Jesse Bryan is the creative director at Mars Hill. He has worked with Mark Driscoll and the leadership team at Mars Hill Church for four and half years. When you’re talking about a church with about a dozen campuses, and nearly 8,000 in attendance each week, Jesse has a huge role. As creative director, he oversees a team of four staff members and many volunteers. Together, they produce everything visual at Mars Hill – from videos to signage and everything in between. Jesse is more than just a creative guru making cool stuff for the church; he’s also a gospel-centered guy. Recently, Jesse and I had the opportunity to talk about his work. Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

Where do you find the creative inspiration to do what you do?

In everything we do, we start with the [Bible] text. For instance, we did a series called the Peasant Princess, and we just went through the book of the Song of Solomon. If you start anywhere else than the Bible, you’ve gone off base with your creativity.

For the Song of Solomon series, I sat down with Pastor Mark [Driscoll], and he said, “So you’ve got this girl and we know that she has a mom and she has brothers. We never hear about a dad. Her her skin is darker from being out in the sun, so she has to work. She’s an average working class girl. And then the king shows up, and she ends up marrying the king.” At that point, I was like, “Wow. that sounds like a fairy tail.”

Then the creativity starts snowballing, and you end up with what we had for the Peasant Princess. But it always has to start with the text. If it doesn’t, you only have one other place you can pull from – the culture.

Jesse Bryan

A Sermon Series on The Expendables. (Wait a second…)

If you’re pulling everything from culture, you’re going to end up with a pop culture church. That is one of the biggest problems with the church today. Churches go out and steal a bunch of stuff from really good artists in pop culture. But of course, they don’t do it quite as well. They lose authenticity. In some churches, you’ll have an entire sermon series based on The Expendables. And you’re thinking, “You guys are stretching pretty hard.”

Their biggest problem is that their creativity is not coming from the text. Instead, it’s coming from what you think is relevant at the time. This comes from the idea that you don’t believe Jesus is relevant. You believe culture is relevant.

Creativity vs. Clarity

If I get an assignment to brand something or create something, I’m not going online and looking at the most popular YouTube clips or finding out what the most popular movies are. That’s the last thing on my mind. We always start with the text, and then the story comes right out of the text. My top priority is to communicate clearly, because creativity is really about clarity.

I would rather our emphasis be on communicating clearly and not putting on some type of a show. Look how Paul achieved relevance. In Acts, when he came to Mars Hill he began discussing their culture and religion. He looked for a point to connect with them But then he flips it on them, and talks about the true God, and how He is the ultimate Judge. He completely destroys their philosophies. We see him achieving a contact point with these people. But notice what he did after connecting.

Jesse's Pastor, Mark Driscoll (photo from Mars Hill Church)

The biggest problem with emphasizing relevance is that its easy to slip into watering down the gospel. You think, “Well, I need to be relevant.” But today, “relevance” means that you should be accepting of homosexuals or homosexual pastors. In our pursuit of relevance, we start giving up ground.

Making Jesus Relevant

If the church doesn’t believe that Jesus is relevant, we have to make him relevant. And the only way to make Jesus relevant is to grab something that we do think is relevant. So you think, well what is relevant? Ironman! So you think Ironman is relevant. So if I add Ironman to Jesus, maybe then Jesus will be relevant. So he’s called Jesus: The Real Ironman.

In doing that, you’ve just elevated the culture to the same level as God, which I would suggest is always a horrible idea. It’s a totally arrogant position to take, too. What you’re really saying is “Jesus, why don’t you sit there on the bench, I’m a smart guy. I’ll figure out how to make you relevant.” That’s insanity!

Like you said before, “Jesus is the reason that we’re relevant. It gives you freedom when you realize, “I don’t need to make Jesus relevant.” Your focus then is to be as clear as possible, and to help people connect with the Scripture. We know that Scripture is going to work. We just have to trust it. And you know what? It always does work. It always works out.

Follow @JesseBryan on Twitter.

church media director · creative director · media director

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