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A Mexican restaurant becomes popular in the Balkans. An aerobics program connects women in another part of this war-torn region. There are dreams of a plastic recycling program in Central Asia and a beauty salon in the Middle East. Each of these are creative opportunities to begin church-planting movements.

Perhaps closer to home, your missions committee wrestles with how to best engage your church with the world’s needs. Or your international team tries to make decisions that honor each member and reveal Christ to your host culture.

Creativity is at the core of missions. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Italian Matthew Ricci made Christ real to Chinese people through a Chinese style of communication.

Decades later, two Moravians willingly became literal slaves for Christ to reach the West Indies with the gospel. Such heritage stretches back to that ultimate act of creativity, the incarnation. Yet in our modern missions efforts, how do we encourage it in the same big way that our forefathers did?

Committee We form a team and give it a task. Believing that “together each achieves more,” we expect that the group will accomplish more than its members ever could apart.

Midstream in the project when competing voices raise, we find that our team may actually be a dreaded committee in disguise. The “cow” we’re trying to create is looking more like a camel, but we may be too close to tell.

Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow, condemns the compromising for which committees are famous. Why do Starbucks, Google and JetBlue do well while other business endeavors go largely unnoticed? Because they take risks and pitch their product to a highly specific audience, Godin says.

Edward England, former religious publishing director at the British firm Hodder and Stoughton, understood this at both a professional and spiritual level. Deeply aware that he was called to lead, he was known for often deciding alone which books to publish rather than relying on an editorial committee. He gave voice to what he knew the committee would kill.

Community To avoid committees, we create independently—or at least attempt to. We keep ideas to ourselves and work at building them on our own until they are strong enough to release for critique. At best, such projects hobble out of the gate, and we privately wonder how they might have soared. We identify with the frustrated muse, but still we support a team approach to ministry. After all, Christ sent his ambassadors out in twos and worked with twelve.

Singer Michael Card, author of Scribbling in the Sand: Christ and Creativity, says that all true art comes out of community. He points to the Renaissance—an era renowned for renewed thinking and creativity arose from schools of artists working together. To ignore this sort of teamwork is to miss a vital history lesson.

What’s the difference? So what’s the difference between a community and a committee? A community operates in unity. Participants seek an objective by looking at many ideas. Members with differing opinions give in to one another and take risks in decision-making. Rather than compromising, they’re hoping to embrace God-ordained opportunity. Such teams work because they trust each other.

Members of a committee, however, look out more for “me.” The committee also has a common task, but each member pursues a separate agenda—even unintentionally. They want to see their fingerprints on the final product. Ownership is positive, but also counterproductive.

Roy Peterson, former president of Wycliffe/USA, often encouraged participants to “leave their egos and logos at the door.” The phrase probably wasn’t unique to Roy, but through his example he moved Wycliffe toward its byline, “Partners in Bible Translation.”

In Practice Some Orlando-based mission agencies are working together to host a conference for missions communicators in February 2005. This happened when Media Associates International, sponsor of previous conferences, passed its baton to us.

As six representatives from Campus Crusade, New Tribes Mission, Wycliffe and Pioneers meet every other week to plan, our brainstorming is filled with energy. The conference strikes a felt need, and we are getting more done together than we could apart. The synergy is refreshing.

After our first meeting, one member said almost in disbelief, “That was encouraging!” Of course, we may be too close to know the camel humps we’re adding to the cow, but for now, it seems we’re experiencing true creativity—the kind that comes from community. The quote of the day on my planner recently read, “Big ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill. Don’t forget that, all of you who don’t have them.”

The task of obeying the Great Commission is too great and carries too much eternal weight to ignore any idea of how we can achieve our mission more effectively. May God help us cultivate such creativity for his glory among the nations.

For more on this topic, see “Third Dimension Teams,” an article by Steve Richardson Richardson posted at www.pioneers.org/international/about-us/key-value-documents.htm

Caryn Pederson directs communications for Pioneers in Orlando, Florida.