Received: 6 May 2020 Accepted: 6 May 2020
DOI: 10.1111/dial.12570
OUTSIDE THE THEME
Pastoral leadership as creativity and resilience
Derek R. Nelson
Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana
Correspondence
Derek R. Nelson,Wabash College, 301W.
Wabash Ave., Crawfordsville, IN.
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
Contemporary trends in American culture like the de-centering of the church from
public consciousness and the weakening of institutions in general provide an occasion to reflect on a new theology of pastoral leadership. This article proposes that
pastors function best as community leaders when they are maximally creative in seeing possibilities, rather than functioning as spokespersons for an institution. God’s
creative activity involves both foresight and improvisation, and therefore a pastoral
theology modeled on God’s creative work must also include those elements.
KEYWORDS
creation, creativity, improvisation, Jahwist, pastoral leadership, providence
1 CREATION AND PROVIDENCE
A locus classicus of Protestant (especially, but not only,
Reformed) theology since Schleiermacher has been to consider creation and providence as two sides of the same coin.1
God creates, and then God sustains and provides for what
God creates. The word “then” in the previous sentence means
not just chronologically, but also logically and even ontologically. God’s forethought and foreknowledge mean that God
can and does consider threats to the created order(s): the threat
of decay, of non-being, of the vulnerability of all that is. This
essay argues that a similar trope, applied to a different area
of theology, namely pastoral leadership, can illuminate our
understanding of what it means to be a pastor and a leader
in our present context. Specifically, I will consider the pastoral gift of “creativity” as an analogue to the divine creativity in creation, and pastoral “resilience” as an analogue to
providence. Pastors, if they are to continue in the holy and
challenging work to which God has called them, need everdeeper wells of creativity to respond to changing needs. But
if those wells are to sustain the well-being of the pastor and
her community, the pastor needs resilience, just as creation
needs providence in order to endure.
Why creativity and resilience? One of the insights that has
emerged from the work of the initiative of pastoral leadership
programs over the last 6 to 10 years that I have worked with is
that the early career point in the arc of the pastor can be a crisis
of creativity. The energy from seminary and the excitement of
responding to God’s call to ordained ministry perhaps begins
to dwindle. You have tried your best ideas. You have had some
successes and some failures. What now? Bands spend years
honing their sound and creating that breakout album. It is a
hit. But then what? Teachers may experience this too, as can
those in other professions. The excitement of starting out gives
way to drudgery and repetition. Where do the new, good ideas
come from?
The early career moment can be a crisis of continuation,
as well. If creativity is not stoked, new ideas not developed,
where does the strength come from to keep on keeping on?
In other words, what are the sources of resilience for the pastors? Matt Bloom, a researcher studying what it takes to have
“Flourishing in Ministry,” emphasizes the need for significant
peer groups, especially for clergy in this timeframe, to fund
resilient pastors2 Resilience is becoming an important interdisciplinary concept, informing discourses from systems theory to community development to economics and beyond.
The more I have observed and thought about early-career
pastors, the more their creativity and resilience seem to sound
like “creation and providence.” God’s work in creating always
relies on the endurance and safeguarding of what is created.
To create X means something like “to give a future to X.”
To give a future to something must mean to make that something last.3 Therefore my guiding question in thinking about
a theology of pastoral leadership is: “How do we understand
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creativity and resilience in light of human attempts to thwart
God’s vision for the world?”
Consider some examples of what I mean by these terms
and their interconnectedness. My sister used to send me care
packages when I was in school. The packages contained items
of her creation, like cookies and other sweets. But she also
almost always included a tube of toothpaste! Part of her creativity was her care for the resilience of her brother’s teeth that
would allow me to enjoy her creations long-term. Donors to
institutions may want to create a program or build a building.
When they do so, they would be wise to also endow funds to
staff the program and maintain the building. Creation is nothing without providence. In one version of this theology, the socalled “orders of creation” theology, God uses things like families, the state and the church as orders or ordinances within
which God’s creations may thrive.4 In another version, God’s
providence for creation comprises governance or rule, concursus or accompaniment and conservation, or steadfastness.5
But the main point is the same: to bring about what is new and
good requires sustenance.
Two other introductory points: creativity is not the same
as novelty. We must not speak here only about the next fad in
ministry, nor multiplication of difference simply for its own
sake. God’s creativity is not simply shiny, pointless thing
after shiny pointless thing. It is directed toward the future God
has in store for this creation, namely the new creation. To formulate this as a proposition, we might say, “In creation God
establishes possibilities. Humans actualize some of them.
When in creation what they make actual is in accord with
the new creation, they are partners with God in a continuing
creation.” Therefore, we can speak of a “divine creativity”
that humans have. We partner with God, co-labor and cocreate with God when we actualize something like the new
creation.
Second, I wish to simply note, and not solve, a problem. It
is debatable in what sense human beings “create” anything.
Mostly we make things. God’s work of creation is fundamentally different from human works of creativity. But the
two senses of “create” can’t be utterly different. There is a
massive discourse about this in the history of theology that
is important to consider, even if for the time being I must
simply set it aside.6
I propose to share three insights about creation and creativity. Those three are God as possibilizer, God as planner, and
God as improviser. This article unfolds as a discussion of each
of those aspects of God’s creative work, and the resilience that
is borne from God’s providential creation.
2 GOD AS POSSIBILIZER
In the work of creation, God calls into being that which is
not in being. God looks over the formless void and speaks
forth light, which had not been. Or as Paul puts it in Romans
4, God “calls into existence the things that do not exist.”
Furthermore, what God calls into being is fundamentally
incomplete and pliable. So when God makes something from
nothing, the something that God makes is full of potential
something-elses. The human task, then, is to take the something and see the something-elses. When we can discern
godly opportunities to further develop the work of creation,
humans in faith actualize those possibilities. Woodworking
metaphors come always to mind for me on this front: God
creates trees and iron ore. Humans see that the trees can
become boards and iron ore can become saw blades. And
that boards and sawblades can become furniture. God speaks
and nothingness is banished for a divine somethingness,
and human creativity extends and gives shape to this divine
impulse.
I hasten to note that Genesis 2:2 might appear to contradict this point, which reads in the NRSV, “And on the seventh
day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on
the seventh day from all the work that he had done.” But in
almost all of the history of interpretation of that text, it does
not mean that all latent possibilities have been actualized. Far
from it. Infinite possibilities exist, of which a precious, finite
few will become actual. Irenaeus, for instance, spoke of the
goodness of creation as the “perfectibility” of creation. It may
be incomplete, but its perfection means that it can be perfected, while something imperfectly made could not7. In cosmic and human history there is growth and development. For
Origen, Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen and countless others, in God’s possibilizing work of creation God presents his
creatures with futures. As I mentioned above, when X creates
Y, X gives a future to Y. X causes Y both to be and somehow to endure, to become actual. The goodness of a kitchen,
for instance, is not that all meals have already been prepared
therein, but that any meal can be prepared therein. The better
kitchens are those where better or more possible meals can
be prepared. The best, most perfect kitchen is one where any
meal can be made. Another example might be totipotent stem
cells, which could, in principle, differentiate in myriad different ways, becoming any kind of bodily tissue. Or in a decidedly untheological example, Flubber, as invented by Robin
Williams, can become any form of matter or energy. The possibilities are endless.
Practically speaking, I think one of the most powerful
forms ministry and pastoral leadership can take today is
when a pastor holds up an outrageous possibility, and works
with other Christians and other Others to make it actual. “It
can be otherwise,” is a mantra worth remembering. In the
Early Career Pastoral Leadership Development Initiative I
direct, a pastor provided a powerful example of this. He was
a quite reserved person, so I could not tell if he was having
a valuable experience in the program, nor how ministry was
going for him. When I asked him how things were going
214 NELSON
at the church, he might respond, “Oh, fine.” I didn’t know
that an albatross was hanging around his neck. A couple had
bequeathed a plot of land to his suburban congregation, from
back when the congregation was not in the suburbs, but in
the middle of Indiana cornfields. The pastor felt he lacked a
plan, had no vision, and felt guilty that his church could not
do more with this generous gift.
Our program took this pastor and 16 others on a study tour
to the Pacific Northwest, and this included a visit to A Rocha
Canada. This is a Christian conservation organization with
sites across the world that help people learn about conservation, restoration, healing and agriculture. It is a place teeming
with community, with species, with edible bounty, and with
thoughtfulness. While we were there, our Pastor started to see
possibilities. What became of that insight is really amazing.
He saw the way that talking about conservation and sustainable agriculture, as well as community food insecurity and
food deserts, enlivened conversations about God and faith in
God. He began to wonder if the bequest of land to his congregation could become a similar place where food was grown,
volunteers found community, and where conversations about
our abundant God sprouted and bore fruit. Within two years,
his vision for what was possible there had developed into an
organic farm that gave away literally tons of food to people
who needed it.
God the possibilizer helps to see that which might be in the
midst of what is. If we are open to them, divine possibilities
make life where there is death, abundance where there seemed
to be lack.
3 GOD AS PLANNER
The first creation account (Gen 1:1-2:4) shows how the plan
of creation unfolds from moment to moment, day to day. God
is like a skilled architect who uses reason and foresight to set
up rules and then follows those rules herself. The context of
this account, often called the Priestly source because of its fixation on the cult of the temple and the laws it oversaw, is the
Exile. Judah had fallen to Babylon in 589 BC and the trauma
that the Israelite people felt could hardly be overstated. They
had put their faith in the God of Zion, of the mountain, whose
fortress the temple could not possibly be breached. And yet
breached it was. Nebuchadnezzar and his forces dispersed the
Judeans after ransacking their capitol. Many went into exile,
some to Egypt, and many to Babylon itself. One cannot help
but imagine the weeping being interrupted only by the headscratching. “How could this happen? I thought God was in
control! We worship the One God of heaven and earth, in
whose hand human history, we thought, was carefully placed.
Were we mistaken?”
Into that context of fear and uncertainty the Priestly source
speaks. Faith in the God of history is possible, it says. Let
me tell you about God, it says. There was evening and morning, the first day. And there was evening and morning the
second day. First the sea is separated from the dry land, and
the firmament keeps the waters of the heavens up there (until
the flood, at least) and then after there is sea and land, there
are sea creatures and the land creatures, and then there is
humanity and then there is a Sabbath picnic. Freak Not, as
my seminary roommate used to say. Freak Not, for God’s plan
unfolds.
Foresight and a vision of the completed whole are part of
the creative process. Regularity and the following of triedand-true principles can aid creativity. Think about poetry—
someone who might not be able or willing to write or speak
a poem on the spot can write a Haiku. A simple 5-7-5 rule
makes it easier, somehow, to create. Knowing the ground
rules of a sport makes playing possible; knowing them by
heart, in one’s body, makes possible playing beautifully and
creatively.
To change the metaphor to visual art, consider the creativity
of the medieval Chinese experts of Confucian painting.8 Here
precision and foresight were prized above all. The Confucian
ideal of li, propriety, and harmony, called for perfect balance
in composition. Equal amounts of ink should be in each quadrant of a painting. Sketches were made and tested by a jury
of the painter’s peers for balance and integrity. The vision of
the completed whole guided the process of creation. Silk was
the preferred medium because its surface was perfectly flat.
Sometimes brushes only a single bristle wide were used for
the application of the ink. This sounds a bit, to my ear, like
the Priestly source’s understanding of God’s creativity. There
is evening and morning, the fifth day. The vision of creation
unfolds according to plan.
Gallons of ink has been spilled over the years about the
intricate plan of God for creation. William Paley’s thought
experiment recounts the man walking in a heath who steps
on a watch—he cannot imagine it just happened to be there,
like a stone, but required such forethought and planning that
a watchmaker must have planned and made it is one wellknown example. The Roman Catholic tradition of the analogia entis, the analogy of being, wherein the effects that we
see are somewhat like the causes we do not see: God’s plan
unfolding means we see God the planner indirectly, is a second
one. The so-called cosmological argument for the existence of
God is a third well-known example of theological reflection
on order, predictability, and plan.
Lately I have been studying something quite different, however, which makes the point in an even more enchanting way.
This is the group of nineteenth century “Romantic” German
artists and scholars who thought that God’s plan could be
revealed in a kind of “universal language” that was hidden
in creation. The great polymath and poet Novalis called this
“poesy.” Was there a way that all people could communicate with all others, without needing recourse to words? He
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hoped for a kind of Pentecost, in ordinary time. The Rosetta
Stone had been discovered just as the Romantic era was
dawning in Germany. What a thrill that was! Obscure texts
could now be understood! New languages could perhaps be
written!9
Looking for patterns in nature, some German romantics,
like the composer Johann Ritter, turned to music. Could one
get “in tune” with the maker simply by being in tune? The
dominant theory of how blood flowed in the body had to
do with magnetism. They knew the blood had iron, and that
magnets moved iron around. Could it be that the chills that
one gets down one’s spine when one hears sublime music
are being spoken to by God, in some secret, Rosetta-like
way through magnetic waves? Tantalizingly close to seeing God’s plan, perfectly regular and discernible to human
reason, in creation.10 The sense of excitement that would
come if you were that close to finding God’s language would
overwhelm.
Luigi Galvani, whose work with metals gave us the name
“galvanized,” even conducted experiments on his own body
with electricity and magnetism to test these theories. He is
perhaps best known for making the legs of a dead frog twitch
by touching them with a battery. But he also thought electric
pathways were hidden in all organic matter, including his
own skeleton, as he tested to his wife’s dismay. His German
colleague Georg Lichtenberg applied this to wood. He took
a battery and stuck positive and negative leads into wood
and gave it a shock. The electricity burned pathways in the
wood in beautiful figures that seem to have magically been
there all along. It practically looks like language, like God’s
handwriting.11
Another in this circle is the physicist Ernst Chladni.
Inspired by the Rosetta stone and Novalis’ theories about
music, Chladni experimented on tiles. He found that he could
put magnetic shavings or even bits of sand onto metal tiles.
When he “played” the tiles with a violin bow, the granules
would bounce with the vibration. They would move and
move until they came to the nodal points of the sound wave
being produced by the vibrations. There they would sit,
like a hieroglyph previously hidden from the naked eye.
Different metals vibrated at different frequencies, so iron
would produce a hieroglyph that looked like this, bronze one
that looked like this, and silver something quite different. It
was astonishing. Hidden in plain sight, a universal language,
the Logos of God, perhaps, right in front of us. This discovery
marks the beginning of a voyage to which one can easily
imagine giving one’s very life.
I tell these stories because it can be easy to dismiss God
as “planner.” Those obsessive Confucian artists had gone two
steps too far, we might say. But creativity simply must involve
foresight. If one wants to paint a landscape, one must remember to pack paints and a canvas when you sit in the field to
work. Creativity depends, in some sense, on continuity, regularity, and the vision of what may be. It’s true of God’s work
in creation, of the artist as she creates, and of the pastor in
search of creative ministry.
4 GOD AS IMPROVISER
The second creation account (Gen. 2:4-3:1) is different. Its
understanding of God is different. Here the emphasis is not
so much on God’s plan unfolding according to discernible
rules, by virtue of command, but is actually more free form.
This source is of course the proto-biblical document called the
Yahwist or Jahwist source. It is much older than the Priestly
source, and connotes an agrarian past. Whereas the work of
God takes shape in cities and civilizations for the Priest, with
their advanced technologies, architectural achievements and
strategies for social control, the Yahwist’s context is the garden. Ask any gardener, and they will tell you control is not
the name of the game. There is too much chance. Will it rain?
Will the sun shine? Will the sheep get a hoof disease? Will the
wheat ripen? For the Yahwist, we have not God the King issuing his demands, but the God the potter calling forth the pot
from the clay, feeling it in his hands and making it as he goes.
There is experimentation, rather than predetermination, and
thus more genuine drama and story in the Yahwist account.
God makes a world, and then realizes, Oh, it needs a human.
Oh, he’s lonely—I’ll make him a companion. If you follow
the Yahwist story further into Genesis you see God despairing of his creation, regretting it, even. Then comes the flood,
and then God changes his mind again and remakes a nation
with a new covenant.
Nomadic agrarian people have less ability to control nature
than those in the cities, that is true. But they also have less
need of it. They are not bogged down by the ballast of a ziggurat, tied to one zip code because that is where the millstone
and silos are. When Jacob and his sons experienced drought
in Canaan, they moved their tents to Egypt. When this worldview is applied to God, the Yahwist does not assume that the
point of life is to control creation, so the focus is not on the
intellect of God, but on God’s will, or God’s feeling. God’s
intellect, for the Yahwist, is to be avoided, not imitated! Literally, to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and
Evil is to sin. One accepts randomness and what appears to
be caprice because that is just part of life. And it is part of the
creative process.
In that way, at least, the Yahwist depiction of divine creativity has more in common with Taoist painting of the middle
ages, rather than the Confucians. The Taoists thought the Confucians had too much yin and needed some yang. Too much
control, and needed some randomness. They were quantum
physicists to the Confucian Newtonians, to dreadfully mix my
metaphors.
216 NELSON
Consider some examples. In much Taoist art, not silk but
rough rice paper was the medium of choice. One boiled down
rice into a paste that could then be flattened out and dried into
a canvas. But invariably there would be little hunks of rice that
hadn’t cooked down. They’d catch the tip of the quill when the
pen went over it, where ink would travel where it “wanted” as
the painting “made itself.” Some Taoists, like the great Wang
Mo, would take a brush full of ink and splash it violently on
the paper. Only then was the composition arranged (“oh – that
blob looks like a mountain, but that blob looks like a bird. I’ll
draw it that way, I guess.”). Some Taoist painters used their
hair as a brush. Wang Mo would make sure to get good and
drunk before painting, so that he would be a more pliable vessel for the creative impulse, seeking to respond rather than
to control. This calls to mind jazz, where technical expertise
and precision is present, but where the true virtuoso is one
who responds to the creativity of others, rather than seeking
to dominate and direct it. The same might be said of free verse
poetry, or even of hip-hop. Sampling is responsive to the creativity of others, like jazz, like Wang Mo, like the Yahwist
vision of God.
The genius of the biblical canon is that we need not
choose between these visions of creative work. Instead we pair
Priestly order alongside and Yahwist improvisation. There is
both Confucian precision and Taoist openness. Divine foresight and divine spontaneity. The wisdom of the biblical canon
is not to conflate these different accounts of creation, nor to
ignore their differences, but to confront us with them. Creativity, if it would be divine work continued by humans,
needs to make possibilities actual, to build from a vision
or plan of the future and to respond in fidelity to the creativity of others. This is true of all of us, I think, but particularly so of pastors who are leading their communities
forward.
5 CONCLUSION
In the words of Craig Dykstra, “It is a beautiful thing to see a
good pastor at work.”12 In a bygone era, a pastor could lead
by being a manager of a steady organization executing a wellworn, widely shared vision for ministry. In the current age of
alienating accelerations (Hartmut Rosa)13 and an immanent
frame hostile to such appeals to a transcendent God (Charles
Taylor)14, the “pastor as manager” is not only insufficient, but
misleading and dangerous as a model for how pastoral leadership should be exercised. The pastor as artist and the pastor as
resilient endurer of repeated challengers, instead, seem to me
to be far more promising as animating models of leadership
in post-Christendom contexts.
ENDNOTES
1 For example, “However far our consciousness extends, we find nothing the origin of which cannot be brought under the concept of preservation, so that the doctrine of Creation is completely absorbed in the
doctrine of Preservation.” Schleiermacher, F. (1989). The Christian
faith (H. R. Mackintosh & J. S. Stewart, Trans.). Edinburgh, UK: T&T
Clark, p. 146.
2 See the summary of his work in Bloom, M. (2019). Flourishing in
ministry: How to cultivate clergy well-being. Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield.
3 Ted Peters and Robert Jenson have made this point repeatedly, such
as in Jenson, R. (1997). Systematic theology (pp. 2:25-26). New York:
Oxford University Press and Peters, T. (2018). God—The world’s
future: Systematic theology for a new era (3rd ed., p. 286). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.
4 The term “Schopfungsordnungen” and attendant related concepts has
a complicated history, probably beginning with the nineteenth century theologian Adolf von Harless. Its heyday in 1920s–1940s German theology includes those who supported National Socialism, like
Emmanuel Hirsch and Paul Althaus, and those who opposed it, like
Emil Brunner and, in some ways, Werner Elert. Bonhoeffer’s intriguing notion of “orders of preservation” and the atrocities of South
African “apartheid” theology can both be traced back to Luther’s
insight; some plants bear ripe and foul fruit alike.
5 Characteristic of this approach is Barth, K. (1960). Church dogmatics,
III/3 (G. H. Bromiley & R. J. Ehrlich, Trans.). Edinburgh, UK: T&T
Clark, p. 239.
6 For an excellent discussion of this issue, see Hart, T. (2014). Making
good: Creation, creativity, and artistry. Waco, TX: Baylor University
Press.
7 See Hick, J. (2010). Evil and the God of love (pp. 212–217). New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
8 For this illustration and some insight on the contrast in J and P on
creation, I am indebted to Hyers, C. (1984). The meaning of creation:
Genesis and modern science (pp. 177–182). Atlanta, GA: John Knox
Press.
9 Novalis. (2007). Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia: Das Allgemeine
Brouillon (D. W. Wood, Ed. & Trans.). Albany, NY: University of
New York Press.
10 Ritter, J. W. (2010). Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen
Physikers. In J. Holland (Ed. & Trans.) Key texts of Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776-1810) on the science and art of nature (pp. 433–
436). Leiden, The Netherlands and Boston, MA: Koninklijke Brill
NV.
11 Ritter thought of the Lichtenberg figures as a subset of the “Klangfiguren” of Chladni—glimpses into a universal, wordless language.
For this insight, and much more on this line of thinking, I am
indebted to the brilliant dissertation of Smith, A. B. (2017). Hearing with the body: Poetics of musical meaning in Ritter, Novalis
and Schumann (Doctoral dissertation). University of Oregon, Eugene,
OR.
12 Dykstra, C. (2008). Pastoral and ecclesial imagination. In D. C.
Bass & C. Dykstra (Eds.), For life abundant: Practical theology,
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theological education, and Christian ministry (p. 41). Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans.
13 Many of his books make this point, but especially concise and insightful is Rosa, H. (2010). Alienation and acceleration: Towards a critical
theory of late-modern temporality. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press.
14 In addition to Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, see Root, A. (2019). The pastor in a secular Age (pp. 3–24).
Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
ORCID
Derek R. Nelson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1387-7640
How to cite this article: Nelson DR. Pastoral leadership as creativity and resilience. Dialog. 2020;59:212–
217. https://doi.org/10.1111/dial.12570
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