inspired (willowcreek 2005 arts conference reflection)

June 26, 2005

i left the willowcreek conference more inspired than ever before about arts ministry. i didn't really write much about my actual experience in my last entry, so i hope to cover that in this entry. i love the willowcreek arts conference. it's such a wonderful place to be inspired, refreshed, and taught. i love it because the staff and volunteers that put on the conference know how hard it is for leaders in art ministry to keep trucking along day in and day out every year. they know that so often, leaders invest so much time in ministering to others that they don't get ministered to themselves. and so what they hope to do, is not only teach us (or as they say it, to learn together—that's humility right there) about the arts, but also to minister us as well. i love that. that's one of the reasons why i love going there every year. another reason why i love going is that willow is on the forefront of the arts (at least in my eyes). so all the things they do during the conference is so very inspiring because it opens your eyes to what is possible.

the conference was split up into two tracks this year—the first time willowcreek has ever done this. it was split into act I and act II. the first act was more of the theoretical side of things and the second act was more of the hands on/practical learning. we went for both acts. i decided to check out the creative arts leadership track. i figured it'd be a good idea to figure out how to both lead and be part of creative teams, since i was going to be doing this in the future. each day was split up into three sessions (some four in act II), whether they were messages or workshops.

we arrive in chicago early tuesday morning. that was the start of act I. it was so awesome. every single message that was given really hit home for me on all sorts of different aspects of my life:

the first message, nancy beach was talking about how she was going to be taking a break in the near future. she talked about the idea of rest and how necessary it is for us. that really confirmed with me my decision to relax in these few summer months before seminary starts up again in september. i've been working so hard for the past four years, i knew it was time i took it off to recharge and re-energize. and i knew God was calling me to do it too. hearing nancy talking about that really was an encouragement.

i already mentioned the second and third message in my previous entry—about dewitt jones and bill hybels.

the fourth message took place the next day (wednesday). john ortberg gave a talk about how God is closer than we think, using the story of job as the basis for his talk. man, that really resonated deep with me. like i've said many times before, it feels like my life is like job. now, i know that it's nowhere close to the amount of suffering that job encountered, losing all his family, his livestock and even his health, but it's something like it. i've faced a lot of things as a 23 year old. so whenever anyone talks about the story of job, my ears immediately perk up. something i've learned through all these trials is that God has used them to draw me even closer to Him. had they not had happened, i don't think the intimacy i have with God now would be anywhere as close. i've read through some of my older journal entries, from two years past, and i realize that it's because of all the craziness that's happened, that my faith has deepened, matured and grown much stronger. one of john's points was exactly that, that through the trials and tribulations that we face, God uses them to strengthen our faith in Him. it's so very true.

the fifth message was an interview/q&a with a famous Christian movie producer. the key thing that hit me in his message, was when he said something like, "sometimes, the very place we need to be is right in front of us." since i was really going after God about the willowcreek internship deal that morning, when he said that, it hit me like a ton of bricks. it was one more confirmation along the many confirmations that morning that i should stick around toronto and go through with tyndale.

the sixth message, harvey carey talked about the idea of God moments. that was such an incredible encouragement and inspiration. he talked about how we need to encounter God in the planning processes as well as in the presentation. he talked about how unless the Lord builds, our labour is in vain. i think it's easy to sometimes leave God out of the planning. i mean, yeah, we might pray a quick prayer or two here, but if we're really honest, we get so task-oriented, so focused on the end game, that we can forget that God can still meet us along the way and completely leave Him out.

coming back, i think our creative team at RHCBC needs to really saturate what we do in prayer. we really need to go after God for the things we do, more so than ever before. harvey's message also got me reflecting about the tc days. when i served on the worship team, i remember all these amazing encounters with God that i would have during our rehearsals. those times were really special for me. i learnt that you could still encounter God in the planning, that it wasn't all about show-time before God would show up and move people. but somewhere along the way, that lesson was forgotten. it took a back seat to whatever else i was doing.

harvey also made a lot of good points about how we couldn't give what we did not have. he talked about how as creative people, we spend so much time investing in ministering to others, that we ourselves, would be neglected. he gave examples of how people might come up after a service and say something like, "wow that really ministered to me." and that yeah, you could be happy for them, but at the same time, you'd also feel like, "why can't anyone minister to ME?" that's why it was so important for us [as artists] to encounter God in the planning! because when we presented whatever we were presenting, we'd be sharing it from our hearts, from something we encountered God with. we can only minster to people when we ourselves have been ministered to. we cannot give what we do not have.

act II was also amazing. the entire first day, i basically followed nancy beach around to every workshop she lead. i learned about how to lead an arts team, how to do evaluations and how to weave the arts with teaching. all very, very practical topics for me. the second day consisted of more leadership specific things: about leading from the heart, about what sinks leaders and about how to do creative programs with few people and no resources. each one of them was very interesting in their own regard, and i hope that we can incorporate some of those ideas in our own church. especially the one with weaving the arts together with teaching.

i think there's a really powerful thing that happens when the arts and the teaching are interwoven with each other, because no longer do you get this isolated part of the service, it's one message, one theme. from what i've observed (and this is what nancy beach also said), the way a lot of churches work is that you have a part I and part II. normally part I is a singing time, where part II is the message. in most cases, they don't link to each other at all. sometimes part I might hit part II in the response song, when it actually fits to the sermon. that's not a great scenario. there's also a part I and a part II, where part I leads into part II. this isn't bad. she was saying how a lot of churches are here nowadays. but still, there's still a separation between the two. the most ideal scenario, is when there isn't a part I and a part II, when the arts and teaching are woven together to present one message/theme for the service. and when this happens, the congregation wins.

i heard this a lot of times during the conference. when we incorporate the arts into our services, the church wins. why you ask? here's another big thing i learnt: not everyone connects with God through congregational singing (aka. participatory singing). nancy was saying how her husband was like that. she gave an example of how they went to a church service where the entire first half was all singing. it did not work for her husband at all. that opened my eyes. in the 23 years of my life, almost every church that i've been to focuses mainly on congregational singing! so what happens to the people that don't connect well through this medium? they miss out, they lose. a nice way to accommodate for these types of people, is to present songs, rather than having them sing them. or, use different types of arts to help people connect with God, like video, dance, drama, visuals, etc. the bottom line? incorporating the arts into the church helps the wide spectrum of people in the church to engage with God—God did not create us all the same and different things help us connect with God better than the next. another thing the arts does, is like people EXPERIENCE Him, not just be told about Him. the arts is multi-sensory. and especially in our north american, MTV-driven culture, we demand more and more of the experiences we have. a guy talking to us just doesn't cut it anymore. we want to feel it and experience it in bigger and better ways, and most importantly, we want a personal experience.

one other big thing for me was the idea of excellence. excellence is something i'm very vocal about and something i try to push people towards because i believe that is what God calls us to. God deserves nothing less than our best (excellence). i've always modeled my life after colossians 3:17 & 3:23—my life verses. i strive for excellence in everything that i do. simply put, both these verses are essentially saying anything and everything we do is for Christ. i wish more people got this. i wish the church got this. i'm all about getting people who are gifted to serve in the areas they are gifted in. if there are people serving in areas that aren't gifted in, the church loses, the person loses, and other gifted people lose. it's not a good place to be and i find that many churches are in this boat. the church loses because it's a hard thing for someone who is ungifted to serve you. take for example sunday school teachers. if you aren't a gifted sunday school teacher, your class will suffer. they may not get the feeding that they so desire or maybe you simply bore them to death. the person loses because they miss out on the areas of service that they would be gifted in (since they are already serving). plus, they would most likely get frustrated because they wouldn't see much fruit coming from their labour and risk burnout. the gifted people lose because they don't get an opportunity to serve in an area they are gifted in—thus, they can't nourish their gift. willowcreek is all about excellence and i love it. just go to one of their services and you'll know. for some of their ministries, like music/drama, they will actually audition the applicants and they have a pretty stringent interview process as well, that takes several months. some people think this is anal, but i don't. this is the way it should be.

one of the workshops i attended was held by discovery church. these guys talked about excellence and how much of a value it was to them. right now, they have one music team that plays once a week out of the four in a month. the rest of the three weeks are done by accompany tracks (basically pre-recorded instrumental tracks) with the worship pastor leading those times. the reason why they do this is, a) they don't want to burnout their volunteers on the one music team and b) their other musicians aren't good enough yet to serve on a week-to-week basis. they told their people that until their musicianship was equal or better than the musicians on the CDs, they'd stick with the accompany tracks. how incredible is that?

there's probably a lot more i could say or write. i think i should reflect and review the notes that i took during the conference later on. but that's a pretty good summation of all that i experienced there.

one final thing. i don't know if i've ever written this before, but i believe the reason why God lead me to RHCBC was because of the arts ministry that is beginning to develop here. i initially came because i thought i would find community and to some degree, that's slowly begun to take shape. as time passed, i realized that arts ministry was where God was leading me to, and it suddenly clicked one day. i came to the church at a very special season. i'm surrounded by a group of four people who are just as jacked up on the arts ministry as i am. we're part of the esc core group (i call it the creative team). we meet up pretty regularly to dream about the possibilities of incorporating more of the arts into our services and then to execute some of those dreams. it's a great place to be. i absolutely love every minute of it. our core group is awesome too, because everyone's from a different background. of the five of us, only two of us are from an artistic background (me being one of them). isn't that just great? you do NOT have to in arts to be an artist. i believe God has created all of us with creativity. after all, we were made in His image, and He's the most creative being in this entire universe. sure, some are more creative than others, but that's besides the point. i'm so excited to see how God will take this arts ministry. we're all very excited.

june has been a really special month for us, because herman (our pastor) returned and most of us had more free time to do things. the first week, we took a song called mood ring and did a dramatic reading for it. we had three guys read the lines of the songs, and dramatizing the lines with the help of three girls. we also did a live video feed (the first time ever) that week to help people see facial expressions better. it went awesome! the point of the reading was to introduce the congregation to the sermon topic that week. the week after, we had a video. the prior week, we shot a video that interviewed the guys in our congregation about a specific topic.

today, we had something really special happen. after willowcreek, our entire creative team got together to cast vision, to talk about what we learnt, and where we wanted to go. today was our first service back from willow that we could try something out (we did in fact get back to toronto before last sunday, but we didn't have enough time to do anything) and we were all very excited about it. our theme was following Christianity vs. following Christ, focusing on luke 10:38-42 (the martha and mary story). i worked closely with esther on planning the service but everyone helped to pitch in to get things done (like the calendar/music/video). last tuesday, i had the chance to sit around and brainstorm ideas for the service. a calendar idea came to mind, so i presented it to the creative team. and for some reason, everyone really liked it (i thought that was kind of odd). the next day, bobby, esther and i met together to talk about how to make this calendar idea a reality. we also talked more about the specifics of what we wanted to see happen with the service, and then during the rest of the week we went to execute it. we changed up a lot of things today: the service order, we took out elements of the service that normally happen and introduced some new ones (by new, i don't mean like it's never happened before, but new in the sense that it hardly ever happens).

so here's what we wanted to do. we wanted to create a space for people to come in and reflect about what's been going on in their lives, and to get them to think about their walk with Christ. we felt this would be a great lead-in to the sermon. we started off with congregational singing (for the people that jive with singing), threw in the family news, then moved to a reflection time. the reflection time was a video/slideshow of Scripture mixed in with photos that were really calming/serene/restful/peaceful (mostly nature pics), overlaid with pre-recording music. the songs were carefully selected to follow this theme of resting in God/sitting with Him. we decided to use one of the songs from that video, and then introduce a live music piece that was sung over the congregation during the video. immediately following that was the sermon. after the sermon, we created three calendars for people to respond with. the calendars all had these little cards with the word "do" on the front with a few lines, and the word "be" on the back. the idea was that people could write down something that they do, that gets in the way of following Christ (it could even be church service), and then take the card with them when they left. it was to be a reminder for them that they could see the thing that they did, and when they flipped it over, be reminded that all they needed to be, was be. during the response time, we had the word "be" on the screen and we sang two songs over the congregation, so they'd have ample time to reflect and respond, followed by congregational singing and a closing prayer.

God really made Himself manifest in our church this morning. what was super amazing about it, was that God was orchestrating all of this together even in the planning process! we did not collaborate with the speaker about these ideas, except that we fired off an e-mail to him explaining what we were planning. that was it. but when he came up to speak this morning, everything he said was so right on with what we had envisioned. the first thing he said could not have been more perfect, it was something about human being vs. human doing. it was so incredible! i was pretty nervous about the response. i didn't know if anyone would come up. was it going to work? it took a LONG time for the first person to come down, but after that, there were quite a few people who also responded. i think they needed time to reflect more and maybe to get the courage to come down in front of everyone. this morning was such a God moment. God was ministering to His church. tears were shed. what a beautiful thing. i love it. i love being able to be part of a team that is able to do things like this, to help people connect with God in a deeper way. there is no other place that i'd rather be, than right where i am now, in this church, with these four people. and i hope, that our team will continue to grow, be inspired, find genuine and authentic community with each other, and push for arts ministry as long as we have life, all for the cause of Christ.

Posted by Leo Chan at June 26, 2005 6:19 PM