Creative Mess
Some of you will know I can’t abide mess. I love things to be neat and tidy. But it takes time to keep things organised. Often I end up with piles of stuff where I’ve had to move on to the next thing before putting the previous thing away. Is that something you can relate to? It’s one of the reasons I loved being a software developer: a well-written program will always produce the same result from the same inputs with no side effects – it’s called a ‘pure function’: simple, beautiful, like a mathematical equation.
You can’t get much farther from that than church! If I were to describe every church I’ve been part of I would never use words like ‘neat’ and ‘tidy’ – much closer to the truth would be ‘beautiful mess’.
Yesterday in my sermon I quoted Eugene Peterson. He wrote The Message paraphrase of the Bible, and one of the best books I’ve ever read: Under the Unpredictable Plant. It’s a book written for pastors, based on the book of Jonah. He says this:
I hate the mess. I hate the uncertainty. I hate not knowing how long this is going to last, hate the unanswered questions, the limbo of confused and indecisive lives, the tangle of motives and emotions. What I love is the creativity. And what I know is that I can never be involved in creativity except by entering the mess.
Mess is the precondition of creativity. The [chaos] of Genesis 1:2.
Creativity is not neat. It is not orderly. When we are being creative we don’t know what is going to happen next. When we are being creative a great deal of what we do is wrong. When we are being creative we are not efficient. …
In any creative enterprise there are risks, mistakes, false starts, failures, frustrations, embarrassments, but out of this mess — when we stay with it long enough, enter it deeply enough — there slowly emerges love or beauty or peace.
Wherever two or three are gathered together in Jesus’ name, our Lord the Spirit is there. The Spirit is the Creator Spirit. In every congregation (I insist on the every) creation is in motion. Something new is coming into existence, finding form in these bodies and minds. Creation, true creation, is always unprecedented and unmanageable. … Presiding over and protecting the conditions in which this “slow emergence” takes place is essential to the pastoral vocation.
Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, 163-164
It’s a long quote – which is why I cut this section from my sermon yesterday! – but I think it describes powerfully both where we are as a church right now, and what I and others called to shepherd Christ Church are doing – and not doing.
First, and I know this has frustrated some of you, I have been resisting my natural inclination to sort out ‘the mess’ with quick fixes or like-for-like replacements or by plugging gaps. Instead we have been deliberately seeking the creative Spirit to shape and form something new. We haven’t been doing nothing – far from it – but have consciously decided to leave spaces in which God can work, rather than fill those spaces immediately. I recognise that hasn’t been easy for many of us, but I believe it is the right response to the place we’re in right now as a church. We need God to expand our imagination to see beyond what we do or have always done, to the immeasurably more he is calling us into.
Because second, I am convinced that God is working and birthing something new at Christ Church. The truth is I don’t know what it will be or what it will look like, only that it will be different. Change isn’t easy and there is a lot of change going on at the moment, all at once. But God’s got this, he’s got us, and he’s got you. As I shared in the summer the word ‘shuffle’ – or ‘remoulding’ if you want the biblical word – describes how God is working in us at the moment.
Third, as we wait on God, to see what starts to emerge from what feels like chaos sometimes, I am encouraging us to do the basics: to grow as disciples every day of the week, to be faithful in evangelism, to pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit to empower and equip us for works of service and worship.
Through all that I know God will bring immeasurably more love, beauty and peace.
I’d like to end with another quote from Peterson’s book, in which he describes ‘A Nineveh vocation’ as ‘work at which we give up control, fail and forgive, watch God work… a sacred place of worship, adoration and mystery where we direct attention to God’ (Peterson, 176).
That is exactly what I’m praying for Christ Church at the moment: that we would give up control, make more space for the creative Spirit, learn to experiment, to try out new things, fail and forgive – and in all that beautiful creative mess, see God at work in our life together.
Revd Ben Green – Vicar