People often at times believe that dollars = creativity. That is wrong on so many levels. Let’s examine the world of cinema for a moment.

Do you remember “The Blair Witch Project’? The movie about 3 college kids disappearing in the woods while filming a documentary cost $35,000 to make. Artisan Entertainment spent about $25 million marketing it and the movie made $248 million worldwide.

If you’ve ever seen ‘Spy Kids’ or ‘Sin City’ then you probably know the director is Robert Rodriguez. If you want to read an excellent book, check out his book ‘Rebel without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player.’ Rodriguez chronicles how he made the film ‘El Mariachi’ on a shoestring budget, and was merely hoping to get the movie distributed via VHS in Mexico to make enough money to finance his next film. Instead, you can learn how Rodriguez wound up being wooed by the big studios in Hollywood and how ‘El Mariachi’ became a huge hit at the Sundance Film Festival.

On the other hand, many people can name big budget flops. For instance, ‘The Postman’ cost $80 million to make and earned $17 million at the box office.

It works elsewhere as well. I love photography. Photography is an art. You can hand a person $5000 in camera equipment and they can come back with images you could get with a disposable camera. But take a look at the image below:

It’s hard to see because it was taken with a camera phone. My son grabbed this image. It looks like the sun rising out from behind those trees but actually its the headlights to a car. The sun had actually set, but Michael said the headlights looked kind of like the sun so he snapped away. That’s creativity at work.

How does it work at the church? Well, Buckhead Church near Atlanta did a Good Friday service. You can see some of what they did in this video. Buckhead is a satellite church that is part of Northpoint which is Andy Stanley’s church. Now, in seeing the video, some people might think, “Well yeah. When you have access to those resources, it will be a lot easier to do something like that.” That’s partially true. Northpoint conveniently makes their budget available to view online and yes, the combined operating budget of Northpoint and the satellite churches exceeds $30 million. But does that contribute to the creativity? Watch the video again. Somebody had to think of all that. Money didn’t create it. Somebody’s creativity inspired it. Buckhead has just been blessed by God with the resources to implement it on that scale.

At Parkview Baptist Church where I attend and volunteer, we have nowhere near the size budget Buckhead does. We don’t have their sound system, lighting system, musical budget, etc. But what our church did this weekend was just as creative. You saw some of the images in this entry here. Rather than doing your typical Easter Sunday service, our church leaders took it to a different level. They put into it some art (which I wasn’t able to photograph because of lighting, but will now that it is complete) with young man named David Brazell, painting Jesus’ left hand, right hand, crown of thorns and feet during each of the four services we had at our worship center. The dude has some wild hair so from what I understand, people at school call him ‘Bob Ross’. You know Bob Ross. The “happy trees” painter who would put a work of art together in 30 minutes. David had to do the same as he would complete each painting before the service was over.

Next came a video of several people discussing how their lives had changed forever when they became Christ followers.

After that, men from our church acted out ‘The Last Supper’ while our Pastor would from time to time describe the events and read from the bible. Everybody at the church took part in communion at the same time as the disciples came down from the stage to pass out bread (crackers) and wine (juice!) to the congregation. It was the best Easter experience I have ever had at church. The creative process that went into these services was awesome. The people involved used the resources God has blessed Parkview with to create that experience.

The term ‘think outside the box’ is cliche, yes. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply. Both Buckhead Church and Parkview Baptist Church had people that thought outside the box this Easter weekend and as a result both delivered to people services they won’t soon forget.

Is your church thinking outside of that box?