By John Chandler
Joshua Wolf Shenk finds in Paul McCartney and John Lennon a master metaphor of how brilliance happens. In his recent book, Power of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs, Shenk makes the case that we’ve looked for far too long in the direction of the lone genius. We would be better served to watch for the sparks that fly only in creative pairs.
Enthralled in our American ethos of rugged individualism, we can easily miss the magic that happens when two people capitalize on the simultaneous richness of their differences and proximity. In the case of the Beatles it was the tug of war: Paul was methodical, John chaotic; Paul, diplomatic, John, an agitator; Paul persistent, John impatient; Paul a neatnik, John a whirling dervish. Lennon’s first wife summarized the partnership by saying, “John needed Paul’s attention to detail and persistence, and Paul needed John’s anarchic, lateral thinking.”
Shenk locates historic archetypes that should have tipped off lone wolves long ago. The Greeks had Apollo for the rational and self-disciplined, and Dionysus for the spontaneous and emotional. “Friedrich Nietzche proposed that the interaction of the Apollonian and the Dionysian was the foundation of creative work, and modern creativity research has confirmed this insight, revealing the key relationships between breaking and making, challenging and refining, disrupting and organizing.” The business term for this is “co-opetition,” where two entities at once oppose and support each other. The image is two people pulling on a rope, smiling, yet tugging with all their might.
Such tensions were evident in the earliest Christian churches. Paul admonishes the Corinthians, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?” (1 Cor. 12:17). As dysfunctional as that church could be, it was the presence of radically different types of people within that church in co-opetition with one another that accounts for much of the vitality.
It can be nerve-racking to live in that tension. But individual(ist) leaders of churches in days to come would be wise to find others to lead in tension alongside of them. And independent churches who would be creative in the gospel would be wise to locate themselves in community with other churches with whom they are in co-opetition. The Baptist voice has always prized autonomy. Can it learn to prize collaboration alongside of it in new ways? The extent that we do — or don’t — will reveal our creative powers.