At some point, Christianity became obsessed with order. The sermons got cleaner. The rules got clearer. The worship songs started sounding the same. And the story of a God who spoke galaxies into being got reduced to bullet points and behavior management.
For Mosaic pastor Erwin McManus, that’s more than a theological misstep—it’s a spiritual identity crisis.
“We’ve overstated that God wants us to obey,” McManus says. “Obedience is not the end game. It’s a means to freedom. And freedom is a means to create.”
If that sounds radical, good. It’s supposed to. In McManus’ mind, creativity isn’t optional for Christians—it’s central to what it means to be made in the image of a Creator. And the Church’s failure to nurture that has rendered it, in many ways, culturally tone-deaf and spiritually stagnant.
“It’s astonishing to me that we’ve allowed people to turn the Bible into a manuscript of conformity when it’s really a manifesto of creativity.”
McManus isn’t calling for a style upgrade. He’s diagnosing a root-level dysfunction: a Church that forgot how to imagine. And in a world increasingly shaped by innovation, storytelling and reinvention, that kind of amnesia isn’t just inconvenient—it’s dangerous.
“If we don’t reclaim the space at the intersection of creativity and spirituality, we’re going to become irrelevant in the human conversation.”
He’s not wrong. As AI begins to automate logical thinking, execution and even communication, what’s left for humans to own? Imagination. Emotion. Vision. If churches can’t engage people in those spaces—if they keep functioning like spiritual bureaucracies—they’ll lose their cultural credibility entirely.
And for McManus, this isn’t abstract theory. It’s personal. He’s spent decades pastoring in Los Angeles, watching artists, entrepreneurs and cultural outsiders walk away from the Church—not because they rejected faith, but because the Church had nothing meaningful to say about creativity, ambition or original thought.
“The world needs us to imagine a different kind of future and have the courage to create it,” he says. “And most of the time, the Church is too busy defending the past.”
It’s a jarring inversion of what the Church was meant to be: not a museum of preserved traditions but what McManus calls a “creative agency” designed by God to bring His future into the present. That framing changes everything. It turns faith from a set of restrictions into a calling to build something—your relationships, your career, your city—in ways that reflect hope, beauty and divine imagination.
And no, that doesn’t mean quitting your job to make stained-glass art or write Christian poetry. It means bringing creativity—actual, risky, disruptive creativity—into every corner of your life.
“Every job is an opportunity to create a better world,” McManus says. “Bring your imagination, your inspiration, your compassion. If you do that, even the most mundane job becomes a platform to build something bigger.”
But it doesn’t stop at creativity as productivity. For McManus, the real material of creation isn’t talent. It’s love.
“Van Gogh, Picasso, Jesus—they all believed love is the source of all great art,” he says. “So if you live your life as an act of love, your life becomes your greatest work of art.”
That might sound like Instagram-deep wisdom, but McManus means it literally. If you’re filled with bitterness, resentment or fear, you’re not going to have the emotional material to create anything that heals or inspires. But if you let God transform your interior world, then suddenly you’ve got something to work with. Something eternal.
That’s where this starts to feel less like abstract philosophy and more like a gut check. Because a lot of young adults—especially Christian ones—are stuck in the tension between what they have to do to survive and what they long to do to feel alive. McManus doesn’t offer some clean, sanitized answer. He just says: use the system to fund the dream, but don’t let the system define your story.
“If your job is unfulfilling, fine,” he says. “Use it to pay the bills. But don’t use it to excuse living a lesser story.”
Instead, he challenges people to interrogate the dreams that still haunt them—the ideas that won’t go away even though no one is offering to pay them. That’s probably where the real calling is.
So what does that mean for the Church? According to McManus, it means ditching the instinct to gatekeep and control and embracing the messiness of real innovation. The Church shouldn’t just tolerate artists, dreamers and question-askers. It should be led by them.
“Before I die,” McManus says, “I want to change how we think about human beings. The Church will stop seeing itself as an institution to preserve the past and start acting like the creative force God designed it to be.”
It’s a big vision. It doesn’t fit neatly in a five-point sermon series. And that’s the point.
Christianity was never meant to be mass-produced, color-coded or algorithm-friendly. It’s wild. Human. Imaginative. And the moment it forgets that, it stops being compelling—not just to culture but to the people sitting in the pews wondering if any of this still matters.
If McManus is right, then rediscovering creativity isn’t just about relevance. It’s about survival. Because if the Church can’t inspire imagination, it’s not just behind—it’s lost.
