News from The Northwest Conference

For staff members and leaders

of Northwest Conference churches

What if we could step outside the way we think about organizations; what might we imagine? Imagining other ways of working together is a challenge because the images we consciously and unconsciously hold of organizations are powerful.

Gareth Morgan, a professor at York University in Toronto, Canada, and a consultant on managing change in organizations, has tried to do that. His books "Imaginization" and "Images of Organization" have helped many people break out of the thought prisons to which their lives in the world of organizations have confined them. His message is simple: people cannot develop new ways of organizing themselves to listen and more effectively respond to the challenges they face while working with the images of organization and leadership they have relied on in the past.

This means that those of us concerned with church governance must seek to reimagine how people responsible for governing a congregation or other church body might order themselves if they truly seek to listen to God and more effectively carry out their work.

Morgan suggests that if we are to really change, we must be willing to suspend our images of what organizations should look like and to explore new ways of organizing ourselves to do the critical work before us. He draws heavily on visual images that we do not normally associate with organizations, such as termites and spider plants. His purpose in picking such unusual imagery is to help us shake free of our thought constraints by asking us to look at other ways nature is organized.

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It's a boy!

Congratulations to Jeremy Berg, pastor of MainStreet Covenant Church in Mound, MN, and his wife Keri, on the birth of Peter Bjorn on July 18. He weighed in at 8 lbs. and was 21.5 in. long, with "long, skinny fingers and toes like his dad, and as cute as his mom."

Keri and baby are doing well. He is named after his daddy's best friend Peter and his uncle Barry ("Bear") as Bjorn is Swedish for bear. "Thanks for your prayers and for helping us guide him in the way of Jesus in the days ahead," Jeremy Berg said.

It's a boy!

Congratulations to Kyliah Villa, pastor of children & families at First Covenant Church in Minneapolis, MN, and her husband John, on the birth of Silas Stephen on July 1. He weighed in at 6 lbs. 2 oz. and was 19.25 in. long.

"He came a month early, surprising everyone involved," Kyliah Villa said. "It has been a whirlwind ride adjusting to the newest arrival, but we are all doing quite well. Samantha and Andreu adore him, and we are enjoying the last week of John's paternity leave."

Communications Corner

Creativity is work

By Bryan Malley

Anyone and everyone in church communications work eventually runs into "creative block." Are there ways to avoid coming up blank on a project, especially when the deadline is tight?

Church communications consultant Tim Schrader, blogging from a session at the Echo Conference 2011, captured a series of notes about the creative process from artist, actor, writer and producer Blaine Hogan.

Hogan's day job is as the Creative Director at Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago, IL, where he works to create spaces and experiences using video, multimedia, movement, and performance art. A few of his comments that resonated with me:

No cares about your ideas, they care about the execution of the vision. Execution is everything.
Great art is only made in the face of fear.
Really great ideas come at the cost of many other good ideas.
Creativity is work. It's a discipline.
Establish a discipline of cultivating ideas even when you don't need them.
Hunt for ideas. Gather them together.
Catalog your thoughts and ideas.
Make a routine of cultivating ideas.
Even though it feels tedious, your work will never be done.
Do the work now so you'll have the ideas later.
Inspiration comes to someone who is available.

Read the full notes from Hogan's presentation, "A conversation about the creative process."