The church as a whole has been in a decline for quite some time. It seems we are looking for the new program that will turn everything around. The cookie cutter that will make all of our gatherings be like they were in the ‘good old days’… But will we ever get back to those days, if we could ever actually agree on when those day were?
John O’Keefe has given us a work to help us move away from thinking about things in a box, to re-imagining they way we look at issues and ministry. The book The Church Creative is a wonderful work on leadership in the gatherings of the 21st century.
John helps us to look at life in a different way to to image leadership in a different way. This book does not claim to have all of the answers to make you the perfect leader. I think, and believe John would agree, it raises as many or more questions as it answers. It is a method to help us understand what Jesus meant when He said we must enter the kingdom of heaven as children, because as adults we have lost our creative imaginative selves. We are so hung up on fear of doing something different we would rather let the gathering die around us then risk being the person God has called us to be. In John’s words:
This is where many start to buy the stories of limits real adults place on the world around them. This is the time in our lives where we say things like, “Oh, I can’t do that.” It is a time when we’re told that we can no longer see ourselves as an innovator, a knight or a superhero. This is the time in life where we leave behind the “childish” idea of the little train that could and replace it with the adult idea of “I Think I Can’t, I Think I Can’t, I know I Can’t.
As adults we want the limitations that children seem to push aside. We as adults want our worlds in nice boxes so it is all contained. We spend a lot of time as leaders telling people to think outside the box, and John in The Church Creative asks us to completely get ride of the box!
This book is a must read for every leader in the gatherings of the body of Christ. John helps us all see a new way of looking at things and really unpacks the meaning behind Jesus’ statement of new wine in old wine skins in a way that helped me to look at leadership in a new light. God is a Creative and he needs Creatives to lead his gatherings, and John can start you down the road to being the Creative you were created to be.
aSacredRebel 