CLASSIC CREATIVITY
Bringing color and fragrance to historic church is what you'd expect from a pastor named Rose.
January 1, 1993
Bringing color and fragrance to a historic church is what you'd expect from a pastor named Rose. Walk down 57th Street in Manhattan, one of the most expensive streets in the world, past the Hard Rock Cafe and across the street from Carnegie Hall, and you happen upon an anomaly: a Baptist church tucked next to and under the seventeen floors of the Salisbury Hotel. Judging by the traditional architecture and the age of the buildings, you surmise that Calvary Baptist must have a storied tradition. And it does, dating back to 1847, and in this building since 1931. Yet Calvary's current pastor, Jim Rose, says, "I'm always tired of what I'm doing two weeks after I've started it." Prior to entering the ministry, Jim was a NASA engineer, helping to design space suits for the Apollo project. He enjoys classical music and the arts. He is committed to creativity in ministry, as evidenced by his first-person narrative sermons and the unconventional church he founded in Clearwater, Florida, in the 1970s. How does this unusual man, who aims to be on the slicing and dicing edge of culture, work in a church proud of its past and its pipe organ? LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Brian Larson took the elevator to his fifth-floor office to find out. Why would someone like yourself, known for innovative ministry, come to a historic, tradition-rich church? Most creative churches are new churches. One reason I wanted to come to Calvary was the challenge to see (a) if the church could come out of yesterday, and (b) whether a church with this much diversity can have a creative edge. (Avant-garde churches tend to be very homogeneous.) After five years here, I don't know the answers to these questions, but we're working on them.
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