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When using your creative giftings in the church, creativity burnout can rear its ugly head at any point, not just during a global pandemic. Creativity burnout can vary in its effects - maybe you just have a bit of “creator’s block” and can’t seem to create at the capacity that you used to. Maybe you have lost sight of why creativity is important. Maybe you’re been completely emptied of your passion and drive to create whatsoever.
Burnout is real and burnout can choke out all of your potential as a leader if you aren’t prepared for it. The biggest mistake you can make when it comes to burnout is to believe it could never happen to you. But a greater mistake is to believe you are helpless to the whims of burnout and are destined to just fizzle out one day.
Out of all of the ways to avoid burnout, the most important is to center everything you do around Jesus and His all-sufficient grace for you.
Your relationship with Jesus is of the utmost importance and when you nurture that relationship, your creativity can’t help but thrive too. After all, we create because of the creativity of the Creator of the universe.
Burnout happens. Passion can begin to lose its potency. But throughout it all, when we intentionally “set our minds on things above, not on earthly things” as Colossians puts it, we can avoid burnout and flourish as creatives!
One of the first questions you should ask yourself is: why do I create? Maybe you design graphics, write songs, or compose videos because you went to school for it. Maybe you create because you developed a knack for it or your pastor simply asked you one day to head-up your church’s creative team. Whatever your background may be, there is a bigger “why” behind our creative giftings than we may realize.
Handel’s Messiah, The Sistine Chapel, and Michaelangelo’s David are just a few examples of Christian art that has shaped our culture and has immense influence on the world. When we look back in history and see how almost all great art was influenced in some way or another by Christianity, we can see the impact our art can have on a world desperate to know Jesus.
So why do we create?
We create because God is a Creator.
We create because culture is influenced by creativity.
We create to ultimately lead people to Jesus.
When you focus on this “why” instead of just on “what” you do as a creative, you are making a decision to focus on Jesus and the eternal impact of your work rather than just checking off a to-do list. When you rehearse the reasoning behind your creative expression and burnout comes your way, you can set your mind on Jesus instead of yourself and your own abilities.
When you’re a creative in the church, you may read the call to rest and think “Ha! When? How!?” Rest can often fall at the bottom of our to-do list when we have videos to create, graphics to render, and social media captions to write. And forget resting when you get in a creative flow and have dozens of graphics to edit before the weekend service.
But rest is not an option, rest is a mandate. It is not a mandate in that if you don’t do it, God won’t love you - it is a mandate in the sense that if you don’t do it, you will experience consequences. When you don’t rest, you will get overwhelmed. You will overwork yourself. You will burnout.
Even God, who created everything in the entire universe, rested. Now we aren’t creating animals or the human race, but we are exercising our creative abilities to point people to Jesus, and we must rest. Thankfully, when we believe in Jesus, we enter into an eternal rest in Him. That means we don’t need to strive all of the time to try to please Him, we need only to rest in Him.
Rest must also come with responsibility. It probably isn’t wise to pick the day before a huge campaign for your church is due as your rest day. Just pick a day and make it your Sabbath. Use your day of rest to allow your brain to rest because let’s be honest, it takes a ton of brain power to edit videos for hours on end or to design an entire sermon series. When you value rest, God honors that rest and you can avoid creativity burnout.
In addition to resting and focusing on the “why”, leaning on others for guidance is an important part of steering clear of creativity burnout. Sometimes as creatives, we feel like we need to reinvent the wheel. We need to always be coming out with new and innovative ideas for all of our church content. But what if we actually looked to others to help us creatively?
There are a ton of churches with massive creative teams who develop incredible content for their online church experiences. There is no shame in looking to large churches such as Elevation or Hillsong and gleaning off of their creative wisdom.
We are all in this together. We are a part of the large collective Church who is seeking to reach people for Jesus. We can rely on one another and frankly, we should!
Serving as a creative director or as a member of the creative team can often be lonely. You spend more hours serving behind a screen than many other people in the church and it can be all too easy to just go through life without making sure you are staying healthy. It can also be easy to overlook the overwhelm and mounting to-do list and chalk them off as things that are just a part of the job.
But God doesn’t want you to just survive, He wants you to thrive. Jesus came to give us not just life, but abundant life and He wants that abundant life for you!
If you are experiencing burnout in a very real way, reach out to your family and especially your church community. Ask for help, guidance, and prayer. Maybe even seek the aid of a professional counselor to help you work through your burnout and the anxiety that can come with it.
One of the reasons creativity burnout can happen is because we are overloaded with work. If you work for a smaller church with a smaller staff, you may wear many different hats: video editor, content creator, copywriter, production, etc.
Creativity takes time, so trying to balance a plethora of tasks all at once can lead to work overload and honestly spread your creativity very thin. A great way to combat this creativity overload is to build a team of creatives.
The reality is, people want to use their gifts, they just need to be asked! Oftentimes our teams can remain small because we don’t consistently seek out new people to join us. But creativity is a collective effort. We need new eyes, new opinions, and new abilities to join our ranks and make for a better and more efficient creative team.
You can only create for so long until your creativity juices begin to run out and you’re running on fumes. Having a talented, dedicated team around you will help to not only bear the weight of the team, but also support you and bring new ideas to the table.
If you’re unsure of how to build your creative team, Pro MediaFire has an incredible team of people who can help your church excel digitally and ignite growth in your community. Our services act as your own personal creative team for less than the price of a staff member! We have an entire team of graphic designers, video creators, digital marketing experts, and copywriters to help create content for your church and lessen the load.
You don’t need to carry the burden alone - we are here to help and to ensure your church thrives and grows as a result of your digital outreach and content!
When working as a creative, remembering why you do what you do, taking time to rest, leaning on others, and building a team can make a world of difference. Burnout is scary, but it can be avoided and you can thrive more as a creative than you ever have before.
Ultimately, trust in God to sustain you, to inspire you, and to fill you with His passion and His love for the world that needs to hear the message of Jesus!
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