Have you ever really stopped to think about the ocean? Covering most of the earth, it expands far past what we see when we stand at the intersection of land and water. Just below the water’s surface are entire ecosystems — canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon, mountains taller than Mount Everest, and hundreds of thousands of marine species. The ocean water holds around twenty million tons of dissolved gold (yes, literal gold) with even more gold deposits resting on the ocean floor.
But the craziest part is that eighty percent of the ocean is still unmapped and unexplored. In the midst of all of this discovery lies even more mystery — hidden treasures waiting to be found. It’s one of the most powerful pictures of God’s creativity.
Everything we see is marked with His signature, including you and me. We are made in His image. We can be creative because He is the ultimate creator.
God is magnified when we operate in our creativity. The church should be a space where creativity is constantly on display. Realizing that we wanted to be intentional about stewarding the creativity in our church, we recently added a new element to the rhythm of our creative department by hosting our first-ever CRTV Camp. We gathered a handful of creatives in our community for two full days of creation, collaboration, and community.
The heart of CRTV Camp was to focus on these three areas:
1. CREATE
It wouldn’t be a CRTV Camp without creative projects. We set aside time to build out the priority projects for the 2023 church calendar. From VOUSCon to sermon collections and everything in between, we worked to ideate content, establish vision and direction, and begin taking ideas from concept to creation.
We designated three 4-hour working sessions for our teams to meet and execute. Session 1 was focused on strictly VOUSCon and our teams were split by area of focus — Design, Social marketing, Web, Communications, Environments, and Film.
Session 2 we flipped the script and created collaborative teams spread across multiple areas of focus to execute the majority of SZN 2, 2023 creative projects — Merch, Collection of Talks, SZN 2 Design, etc.
Our final creative working session mirrored the layout of Session 2, but with new creative projects as our team focused primarily on SZN 3, 2023.
2. COLLABORATE
Collaboration is an essential part of the creative process. Ideas take new shape and come to life when we bring our different perspectives to the table. The creative sessions allowed for all kinds of creative mediums to work together in real time. While we had practical goals we were working to achieve, our hope was that the collaborative relationships would go beyond just the creative tasks at hand. We incorporated several organic moments for people to build community. We believe that CRTV camp is really just the ignition point to spark creative collaboration for the rest of our year. We tasked all teams to go back to Miami with this same spirit of collaboration to continue working forward.
3. COMMUNE
At VOUS, we always strive to make hard work fun. We understand the need for grinding and gathering. Both are equally important. We all know that we can’t pour from an empty cup. During CRTV Camp we made it a priority to commune, setting aside time to be refilled and refreshed in God’s presence. Days were anchored by morning devotionals — moments of worship, prayer, and reflection, and evening fireside chats — pastoral sessions with our lead team around the heart of creative.
God will sustain the gifts that He starts — it’s when we continually go back to the true source of our creativity that we find fresh inspiration, fresh ideas, and fresh vision. We hope you are inspired to re-invigorate your creative teams whether at a CRTV Camp or monthly hangout. We believe as we invest, God will grow.
