Since becoming pastor of Fellowship Church in suburban Dallas in 1990, Ed Young, Jr. has led the church from its original 150 members to a weekly attendance of more than 18,000 people. Fellowship Church has been characterized by creativity in worship and preaching, and now the church is sharing its resources with others through its Fellowship Connection network and CreativePastors.com. Ed has recently joined the Board of Contributing Editors of Preaching magazine, joining his father (Ed Young, Sr., Pastor of Houston's Second Baptist Church) in our first father-son Contributing Editor team. Preaching editor Michael Duduit recently visited Fellowship Church to visit with Ed about preaching creatively.
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Preaching: You have come to be identified as one of the most creative preachers around. What do you see as the place of creativity in preaching and worship.
Young: I feel that all of us are creative geniuses because we're made in the image of God. The question that I challenge pastors and communicators to ask is not "how do I become creative" but "what are those things that are keeping me from unleashing the creativity that God has given us?"
We're made in the image of our creative Creator. I always go back to the trinity — the Father invented creativity, the Son modeled it, the Holy Spirit empowers it, and then on top of that people need it. If you look at Jesus, the master communicator, He was so innovative and so creative in the way He taught. He was consistently inconsistent. The message obviously was the same but he changed the methodology. Whether He was pointing to someone or sowing seed, whether He preached from a beach or drew in the sand, He was always using the process of identification and then illustration and application, and basically that's what we try to do. We try to model our communicative style after the ultimate communicator, which is Jesus.
If you read the Bible and look at God and God's relationship with man — from an apple to Adam and Eve, salt to Lot, a tree to Zaccheus, a fish to Jonah, a boat to Noah, ultimately a cross to a world, God is sovereign and He understands that we respond to the message in a multi-sensory fashion. I think that every communicator, every church should do that within the context of their particular style. I'm not into trying to force people into different styles. Whether you have throne chairs and a 500-voice choir, whether you have the postmodern vibe or country-western, you get to be yourself. Within that, though, I believe you've got to be creative. God desires it. We need to unleash it. That's why I like creativity so much — that's why I'm challenged by it.