Today I was reading O Magazine, you know published by that superrich, superwoman albeit theologically confused, Oprah. She writes in this month’s issue how she read (and also gave out 4,500 copies to Stanford grads) the book by Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future. I was fascinated by what she documented in the article so much so that yeap folks, I have to go pick up this book and add on to my growing collection of books I want to read! You can find out more about the book and the author here.
What struck me the most about the conversation Oprah documents with Mr. Pink is that alot of the elements that he writes are Right Brain attributes are ones that our church believes in wholeheartedly but you guessed it, now there is a label for it. So in a way, I think we are a Right-Brained Church or at least taking steps in that direction. We have been promoting the arts in our church especially since we started the process to open up the Dream Center for the Performing Arts where we will have music instruction, dance, drama, partner with arts organizations, etc. Its a lot of work to start something from nothing but our team is so “out of the box” that its a good sounding board for me.
Mark Batterson was talking about right-brained ministry back in 2006 so I see I’m late to join this conversation but hey better late than never huh? He also recently wrote about right brain preaching here. I first heard of the book The Rise of the Creative Class when I met Tim Keel at an Emergent event and we talked over a sandwich in a forum. In that book Richard Florida says “that fewer than 10 percent of Americans were doing creative work at the turn of the 20th century. A hundred years later, 33 percent of the American workforce gets paid for right-brain creativity. That rising percentage is evidence of the value we place on creativity.”
As a growing church with a passion for the creative arts, a dream to work with the community and expose people to the arts, I think this is pretty significant material to understand. I love this test I can across as well, gives me the idea of mixing it in with a gifts profile. I wonder how many right brain thinkers we have at our church. Viewing this test also made me think that my son is a right brained kid and uh, me, well I’m a left-brained with traces of a right brain somewhere. LOL
All this to say, I wonder what our ministries would look like if we functioned and allowed our right brain thoughts to dominate. Do you have any thoughts on this?
