Collide Magazine

Grace and Excellence

Brian Holt - Originally posted Monday, February 9, 2009 -

In church production, we have the great opportunity of using the gift of the arts to glorify God and connect people in worship. Through the use of video, drama, lights, and sound we can powerfully support and enhance the message of Jesus Christ. In order to do this we hire, train, and develop media producers, technical and production directors, sound engineers, and graphic designers. All of these artists give their life and passion toward enhancing the worship experience. The question we must ask and the balance we must find is this: Which is more important, the product or the producer?

For many technical specialists, excellence is the primary goal. We succeed by ensuring there are no mistakes. We tend to be very product-driven, and rightfully so. If a video has terrible audio, people will miss the point. If an actor forgets his lines on stage, no one will be touched by the moral of the story. Sometimes, though, excellence cannot be measured by lack of error. Sometimes excellence is measured by the response. A graphic that elicits a strong emotional response or a solo that connects people to the meaning of the song are both ways the arts can be excellent and successful.

Excellence is a very noble goal. We are told in Scripture that whatever we do, we are to work at it with all our hearts as unto the Lord (Colossians 3:23). When every work we do is being presented to the Lord we’d better not do it halfway. We should work as hard as we can to glorify God through our work.

Even pragmatically it makes sense to put an emphasis on excellence. As media-driven churches, our competition is often not other churches but rather our secular counterparts. We’re compared to MTV, Comedy Central, and ESPN, not the First Baptist down the street. Often, in order to engage our generation, we must use all the resources at our disposal. If the quality of our work is significantly lower than those around us, we’ll look like cheap knock-offs at best and completely irrelevant at worst.

But what does this drive to excellence do to our artists? I submit that the insistence on excellence without grace (or allowance for failure) creates an environment that is adverse to creativity and ultimately leads to stale, repetitive worship experiences and goes against all that we proclaim to the world. We must not value the product over the producer.

I was at a worship conference where the breakout teacher was explaining to us how to produce a script for a live drama from start to finish. He taught us to cast vision to the writer and then encourage and help tweak the script through several layers of rewrites. Being new to drama myself, I found it incredibly interesting to see more changes in each iteration of the script. As we dug deeper into the process, the teacher was explaining how to help the writer mold the piece into something that would really connect with people. One attendee in particular seemed to struggle to understand the concept. His first questions were something like, “What if the writer doesn’t get it? When do you step in and rewrite it yourself?” The teacher responded slowly and thoughtfully. He explained it was important for the writer to come to the piece him/herself and encouraged us to give the writer time. The guy still didn’t get it. Later he asked, “But when do you finally pull the writer off of the piece? How many times do you let the writer come up with the wrong script?” I think many of our churches have that attitude—the artist is only as good as his final work. We tend not to appreciate the process. The teacher finished with a statement that I have ingrained in my mind as the way I always want to treat my artists. He said, “Above all, you must honor the branch. Don’t just pluck the cherries.” I love that attitude. Honor the branch.

We all mess up. Inherent in the “not-plucking-the-cherries” ideology is the assumption that we’re going to produce some rotten pieces. How else do we learn what not to do? People must be given the chance to fail. It is often through failure that people learn and improve.

One of the first things that happens when we seek excellence over everything else is that we stop innovating. Our artists become stale. They stick to what they know will work. They stick to what they know has succeeded in the past. But without innovation, without change and growth, our worship experiences become the same week-in and week-out. People begin to get comfortable with what they see. People get into a routine. Routine is the enemy of true worship. Routine allows us to experience the same thing without the compulsion to respond. Artists have a unique ability in their work to cast off the routine and impact people on a whole new level. This only works if they are innovating, not recycling their work from the previous weeks or months. Thomas Edison said he had never failed in trying to invent the light bulb; he simply found 10,000 ways that wouldn’t work. If Edison had stopped innovating, perhaps we’d be reading this by candlelight.

If excellence is all that matters, we stop caring about the personal growth of the artist. I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes. We are no longer the Church; we are an organization masquerading as Christian and yet is unable to serve as an example of the love that we proclaim. I’ve been in churches where the pastor has said with his own lips that every person on staff “is only as good as [his or her] last sermon.” What kind of message does that send to our congregation? What kind of message does that send to the world around us? Probably something to the effect of: “We love you all and want you to know Christ, but when you get here you’d better produce.”

All throughout the Old Testament, God used people who were barely able to tie their own shoes. Moses couldn’t talk in front of people and yet went on to become the leader of a nation. Imagine if God had said to Moses, “Sorry Moses, your last message to the people wasn’t quite good enough. I’m going to go in a different direction.” The nation of Israel—a nation created to be the voice of God in the world—is a great example of God’s grace. Let’s think back on how many times the nation of Israel fell away into all sorts of rubbish, yet God found it worthwhile to draw them back and redeem them time and time again.

We must value the producer over the product. We must encourage creativity and experimentation. If your artists have never produced a piece that didn’t hit home, then I would suggest that they aren’t trying anything new.

I’m not saying that an artist’s work is above accountability. We are to do all things as if the work is for God Himself. If your artists are not giving the work their best effort, then there’s a serious problem because we don’t have time to mess around. On the other hand, while the results of an artist’s work should be evaluated, those results should never be tied to the artist’s worth. We must develop our artists. We must innovate. We must allow ourselves to fail and then learn from it. Most of all, we must honor the branch.

Brian is the technical director of Rock Bridge Community Church, a multi-site, multi-venue church in Dalton and Calhoun, GA. He can be reached at brian@rockbridge.cc.