Recovering A Creative Process

 Remember This

We are all creators. Creating is part of being human. Whether we make art, make conversation, make decisions, or make messages, we are always creating. We all make something out of the world we live in by restructuring, redesigning, or recreating it, everyday. Though many of us live our lives unaware to the power we wield as creative beings, those who wish to understand the power of art, communication, and creative content making need to understand exactly what it means for us to be creators. We need to understand the world which we live in and how we as creative people should interact with it. We need to rediscover a creative process. WHO - WHY - WHAT - HOW. This is the creative process, but because most of us are unaware of it, we do not understand it, let alone understand know how to utilize it. All the more, it is crucial for us to think about WHO we are and WHY we do what we do, since this influences WHAT it is that we want to do in our lives and HOW we want to do those things.  Of course, this process affects every single aspect of our lives, but I would like to specifically focus on how this process affects the Christian content maker. The Christian, after all, should be supremely interested in understanding who he is and what his purpose is, and then seek out the ways that he can accomplish his mission through creative content making.The first step in the creative process is to understand WHO we are and WHY we are. These two things comprise what we understand to be our identity. Though it is not my intention to fully explain what identity is or explore Christianity as a religion, I believe a brief of overview what it means to be a Christian is nonetheless necessary, since our identity tells us what it is we want to make and how we ought to make it. 

Identity

Who am I? How you answer that question will determine how you answer every other question in your life. Though ‘I am American’, ‘I am a woman’, ‘I am hispanic’, ‘I am a soccer player’, ‘I am a student’, or any other ‘I am’ answer you may give may certainly be part of who you are, the Christian's identity is based first and foremost upon being a follower of Christ.Who is Christ then? Christ is none other than God in the flesh. Christian orthodoxy has always affirmed that Jesus Christ of Nazareth was born of a virgin, being both fully human and fully God. This is significant because God is only fully known and understood as he reveals himself incarnate in Christ Jesus (Matthew 11:27).In his book, Delighting in the Trinity, Michael Reeves shows how this same Jesus is in fact the blueprint for creation. The fountain of love that the Father had for the Son in eternity past overflowed in Creation; God is in his very nature, life giving. “In other words,” Reeves says, “through the Spirit the Father allows us to share in the enjoyment of what most delights him-his Son. It was his overwhelming love for the Son that inspired him to create us in the first place, and all so that we might share in that highest pleasure of his” (Reeves, 94).As Genesis 1 says, we, male and female, are made in the image of God. Thus, it is important for us to understand that there is no God but God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit, three persons in one, as we try to understand how our identity is found in and defined by Jesus Christ. In fact, the only way that we can truly know what is means to be human is in Jesus Christ. Blaise Pascal rightly remarks, “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.”

“Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.” - Blaise Pascal

So, what does it mean to be a follower of Christ? Among other things, to be a follower of Christ means to partake in the life of God through the Son. We are adopted into the family of God and grafted in the body of Christ. In their book, The Incarnation of God, Clark and Johnson explore how our identity as Christians is totally and completely linked to our unity in Christ. “To be saved is to belong to Jesus Christ,” they say, adding, “to belong to Jesus Christ is to be among the living limbs and organs – member! – of his body. Any divorcing of these two realities can only be artificial” (Clark and Johnson, 185).The Christian cannot separate any aspect of his life, thoughts, or actions from his unity in Christ. The entirety of our lives has been bought with a price, and the entirety of our lives is lived in submission to God. Indeed, increased submission unto Christ alters our desires, and intentions, and our actions so that we become less self-serving and more God honoring and glorifying.  It should come as no surprise then that our identity in Christ is all together relevant for understanding how we are to live our lives. Of course, this includes the art that we make, the way that we communicate, and the message that we make. In Ministry Media Matters, Brian Kammerzelt explains that what we make is not made independently of who we are. The character of and theology of the creative content maker is inextricable from the messages that he or she makes (Kammerzelt, 9, 58). Our identities are central to all that we do in life. The way we, as individuals and society, view ourselves and the world constantly changes (another reason it is important for the Christian to develop a biblical worldview), making the idea of understanding our identity a very challenging and frightening undertaking. Despite the fact that soul searching is difficult, our identity is in fact the most crucial aspect of the creative process, and thus it is important to dive deeply into this element as the first step. 

What Do I Want To Make?

Unfortunately, people are frequently unaware of how their identity shapes their art and communication. Though this is a tragic fact in and of itself, equally unnerving is the fact that many people do not actually think about the message they want to make or how their method of communication might affect that message. Only once we have begun to understand how our identity shapes our desires and intentions can we begin to think about what we want to make and how we can go about making that thing. What do I want to make? This ought to be the question every communicator and artist should ask before they take action. Or, perhaps the better question, particularly for the Christian, should be: What should I want to make? In an age oversaturated with media and drowning in content, it has become increasingly difficult to make meaningful work and determine what works are meaningful. In his book, The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul explains how a mass infiltration of technique into every sector of our life has hindered our ability to make meaningful messages, meaningful art, and communicate authentically. Instead of learning how to use technique to accomplish our tasks, our technique dominates us and keeps us from recognizing and creating real culture.Andy Crouch, in his book on Culture Making, explains that we have 5 potential responses to culture in our spheres of culture. We have the option to critique culture, consume culture, condemn culture, copy culture, or create culture. Unfortunately, most Evangelicals, both individually and corporately, choose to critique, consume, condemn, or copy culture rather than create it.Here, the implications of our identity in creativity become apparent. Since we understand that our God is a creative God who calls his people to partake in making something new, we understand that it is our duty and privilege to create a new culture by inviting others to come and see what we see, a method Jesus set as an example for us since the beginning of his earthly ministry.Again, our theology affects our actuality, re-emphasizing our need to biblically and theologically understand and articulate our purpose as Christians. In Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann explains how part of our role as Christians, as communicators, creators, and message makers, is to be part of creating newer, truer, and better alternative realities. As members of one body, Christ’s church, we are able and privileged to help usher in the new kingdom, bringing heaven to earth in the midst of our now and not yet reality. This surely will influence our decisions on what we decide we ought and ought not make. Surely there are certain actions, messages, and media that usher in a kingdom of darkness, and others that usher in a kingdom of light. James K. A. Smith explains that what we make shows us what we love and what we think about the kingdom of God, and that what we make shows us how to love. Thus, it is our duty as Christians to determine which kingdom we are ushering in by our art, message making, and communication. This inevitable requires a sense of intention and desire. There must be reasoning and purpose in what we make if we are trying to partake in this glorious privilege of creative content making. Unthoughtful and unintentional content making is inevitably meaningless and unvaluable. When the activity of message making is used as an end in and of itself, this desire to #justcreate for the sake of creating frequently results in technically excellent work, but rarely in beautiful, meaningful, and truth telling messages and art. 

How We Make

Finally, after we have considered how are identity shapes our desires in such a way that we determine to make things that are good, beautiful, and truthful, can we begin to think about how we go about message making. The only problem is that the content of our message is not the only thing that communicates, our methods of communication contribute just as much as content does in our message making. Consider three simple words. ‘I love you.’ ‘I love you’ seems like a pretty simple message, but when these words are used in a sarcastic manner, what is communicated is the exact opposite message of what the content of the words mean. Consider the value of these words when they are used in a letter, or a text, in a movie, on a radio station, between two lovers during a wedding vow, or between a parent and child on their deathbed. Though the content used in each of these circumstances is the same, the message is altered in each instance by the method of communication and the message and carries different meanings.What we quickly begin to realize, once we are open to the concept, is that our actions, medias, and technologies all contain inherent biases. We already know that our message making cannot be separated from our identity, here we realize equally that the content of our message cannot be separated from how our content is made and communicated.

Our actions, medias, and technologies all contain inherent biases.

Indeed, this is the challenge of any creative content maker, to figure out how to best intertwine the content and container of a message or piece of art together so that they become one. Wherever this fails to occur, miscommunication occurs and the message of the content is overwhelmed by the method of our content. Perhaps this realization is what caused Robert Fortner to say, “Art is the effort we all make to put our meaning into a form that will increase the chances that it will be understood” (Fortner, 148). If we do indeed care about the messages that we are making, we need to learn how our medias, actions, and technologies are biased.Harold A. Innis began a broader conversation on how different modes of communication act in time and space and how some forms of media and technology are bent towards existing in time but not space, and others are bent towards existing in space but not time. He showed how the form of communication inherently affects the messages that we make and the messages that have been made throughout human history. This conversation would later be picked up and expanded upon by Marshall McLuhan, who became the key proponent of the study for media ecology. In fact, McLuhan was fond of saying that the medium is the message. He argued that the power in the medium is so strong that the way it inherently communicates matters more than the message we are trying to communicate, particularly in how culture and society is formed. In his book, Understanding Media, McLuhan says, “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot” (McLuhan, 19).This is not to say that the content we make is inconsequential, rather that we underestimate the power media has in our message making. In their layman’s guide to media ecology, Brock Lockenour and Rachel Armamentos reiterate that message making involves both content and form, or medium and message. The task at hand then, is to understand how our medias communicate and what biases they hold. This is no small task, the power of media in our lives cannot be understated. The depth and scope of how our technology, actions, and mediums bias are communication are too broad to be understood easily. For those who truly wish to understand the power of media and communication, the best places to dive deep are: Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death, Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message and Understanding Media, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, Rachel Armamentos’ and Brock Lockenour’s Surviving the Technological Society, and Brian Kammerzelt’s Ministry Media Matters. However, for the rest of us who just want to learn about how all of this matters connects to the messages that we are trying to make, let us take a broad and quick look into how message making influences many of the  things that we see and use everyday. 

Method Bias

Speaking: Let’s start with something that we all do everyday. Speech is inherently limited in both time and space since it can only travel as far as the speaker can vocalize and its words are stuck in time the moment they are uttered. As soon as we speak, words exist for a moment, then they disappear. This makes it difficult to to build complex logical conversations, since our logic becomes limited by our minds ability to remember words from the past and process things in the present. As Ong explains in Orality and Literacy, cultures that are orally literate must ritualistically replay stories through words so that society can maintain a common memory. These limitations inherent make speech a direct act, necessitating both speaker and listener to be physically present and participating in conversation.Writing: As opposed to speech, writing has the ability to exist throughout time, but is still limited to whatever space words are written on. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan explains how the written word, particularly the phonetic alphabet, causes us to trade an eye for an ear. Our ability to interpret visual symbols into complex and meaningful messages allows us to develop thoughts and ideas that exist beyond just the present. In fact, McLuhan says, “It can be argued, then, that the phonetic alphabet, alone, is the technology that has been the means of creating ‘civilized man’” (Understanding Media, 120). The ability to write and maintain laws, develop and maintain currency and trade, and communicate beyond an individual's spatial and temporal limitations biases writing towards more individualistic, complex, and informational messages, depending on how the reading and writing occurs.Mass Print: It is worth distinguishing how mass print's biases are distinguishable from handwritten writing. Handwritten messages are confined in space by whatever the message is attached to. By comparison, mass printed messages have the ability to coexist in more than one location because the exact same message is printed in many places, biasing mass printed messages to be more global and corporate. Also, handwritten messages can exist in time only as long as the objects that the messages are written on exist. When handwritten messages are written on papyrus, the message disappears in time as soon as the papyrus begins to decay, whereas a message carved in stone will last much longer. In comparison, mass printed messages have a greater chance of existing through time because the number of copies of a message multiplies its chances of survival, and the message can be copied and recopied indefinitely throughout time.This ability for mass printed messages to deny the limitations of both time and space has massive implications. For one, the ability for information to be accessible to anyone who is literate allows for information, rather than the giver or keeper of information, to be supremely valued. Andrew Pettegree explains how Martin Luther and the Reformers utilized this power to undermine the power of the Catholic Church and spark a revolution that would eventually result in Protestantism.Radio: What mass printed word is to handwritten writing, radio is to speech. Radio (and all recorded audio) is not limited in time and space the way that speech is. Recorded audio has the ability to be edited, meaning that messages are can be crafted and recrafted even after the act of speech has already been completed. This ability to preserve audio through time and expedite it through space, whether by cassette tapes, CDs, mp3 players, or broadcast towers, allows messages to be mass communicated, inherently making radio less personal and raw than live speech but still more relational than silence.Photography: The idea of capturing a moment in time is not unique to photography, artists have attempted this through all kinds of forms long before the camera was invented. What is unique about a photograph is the ability to create an exact image of a certain moment. This greatly extends our capacity for visual memory and visual storytelling. Pictures, and by extension moving pictures, bias us to totally trust the eye over the ear, giving photographers great power to affect our perception of reality. What this has done is allow us to value beauty and science in a greater capacity, but devalue presence and thinking.Television: Making content for television is a difficult and inaccessibility process, thus making it expensive, meaning that messages made for TV are bent towards making a profit. Neil Postman, who studied the power and influence of the TV in the 1980s, shows that Television engages the eye in ways that other medias do not and disengages the mind in ways that others do not. In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman writes, “It is in the nature of the medium [TV] that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business” (Postman, 92).What is interesting about television is that its biases on community are also affected by the screen though which television (or other video content) occurs. While one large screen in a movie theatre promotes unity and community, a flat screen TV in a living room promotes community and distraction, and a laptop screen in a bedroom playing Netflix show promotes individualism and idolatry.Internet: When considering the bias of the Internet, it is best to think of the Internet in and of itself, not of all of the content that lives in it. Unique to the Internet is the fact that it breaks the laws of media - it has no limitations of space and no limitations in time. Because the web is not contained to a physical space and (in function) simply exists anywhere that signal is accessible, it is (functionally) omnipresent. Wi-Fi makes the Internet available almost anywhere, in your bedroom, your church, your school, in coffee shops, in government buildings, in jails, or even in space. Not only is the Internet accessible from all places, it is also all accessible, meaning that to have access to the Internet is to have access to everything in it. Unlike a book, where you can only access a book one book at a time, the Internet gives access to everything all at once, functioning like Mary Poppin’s carpet bag, or even Pandora’s box. You might notice that we utilize some form of speech, writing, mass media, photography, Television, and Internet to some capacity in our lives everyday. This has not always been the case, and it is worth noting how each of these mediums have influenced humanity over history, and how these changes might influence our future.If we can begin to grasp the biases of these broad and encompassing forms of media, then we have a good shot at seeing how all of the different ways we communicate affect our message making. Sometimes though, we need to understand how specific actions, media, and technologies are concretely affecting us before we can see how everything fits together. Though these following examples are by no means thorough, they can help us grasp the all encompassing effects of and biases of our actions, media, and technologies. [expand title=""]Music: Music is acoustic, meaning that it is linked to our senses in our ability to hear. Our brain responds in various ways to auditory input, and music has distinct abilities to affect our content making. Music has the ability to inform, evoke emotion, stimulate memory, create and reflect culture, entertain, or educate. Different genres are biased towards a focus on lyrics or a focus on instruments, and each genre has different effects on how message is communicated.Smartphones: Smartphones are capable of replicating (to a degree) everything we have mentioned thus far. They are always available, and, unless otherwise restricted, they are all accessible. Rachel Armamentos points out that these characteristics in the smartphone make it inherently distracting, discarnate, and narcissistic. Within the palm of our hand, we hold something with enough power and information to rule the world, or be ruled by it.Instagram: Instagram is designed in such a way that image becomes everything. The app utilizes dopamine to get users to use the app at high intensities and long periods of time - this benefits the company through its use of ads and revenue building. The built-in photo editor, as well as the youth and organizations that utilize the app, make it highly susceptible for building counterfeit realities, where images are presented as true and real, but have been airbrushed and manipulated. Due to the biases of the app, Instagram works well as a business platform, a marketing tool, and as a social influencer.Youtube: Youtube is interesting because of how capable it is to accomplish so many types of tasks. It can be used for entertainment, Television, music, education, personal memories, tutorials, journalism, movies, and much more. Nonetheless, Youtube is inherently limited by the fact that it is a digital platform. Though it carries many different biases that can be used in different ways, they are all visual, they are all discarnate, and all of the content is consumed individually, even if individuals collectively watch the same material.Facebook: Facebook is the king of all social media. Though Facebook is not the first social media, it certainly is the biggest. Facebook’s ability to be used on both a laptop and on a smartphone makes it all present reality. Its designs bias it towards entertainment, making it easy to move from one distracting thing to another. Also, due to the anonymity of textual conversation on the platform, opinions and information are shared in abundance without context and without meaning, resulting in bullying, arguments, and political nonsense. The biases of Facebook may soon change, as the platform claims to be making changes, but for now, the platform is still a great place to see old faces, escape physical life for a few minutes, or gather information from people.Virtual Reality: Virtual reality takes what is available both in the internet and in video, and brings them to their extreme. In video, the user is interacting with disembodied material while still being located in a physical world. In virtual reality, the user is interacting with disembodied material extracted from an embodied reality. This, coupled with other sensory inputs, will trick the brain into perceiving something to be real when it is, in fact, artificial or virtual. As is frequently the case, porn is leading the way in this industry, finding a multitude of applications for this new technology. Additionally, Virtual Reality is capable of giving users experiences and preparation they might not otherwise ever have, such as in journalism or military training.Speech: We have already looked at speaking as communication, but what about speech such as sermons, plays, teaching, or speaking events? Though sometimes accompanied by other elements, the common thread between all of these is a one-way dialogue, meaning that there is one speaker, and an audience of listeners. This communicates that one person is in charge and worthy of attention, and everyone else is not. While sometimes this is necessary and beneficial, it often generates a passive audience who is simply consuming (or ignoring) whatever the speaker says. Thus, speech is bent towards education, entertainment, and information.Silence: Though we are often unaware of how our silence communicates to others, we are usually very aware of how other’s silence affects us, particularly when those we love have been silent towards us. Interestingly, silence can be used to communicate both deep care, and apathy, depending on how it is used. When a person or group refuses to speak on a certain issue, such as abuse, values and judgments are communicated. When a loved one holds your hand in the midst of crying and wailing, feelings are shared, and connection is made. Thus, silence is not bent towards education or entertainment, but relationship and values.Podcasts: Podcasts take what might otherwise be finite, one time, personal, conversations and discussions, and makes them public, permanent, and infinite. This works well to tell and share stories with people all across the world, conversely, it does not do well with unique, localized circumstances in specific places. In his article for Christianity Today, Read Schuchardt notes, “for churchgoers to perceive value, churches have to maintain the scarcity of the once-a-week, in-real-life sermon experience. When pastors push their sermons far and wide via podcast, they unintentionally devalue the message they have worked hard to create and communicate. They remove the sermon from the time, context, and body of the liturgy where it belongs,” thus making it invaluable. Podcasts, then, are great at both creating and destroying community, depending on how they are used.Prayer: While prayer is easily considered one of the most valuable and important forms of communication by people all across the globe, the way in which prayer is conducted is often ill-considered. Ryan Snyder notes that the way in which we pray - whether out loud, in dance, in art, in silence, on our knees, standing, sitting, emotionally, with music, or read - matters, as this orients us to God and teaches us what is true about ourselves and about God.The Clock: The invention of the clock taught us to think about time differently. Our lives became measured in how our time, not our money, is spent - time is money. What the clock shows us is how to compartmentalize our lives. When we have certain amounts of time alloted for specific events, life becomes a string of disconnected and contextless events. Regarding this view of time on faith, Ross Tanner says, “In a compartmentalized culture, the invention of the clock has so impacted the way we live, think, and interact that God’s integral role in society has been diminished”. If our spirituality is limited to 5 minute devotions that we have each day, what are we communicating to God, ourselves, and others?Time: The amount of time spent of something during one occurrence, and the amount of time spent on something over collective occurrences, biases us to believe and value certain things. To spend 5 minutes verses 5 hours playing video games has significant differences, as does a 5 minute verses a 20 minute version of communion. Additionally, the amount of time spent repeating or not repeating something (our rituals, habits, and liturgies) also biases us to value or not value something when we do something over, and over, and over again.Architecture: Architecture is one of those things where we might automatically be aware of what it does to us, but we are not aware of its limitations until we try to understand what is happening. Space matters, this is obvious to us because coffee shops don’t feel like museums, museums don’t feel like home, homes don’t feel like classrooms, classrooms don’t feel like theaters, and theaters don’t feel like graveyards. How spaces are designed will entirely effect what happens in those spaces. Architecture bends culture in cities, houses, churches, and everywhere else in society.Appearance: The way that we appear to others communicates volumes about ourselves, and different appearances are biased towards different values and responses, though the responses are largely dependent upon the culture within they are occurring. The way that we dress, the way that we use facial expressions, and the way that we carry ourselves nonverbally biases our messages in ways that communicate much louder than other words and actions we might have. One person or group can communicate many different things depending on they appear both to themselves and to others.Our Bodies: The way that we use our hands, our posture, our eye contact, and our movements bias the messages that we make, as well as the messages that we send while we communicate. Rachel Armamentos says this in Surviving the Technological Society, “Imagine that you need to tell your friend some exciting news – you landed your dream job! As you begin to speak, your friend’s phone vibrates to signify an incoming text message. Her eyes flitter away from you to look at the message. This action tells you that her focus is elsewhere – no longer on you and your exciting news” (Lockenour and Armamentos, 18). We have to be aware of how we present ourselves in our actions and how we use our bodies so that we communicate effectively the messages we would like to communicate.[/expand] 

Putting It All Together

Our actions, medias, and technologies do indeed contain biases. Some methods of communication are more bent towards humor, others are more bent towards learning, interaction, lust, solitude, community, entertainment, satisfaction, distraction, confusion, or emotion. To use a previous example, consider how the message ‘I love you’ might be affected by all of the methods we have just observed: spoken word, written words, mass media, radio, photography, TV, Internet, music, smartphones, Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, virtual reality, speech, silence, podcasts, prayer, the clock, time, architecture, appearance, and our bodies.Message making is difficult. Art, communication, and creative content making is difficult. When we begin to grasp how much our methods of communication affect the messages we make, we realize that message making requires intentionality. We have to grow in knowledge and understanding in how our actions, medias and technologies bias our creative content making. We have to learn to see how our identity affects what we want to make, and how we should go about making those things.

When we grasp how much our methods of communication affect the messages we make, we realize that message making requires intentionality.

This shouldn’t surprise us really, anything worth doing well is difficult. Like anything else that we do in our life, creativity takes practice. Creative content makers must be intentional because message making takes practice, art takes practice, and communication takes practice. However, even the most practiced message makers still miscommunicate - even the most studied scholars still struggle to fully understand how our methods of communication affect their message making. We cannot achieve perfection in our creative message making, and that is okay. For us Christians, it is important to remember that it is not our job to play the Holy Spirit. Though we are called to be intentional about how we create, we are not called to be perfect.Still, this is not an excuse to stop caring. In light of a difficult creative process, it is tempting to believe that it is not worth the effort of trying, and we would rather resort back to the easy, reactionary, lazy, unmeaningful, unoriginal, consumeristic, inconsiderate, message making that we have previously been absorbed in. Again, our identity speaks volumes in how we will choose to make creative content - we have to remember why we make.We do not make messages because it is easy, we do it because it reflects the image of God, and because we live to glorify God. We do not make creative content first and foremost unto men, but unto God, so that we might serve Him though what we make and how we make it. At least, that is the aim…Frequently, we end up serving ourselves in our creativity - our intentions are off. As creative content makers, it is paramount to maintain an attitude of humility and honesty, so that might rightly judge ourselves and measure whether our intentions are good or bad. We must be able to ask ourselves and each other difficult questions. Do our intentions reflect what is true about our beliefs? our identity? our world? Does my message making, both in content and form, communicate that my intentions are godly? or ungodly? What is my aim in creating this? Why are we doing this? 

The Process

Which takes us back to where we began. WHO are you? What is your purpose and WHY are you a creative content maker? We have to understand our identity to know WHAT to make, and we actually need to think about what it is that we want to make. What are the values? What is the intention? Who is the audience? Once we have figured what we ought to make, we can think about HOW we ought to make it.What method will best accompany your message? Is it painting? Is it a video? Is it a sermon? Is it a letter? Is it a song? Is it a tweet? Is it a video game? Is it a book? Is it a photograph? Is it none of the above? Is it some combination of all of these? How would you know if you don’t know how each of these inherently communicate and bias your message?We have to be aware of how each action, media, and technology will affect us as the creator and the people who are communicating. We also have to be aware of how each action, media, and technology will affect those who receive what is created and those being communicated to. We need to be aware if our creative message making is actually doing something that ushers in the kingdom of God, or simply adding more noise to the already noisy world we already live in.

The Christian content maker can select methods of communication that bias our art in ways that aid our message making rather than destroying it.

Upon reflection, we may find that the Christian content maker can select methods of communication that bias our art in ways that aid our message making rather than destroying it. If we select appropriate medias, technologies, and actions that bias our message making in ways that allow us to communicate effectively, we are doing our jobs well as creative communicators, and learning how to honor and glorify God through the creative process.  Works Cited:Armamentos, Rachel and Brock Lockenour. Surviving the Technological Society. 2018. Print.Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. Print.Clark, John and Marcus Peter Johnson. The Incarnation of God. Wheaton: Crossway, 2015. Print.Crouch, Andy. Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling. Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press, 2008. Print.Ellul, Jacques, and John Wilkinson. The Technological Society. Vintage Books, 2011.The English Standard Version Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.Print.Fortner, Robert S. Communication, Media, and Identity: A Christian Theory of Communication. Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Print.Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication.Kammerzelt, Brian. Ministry Media Matters. 2016. Print.McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. The New American Library, 1966. Print.McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage. N.p.: Penguin Books, 1967. Print.Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Print.Ong, Walter J., and John Hartley. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.Reeves, Micael. Delighting in the Trinity. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012. Print.