Received: 6 May 2020 Accepted: 6 May 2020

DOI: 10.1111/dial.12570

O U T S I D E T H E T H E M E

Pastoral leadership as creativity and resilience

Derek R. Nelson

Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana

Correspondence Derek R. Nelson, Wabash College, 301 W.

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 occa-

sion 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 see-

ing 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.

K E Y W O R D S creation, creativity, improvisation, Jahwist, pastoral leadership, providence

1 C R E AT I O N A N D P R OV I D E N C E

A locus classicus of Protestant (especially, but not only, Reformed) theology since Schleiermacher has been to con-

sider 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 ontolog-

ically. 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 pas-

toral gift of “creativity” as an analogue to the divine creativ-

ity 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 ever-

deeper 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 pas-

tors? 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 inter-

disciplinary concept, informing discourses from systems the-

ory 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 some-

thing last.3 Therefore my guiding question in thinking about

a theology of pastoral leadership is: “How do we understand

212 © 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC Dialog. 2020;59:212–217.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dial

NELSON 213

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 cre-

ativity 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 noth-

ing without providence. In one version of this theology, the so-

called “orders of creation” theology, God uses things like fam-

ilies, 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, con- cursus 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 for-

mulate 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 co-

create 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 funda- mentally 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 creativ-

ity. 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 G O D A S P O S S I B I L I Z E R

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 some-

thing 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 contra-

dict 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 per-

fected, while something imperfectly made could not7. In cos-

mic and human history there is growth and development. For

Origen, Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen and countless oth-

ers, 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 some-

how 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 differ-

ent ways, becoming any kind of bodily tissue. Or in a decid-

edly untheological example, Flubber, as invented by Robin

Williams, can become any form of matter or energy. The pos-

sibilities 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 conserva-

tion, 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 sustain-

able 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 congre-

gation 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 G O D A S P L A N N E R

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 fix-

ation 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 head-

scratching. “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 morn-

ing, 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 tried-

and-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 quad-

rant 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 well-

known example. The Roman Catholic tradition of the analo- gia 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, how-

ever, 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 communi-

cate with all others, without needing recourse to words? He

NELSON 215

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 see-

ing 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 remem-

ber to pack paints and a canvas when you sit in the field to

work. Creativity depends, in some sense, on continuity, regu-

larity, 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 G O D A S I M P R OV I S E R

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 gar-

den. 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 issu-

ing 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 despair-

ing 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 zig-

gurat, 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 world-

view 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! Liter-

ally, 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 cre-

ativity has more in common with Taoist painting of the middle

ages, rather than the Confucians. The Taoists thought the Con-

fucians 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 ves-

sel 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 cre-

ativity 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 fore-

sight 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. Cre-

ativity, 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 cre-

ativity of others. This is true of all of us, I think, but par-

ticularly so of pastors who are leading their communities

forward.

5 C O N C L U S I O N

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 well-

worn, 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 leader-

ship 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.

E N D N O T E S 1 For example, “However far our consciousness extends, we find noth-

ing the origin of which cannot be brought under the concept of preser-

vation, 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). Minneapo- lis, MN: Fortress.

4 The term “Schopfungsordnungen” and attendant related concepts has

a complicated history, probably beginning with the nineteenth cen-

tury theologian Adolf von Harless. Its heyday in 1920s–1940s Ger-

man 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 intrigu-

ing 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 Wil- helm 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 “Klang- figuren” 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). Hear- ing 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,

NELSON 217

theological education, and Christian ministry (p. 41). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

13 Many of his books make this point, but especially concise and insight-

ful is Rosa, H. (2010). Alienation and acceleration: Towards a critical theory of late-modern temporality. Aarhus,