Christians have gotten boring.

Not all of us. But the list of wildly creative ones is waaaaaay shorter than it should be for people with the best story ever told.

We should be the most daring people on the planet. In art, business, pottery, entomology. Pick one.

So for the next seven weeks, I'm taking one dangerously creative Christian a week and the trait that made them dangerous.

We start in a field.

Trait 1: A dangerously creative Christian goes where the gatekeeper isn't.

I call it the field test.

When a door closes, most people knock louder, or rewrite the application, or wait for next year's conference, or ask the gatekeeper to please reconsider.

Here's the thing. The gatekeeper only guards one door.

People who pass the field test ask a different question: who isn't the gatekeeper serving? Then they go there.

Picture a cross-eyed kid pouring drinks at his mom's inn.

Critics later called him "Dr. Squintum," which sounds like a DC villain and is honestly kind of rad.

He got through Oxford serving richer students and polishing their shoes.

By 24, he was one of the most talked-about preachers in England. He was also saying things nobody wanted to hear, like you can sit in a pew your whole life and never be born again.

The clergy did not love that. Doors started closing. In Bristol, the chancellor threatened to suspend him.

So he walked outside town to Kingswood, where thousands of coal miners had no church of their own.

On February 17, 1739, he stood on a patch of ground called Rose Green and started talking to whoever would listen.

Stop and think about the downside. If nobody stops, he's the banned guy talking to a field. You don't scrub that off easy.

People stopped. About 200 of them.

He came back. And again. One crowd hit about 10,000.

He wrote in his journal about the first sign it was working: "the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their black cheeks, as they came out of their coal pits."

Years later in Philadelphia, Ben Franklin went to hear him and "silently resolved he should get nothing from me."

By the end, Franklin wrote, "I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector's dish, gold and all."

The most skeptical man in America, out-talked by a guy the pulpits locked out.

So if a door just closed on you, cool, go find a different field to stand in.

Here's a dangerously creative idea.

I was listening to How I Write, and Andy Weir was on. He's the guy who wrote The Martian and Project Hail Mary.

Every agent rejected him. So he just started posting The Martian on his blog, a chapter at a time, sometimes fixing it live as readers pointed out mistakes.

Readers asked for a Kindle version. He set it at 99 cents because Amazon wouldn't let him make it free. It sold 35,000 copies. Then Random House called.

He didn't wait for permission, and neither do you. Not from a gatekeeper, and not from an audience asking for it first.

So what's missing that you care about enough to make? Go make it, even if it's free. Then see who shows up.

Until next time,

Payton ✌️

P.S. I have a friend worth reading

George took the story to the people who weren't in the building. My friend Danielle Wallace does a version of that every week.

She's a former TV news reporter turned independent journalist, and in Called With Open Tabs, her free weekly newsletter from The Virtuous Creative, she shows you what she's reporting before it becomes a story, plus what she's watching and asking across business, faith, and culture. Built for Christian women entrepreneurs. One tap to subscribe.