Experiments in Creative Action

Monday evening, Memorial Day evening, I sat with an older couple whose vitality blurred the marks that times leaves on most people. He’s around 80, I think, and she’s probably a bit younger. He was a pastor for decades. I listened as he voiced a dissatisfaction with the American church, and specifically his local church, that was strikingly similar to what my friends and I have been discussing.

And I listened as he said that, in his decades studying the church from all angles, he had not come across anything much better than what this local church had to offer. He had not found a good model of what faithful community should look like.

80-years-wise and what was this man’s response? Try something new. Start something outside of the box.


Creative Action!

I’ve heard it now from every generation – we are not satisfied with the easy demands of Sunday morning church. We can see that people living the way Jesus taught would create a strikingly different kind of community, and it’s clear that if the story is true at all then it calls us to follow that way with vigor. And the church has taught us to trust the story.

But we haven’t seen what this different way of life or its community looks like, at least not firsthand. We haven’t seen it modeled. We can read about it in Acts, and we can follow different experiments that are emerging around the country and the world. But eventually we come to the edge of what we know, what we have seen, desiring the next step but left without a clear path.

The way forward is creative action: to embed the principles that Jesus taught as deeply as possibly in your paradigm – love for God, love for neighbor, generosity, hope, service, equality, etc. – and to remember the best of what we’ve seen, then create things to do that seem to follow and fulfill those principles and examples.

Do experiments in love; do experiments in generosity; do experiments in hope. Test everything. If it works, repeat it with improvements. If it doesn’t figure out why not and try something new. Test, learn, apply, repeat. Create new ways of loving God and of loving the people around you. Try a new way of serving the poor. Test a new way to apply the idea of equality. Give someone something you’ve never thought to give, or give to someone you’ve never given to. See what happens. Write it down.

And tell me how it goes! I want to know. I’m going to be sharing and discussing different stories of creative action, wherever they happen. Send me stories that you find, or stories that you create. And I’ll share mine as well.


Let’s figure out how to live.