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18 January 2012
It probably goes without saying that the American church hasn’t always valued creativity as highly as it should. But that seems to be changing. Churches all over the country have creative teams, weekly church services are markedly more creative and conferences like STORY have injected new imagination into sanctuaries everywhere.
One of the people at the forefront of this new creative revolution is Blaine Hogan, creative director for Willow Creek Community Church. Under his leadership, Willow Creek has become widely known for its arts ministry, videos and innovative experiences.
But for Hogan, a former actor, the transition to full-time ministry didn’t come quickly—and it still doesn’t come easily. “I didn’t start out in ministry, and actually had never really considered it,” Hogan remembers. “I grew up Catholic in Minnesota but had a pretty broad background. I was always kind of exposed to ministry but never had any interest at all in doing it myself. Since I was 9 years old, I knew that all I wanted to be was a professional actor.”
Which is exactly what he did.
“I went to theater school and then was working professionally living here in Chicago,” Hogan says. “I was working steadily at one of the big theaters in town [and] had a very small role in a few episodes of Prison Break. At the time I had been flown out to New York to go meet with the producers of Wicked about doing a role in the Chicago production. It’s sort of a rarity for an actor to be making a living actually doing their art. Less than 2 percent of actors through the Screen Actors Guild are paying their bills through acting—that’s what I was doing.”
At the same time as he was experiencing vocational success, Hogan admits he felt like his personal life was coming undone.
“One day I deposited a check from 20th Century Fox that had a comma in it—the biggest check I had ever received in my life, and it was from acting. I got into my car, I drove toward the pier to do a show and I was just thinking to myself, I’ve done it. It was this beautiful day, it was August. At the very same time I had this feeling like, OK, well now what? What do I do now? I [had] this overwhelming feeling that I needed to take a break.”
It was during that break from acting when Hogan made the decision to attend seminary—a place he never thought he’d be. “It just sort of bit-by-bit felt like that’s what I was supposed to do,” Hogan says. “So I was there for two years, not vocationally. People go there to become pastors or therapists, and I wanted to do neither.”
That surprise step led to yet another unexpected twist in Hogan’s life: working for a church.
Upon graduation, Willow Creek reached out to him to come work on their creative team. “At first I wanted nothing to do with it because I had [been] wanting to do a sabbatical, and then I just kept getting worked on,” Hogan says. “I thought maybe this was the next part of my story. So I signed on and have been doing that for three years.”
But a desire for a true sabbatical wasn’t the only reason Hogan felt apprehensive about working for a church. Like many people, he feared how a full-time ministry position might negatively impact his ability to be creative—and honest—in his art. “I don’t think Christian artists—artists who are Christians—and the Church deal particularly well with darkness,” Hogan muses. “I have found in my own story and in other art that you can’t have light unless you have darkness. I think my fear is that it was going to be saccharine and watered down, and I wouldn’t be able to tell whole stories because we would want to get to the celebration too soon.”
Despite his initial reservations, Hogan has discovered a niche at Willow Creek. In his time there, he’s made the church’s arts program one that creative pastors all over the world hope to emulate. His performance art piece at a Global Leadership Summit is proof. Combining video with music, stark typefaces and powerful drawings, the piece is unlike most “church art” you might have seen (you can watch it for yourself here).
One of the unique challenges presented to a creative by a ministry job is the need to “be creative” week in and week out. Creative teams in churches (or businesses) don’t have the luxury to wait for “inspiration” to strike—not when there’s a service, project or event just around the corner. “I think in the last six years I’ve really had to come to terms with what creating looks like on demand,” Hogan says. “As an actor, even though I worked consistently, I still would temp here and there. It wasn’t this daily act of creativity, it wasn’t this daily demand. As I started to move into work, particularly what I’m doing now, that fantasy of, ‘Oh, I’m just going to wait for inspiration’ is wiped away really, really quickly.”*
Hogan says the idea that being creative and artistic is somehow a fun and “easy” job is a long way from the truth. He points to the common maxim that “creativity is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”
“As I’ve continued my work at Willow—it’s hard,” he says. “There’s nothing about it that is easy. If I can sit down and start something, and I can be consistent about starting something, eventually the genius shows up. But rarely does it just show up to people who aren’t available. Being available doesn’t mean just laying in the grass looking at the clouds. For me, sometimes that’s writing, sometimes that’s running. I’m running, praying and hoping by the time I get back from my six-mile run, an idea will have come.”
Hogan admits one of the most difficult tensions he’s had to face as the creative director at Willow Creek is walking the fine line between using technology and creativity to bring the Gospel to life but not letting those elements dwarf the Gospel. “There’s some really phenomenal mediums that may appear to be very entertainment-based. But the question I have to ask is, ‘Did the medium serve the content?’” Hogan says. “I think what starts to happen is that we get in these realms of needing 3D in our churches, or holograms in our churches and people aren’t asking why except for the sake of relevancy—it happens when we don’t think of the story before we figure out how we’re going to tell it.”
For Hogan, the story has to come first—then you decide which type of medium is most fitting for delivering the story. He says churches often try to do it in reverse, to make the medium fit the message. “My goal is to tell the most incredible story ever,” he says. “You can use whatever you want to use, as long as you have a really great story you want to tell first. I think what ends up happening is the medium trumps the message because we want to be relevant, we want to be cool, we want to fit in. I just don’t care about that stuff. We’ve got the greatest story ever told; we just usually don’t tell it that well.”
