Creativity is Hard Work

Once in a sermon series I painted these huge banners based on the 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter. Each banner was a persona demonstrating each act of love mentioned in the chapter. I had a total 8 banners that I was putting up all over the church hall.

It was a creative idea and the simple paintings really helped cement the sermon series visually, but they were a lot of work! Each banner was about 4-5 feet tall and took several hours to complete. It was also very tedious work. That doesn't include the research and time it took to design each banner. I spent just about as much time doing the exegesis as I did the creative part.

And that's the rub. Creativity can seem like a whole lot of work for a small amount of concrete material or effect. Most of the time people do not realize how much time and energy goes into creating a creative experience. It seems time could be better spent doing more productive activities, like studying the Bible, and then doling out the information.

Simply put, creativity is hard work. It's not easy. Most messages are boring becasuse the speaker is not willing to put the hard work into being creative with their message. It's easier just to pass out the information in a simple form each week.

Last thought. One reason creativity is hard work is your message's purpose is not to be creative. The purpose of your message is to persuade your audience to do something. Creativity wrongly applied can get in the way of that purpose. It takes hard work to tweak the creativity just right so the purpose of your message is enhanced, and not covered in bunch of fluff.

Creativity is hard work.