The Power of Collaboration

As I sat in a creative meeting yesterday for our church's weekend services, we began, as we always do, by evaluating the previous Sunday service.  We realized how much stronger the entire experience was for our congregation largely because of one key word - collaboration.  This word gets thrown around rather casually, and may have lost some of its power along the way.  But the reality of genuine creative collaboration is truly a wonder.  Let me describe 2 specific ways in which our creating together improved some of the key moments in our church's gathering.
      First, we experienced a video created to expose the hand-written prayers of some of our church's young people.  These were very real prayers, quite simply stated, such as "Please help my father find a new job...a fourth grade student."  The video team had been working on this video piece, and the previous Wednesday, they brought it to the creative team for feedback.  With a few days to go before Sunday, the wider team suggested a slightly different visual approach and also made some suggestions for the music.  The result was that the video's power increased at least 20%.  We all agreed it could have worked without those changes - but would not have been as strong.
      We also had a drama scene in the service.  When the script was first read to the creative team, it was in the form of a monolog.  Now obviously sometimes a monolog is the optimal choice.  But many of us felt this particular script would be stronger as a combination of a scene and monolog - with occasional direct addresses to the audience.  The script features a father who regrets some of his destructive patterns as he relates to his 10 year old son.  The writer went back to the drawing board, adding a son and a wife to the script.  The result?  A much stronger experience in this case.  And the interesting thing was that our drama director originally hesitated to make these changes because he felt the monolog was so strong.  He told our team that he was grateful for how we weighed in and offered a different perspective.
      What is absolutely essential for collaboration to truly work?  Humility.  I celebrate how these artists - all very gifted and intuitive individuals - open themselves to feedback week after week.  Their attitude is simply one of, "Can this be any stronger?"  And together we dialogue until we believe we have arrived at the best possible approach.  Yes, sometimes collaboration is extremely difficult and even messy.  But teams who fight for it, with team members who are open-handed and open-hearted and walking as best they can in the Spirit, will ultimately create the most powerful experiences for those we are seeking to serve.  God smiles when we collaborate well.  And everybody wins...