What does it mean to be human? That’s one of the most fundamental questions of life, isn’t it? Whether we’re deeply reflective or we simply float through our existence, it’s a question that we’re asking and answering all the time.
The Bible gives us answers to what it means to be human, and if you’re a Christian, then these holy words should give shape to how you view the world. On the very first pages of the Bible, we see that God is a creator, the One who speaks words into worlds, forming everything out of nothing. On the sixth day, when God creates human beings, Genesis says that we’re created in God’s image. That is, we are not God, but we resemble God in how we exist. God is Creator, and we’re to be creators as well. God made us to take the very stuff around us and develop it.
Andy Crouch wrote a fabulous book called Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, and it begins with these words, “The essence of childhood is innocence. The essence of youth is awareness. The essence of adulthood is responsibility.”
In the innocence of childhood, I think many of us are more in tune with our creative calling. Kids draw and sing and imagine worlds. They are unashamed in their playfulness. Then, of course, we hit our teens and everything gets a bit awkward. We grow ashamed of those childish things. Our sense of the world’s complexity grows, and eventually we hit adulthood and the responsibility of bills and mortgages and jobs. The innocence is gone.
I loved drawing as a kid. I thought I was pretty good at it. When I was bored, I’d doodle. I think some of that is because I grew up reading the “funny papers,” as my dad called the comics. I loved things like Bloom County, even if I didn’t understand the deeper commentary in it. I still keep an Opus the Penguin plush doll in my office as an ode to that era.
So, I’d draw for fun. I’d draw in art class. I enjoyed creating things for quite a while, and then the inner critic showed up. Isn’t that the case for so many of us? That we stop doing something we love because we cease to believe that what we’re doing is good enough?
God created humans to be creators. That’s our church’s fourth and final core value. We are created to create. Our elders defined that value like this, “We believe creativity is a God-given gift to be encouraged in all areas of ministry. Therefore, we strive for excellence in the arts and worship and throughout the ministry. We encourage creativity in the church, and we hold many events to support artists of all kinds in their talents. We aim to foster this creative desire in all ages.”
I hope it’s obvious to you that we care about creativity. We pour tremendous resources into musical excellence, while offering space for amateur musicians to offer their gifts in worship. We strive to enhance this already beautiful space with candles and banners and other items to draw us deeper into worship. We don’t just settle for things that work; rather, we strive for things that pursue excellence and beauty.
We believe that God created us to create, so we encourage people to pursue that calling in the church and outside of it. But, let me widen this idea of creativity, because it isn’t simply about penning a poem or painting a canvas. All human endeavors are inherently culture making, whether they are God-pleasing or destructive. All that we do comes from that God-given desire to take the stuff of the world and develop it.
Think about it like this: Even the Bible is a Spirit-led collection of cultural artifacts. It’s poetry — we heard that from our psalm reading where the psalmist is a creator highlighting the creativity of God the Creator. This work views all the world through the lens of gratitude. “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” it begins. “You are clothed with honor and majesty, wrapped in light as with a garment. You stretch out the heavens like a tent, you set the beams of your chambers on the waters.” This work draws our attention deeper to consider the glories of the One who created all things. So, within the Bible itself, we see how our culture making can help us live into what it means to be created ourselves.
We heard part of Genesis 1 today, that familiar passage where God created humans. In our translation it says, “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea.” Sometimes those words sound too churchy, but I think Eugene Peterson captures the essence of this so well when he renders it like this:
God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image, make them
reflecting our nature
So they can be responsible for the fish of the sea,
the birds of the air, the cattle,
And, yes, Earth itself,
and every animal that moves on the face of Earth.”
God created human beings;
he created them godlike,
Reflecting God’s nature.
He created them male and female.
God blessed them:
“Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge!
Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air,
for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth.”
We humans, made in God’s image, reflect God’s nature. That’s how we’re to approach everything. How do we do that? We are to be responsible for the care of all around us. Genesis talks about birds and fish and cattle, but it’s really about everything, isn’t it? Our creativity is to be productive, not destructive.
I appreciate Andy Crouch’s observation about this. “The author clearly intends us to grasp the extent of human beings’ responsibility – they are made to rule not just a few easily domesticated animals like cattle, chickens and goldfish, but the whole panoply of the animal kingdom. It’s extraordinary that a biblical author who had seen neither airplanes nor submarines, and for whom boats were small and rudimentary affairs, could anticipate humankind being able to ‘rule’ over fish and birds in any meaningful way. Either the author’s conception of rule and dominion is much less about the naked exertion of power than we might imagine, or this text anticipates millennia of cultural developments that would eventually bring us to the point where we truly have the power to shape the destiny of most species on the planet.”
A second version of the creation story happens in Genesis 2, where the story laments that there was no one to cultivate the ground. The word “cultivate” comes from the Hebrew word ‘abad, which literally means serve. The project of developing the creation is actually one of serving it, not dominating or destroying it. The work of culture, as God intended it, is to serve the creation by developing it into something even greater. Think of it this way. A garden, like Eden, is not just nature. A garden is nature plus culture. That’s where this all starts and then continues in spite of our rebelliousness.
Creation is also relational because God is relational. Here’s Andy Crouch again. “Human creativity, then, images God’s creativity when it emerges from a lively, loving community of persons and, perhaps more important, when it participates in unlocking the full potential of what has gone before and creating possibilities for what will come later. When human creativity is defective and falls short of God’s intention, as with environmental pollution that lays waste to ecosystems or exploitative uses of resources like clear-cut logging, it neither honors what has come before nor creates fruitful space for the creatures, human and otherwise, who will come later.”
Creation also leads to celebration. As God keeps creating, God sees what he has done and declares it to be “good.” But by the end of the sixth day? It’s “very good.” As we dive deeper into what it means to be culture-makers, I hope this can be our posture.
God has created us to create, and yet all of us live with that inner critic that says our efforts aren’t good enough. Silence that inner critic. To be creative takes courage. You can do this at home or work, but we’re also offering a space where you can do this here.
On the fourth Tuesdays of the month from 6:30-7:30, we’re offering Created to Create Gatherings. Bring your journal, sketchpad, needlework, or other portable projects. Join us in the Lounge for an hour of creativity. No skills are required. Just bring what you need. The hour begins with a short reading or devotion to explore the connections between creativity and faith.
Friends, God created us to create. I love that this is a core value of this community. Together, let us spur each other on in all of our God-pleasing creative pursuits, for in doing that, we are living more fully into who God created us to be.