This is the third post in my series on the words of the subtitle of my book, Tell Me A Story: Creating Life-Changing Ministries from Stories. We are not taking the words in order, and today I look at the first word, creating. Creating indicates action. This is the verb of the subtitle. It indicates what the reader can do once he or she has digested the book.
Definition. Creating means bringing something into existence that did not exist before, taking something from a vague concept or goal to the point where it can be used. For a ministry this involves taking a need or the germ of a ministry idea to the point where the ministry begins to impact people.
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Genesis. Let’s digress briefly to acknowledge that our Triune God is the original creator and became the source of any creativity we humans have when He created us in His image. PTL.
Implications. Because create is a verb, it requires a subject. The subject of the verb create is almost always a creator, someone or some group that does the creating. The subtitle of my book does not identify the creator, but both the main title, Tell Me A Story, and the subtitle imply an actor; namely, you, who read my book or this blog and then go out and help create or improve a ministry.
The verb create also requires an object, the thing that is created. For our use, this something is a ministry.
Disambiguation. (Sorry. I borrowed and distorted this word a bit from Wikipedia.) My subtitle uses the word creating. Inside the book and in this blog I rarely use this word unless I need a synonym either for clarity or to avoid using the same word twice in a sentence. More often in the book I use “developing” or “designing.”
I use the words creating and developing as synonyms. There are probably nuances of connotation between them, but I don’t need that fussiness.
Design is not a synonym. It refers to only a part of creating or developing, the part that determines how the created item will look, feel or operate. It does not include the action needed to turn that information into something usable, which create and develop entail.
On the other hand, if design is done comprehensively, the design will include not only a complete pattern for the created item, but also a complete plan for the work needed to turn the design into its usable form. So, designing is the core of creating or developing. It is the hard part. My book and this blog adopt this comprehensive view of design.
Extension. I am interested not only in creating ministries but in improving ministries that already exist. Improving involves redesign. But, for modern design methods, all design is redesign. No design really begins from whole cloth. This may not be obvious at first, but the explanation needs more discussion, and that discussion needs to be the subject of a future blog post.
Ministry Design 