What Churches Can Learn From Lost, Pt. 2

This is a guest post from Dave Sandell. This is the second post in a two-part series. Part one is here.

Creativity & Lost

Last night, Lost began its sixth and final season.  And this morning, thousands of blogs, message boards, newspapers, podcasts, water cooler talks and impromptu lunch breaks are springing up dissecting each second of the premiere.  Millions of people will obsess over every second and every shot.  As I said yesterday, the thought of a community of people responding that way to a sermon or a message from our church is exciting to me.  So, today we continue our look at what churches can learn from Lost‘s creative process.

Lost is a show that thrives on mysteries, mythologies and answers waiting to be discovered.  The creators of Lost seem to have a master plan, and viewers who obsess over every scene are often rewarded.  So, I’m tempted to develop a master plan for our church messages.  I’m tempted to obsess over each little word.

But what’s amazing about Lost is that it’s mostly accidental.  There was no masterplan from the very beginning. Everything that happened, happened organically.

A brief history of the creative process of Lost:

• Lloyd Braun, head of ABC wanted to do a scripted Survivor
• JJ Abrams, hot off of Alias, was asked to write it.  He agreed as long as there could be a supernatural element.
• Damon Lindelof was brought in, somewhat last minute, to help JJ create the pilot.  Together they created the characters that made up the show, and wrote the first two hours, which introduced the supernatural elements, but no real mythology.  The pilot would feature JJ’s directorial fingerprints, but he would have little to do with the series after that point.
• Damon Lindelof brought in Carlton Cuse a third of the way through the first season.  It was at this point that they began to lay out the mythological framework that would drive the show’s mysteries and invite the viewers to a new level of obsession.  They also laid out the major milestones that would mark the entire series.

And of course, the creative process continued to be organic and dynamic.  They had their milestones, but getting from point A to point B was made up along the way.  New mysteries were introduced, characters grew and dictated some of where the story went.  They spun their wheels until the network agreed to an end date, and then they set the second half of their story in motion (which will conclude in May).

What Churches Can Learn

I often want to begin with a masterplan (to boot, we began Greenhouse with the first year completely mapped out, much of which has chucked, and what hasn’t been chucked has been dramatically changed based on the actual needs of our church, rather than the needs we tried to anticipate).

I want to dictate not only what people hear, but how they respond to what they hear.

But it’s not up to us.  On Lost, they established a time, a place, and the characters.  And everything else grew out of that.  They had a framework, and the plans came a little bit later, but after they had a chance to really get their head around what they had.

Perhaps that’s what we need then: A framework to start with, and the freedom and creativity to intentionally craft whatever comes out of that framework.  At Greenhouse, we’re interested in creating a “life message” for our church, three things that we want to be about: Becoming who God created you to be, pursuing emotional healing and gaining a very real sense that we live in a supernatural world where God is currently moving.  How that plays out week to week is constantly evolving.  And we can’t plan for it.  We just get to be ready to respond to the current.

So, someday soon, God-willing, we will roll hundreds of people deep into our neighborhood and serve them with our hands and feet.  God-willing, we will see miraculous healings and we will see captives set free on a regular basis.  God-willing, we will have sermons that inspire second-listens, much chewing and life changes, worship that brings us into the presence of God, and prayer that recalibrates how you understand the world to work.

But for now, we move forward with what we have, and remain poised to respond to the accidents, the opportunities and the flow of the tide.

Your Creative Process at Work

Here’s the Lost-prescription for church creativity: Start with a general idea about who you are.  Then do a lot of thought- (and prayer-) work about where you want to go.  Come up with a very broad plan for how you’ll get there and how you’ll know you’ve arrived.  And then once all that’s in place, start the process of intentionally, deliberately creating something so compelling week-to-week that people will respond en masse.

How does your church’s creative process work?

Post-script: Something else for churches to learn: ABC fired Lloyd Braun, largely in part to the massive cost of the pilot for Lost, which he ordered.  They fired him before it even aired.  And it became not only their largest critical hit (along with Desperate Housewives, which he also ordered), but a cultural icon.  Lesson: stick with your visionaries. Let them make a few mistakes. See what happens.