A number of my friends have access and speak into some of the mega church communities around the country. In our passing conversations it is clear that many of the mega churches (over 2,000 people) have a real challenge in keeping artists on staff and in long term volunteering roles. Why does the Church have such difficulty coalescing an artist’s enclave in their community? Here are some of the difficulties and challenges.
A lack of a biblical aesthetic on the part of the Church
Because we have seen the arts (and especially modern art) as frivolous, esoteric, narcissistic, avant garde and therefore often confrontive and critical, eschewing of tradition, and ultimately a bit unruly (the practitioners that is), it has been easier to find what I would call artist doubles. Much like Saddam Hussein had a double, we want someone to look like an artist, act like an artist, talk like an artist, but at the end of the day not “create” like an artist. Many in the role of “Church” artists are theoretically trained but lacking in the vernacular and dialect of the creative. They can ask for wine and cheese and the train station in creative (the language of creative that is –like French or German) but in truth, they do not know the nuances of speaking “creative.” One conversation with a true artist and their faux status emerges.
Example of disenfranchisement:
I have noticed from my stint with contemporary Christian music, REX and Storyville (small labels I was involved in that birthed Sixpence and a lot of very cool music), and later Grassroots, that many college aged kids (especially) will not even dawn the doors of certain Christian events and conferences. Why?
They perceive it as a propagandistic tool of the entrenched middle class evangelical community.
Now they may not articulate it like that but their reticence to sign up for some GMA competition or attend a Christian festival is that they see CCM as a genre of music that is inherently schmaltzy, saccharine, light on authenticity, and non progressive. Their critique has merit. That is another article.
The Church does not have a biblical theology for the early adaption of art and experience. In the Tipping Point, the fact that certain individuals in a society adapt to some trend or happening sooner than others needs to be factored into the Church’s mission and message. Let me say that being a slave to the “shock of the new” is just as misaligned. But the Church is still denying the struggle to embody the Gospel in real time. I will comment later on the church's fatal attempt to be “relevant” or follow trends” because I think that is still some strange capitulation to modernity, but in truth, early adaption when done biblically is really just being missiologically aware of the culture(s) in which the Gospel is being lived out. Because there are a multitude of different cultures out there, there is no “one size fits all.” This is the danger of the mega church franchise model. It is repeating what denominations did in the past. It may have actually worked somewhat in the past as society was much more unilaterally common in their worldviews but I believe that there have always been enough diverse cultural differences from even the North to the South that the parochial “one size fits all “template for the Church ended up dulling the real process of working out the message of the Church in time and space. In other words, by taking something that works in Ohio and trying to get it to work in Alaska, is in some ways denying the fact that God wants to speak in time and space to people and not just give them a manual. Part of obeying Christ’s mandate is the actual outworking of the Holy Spirit in time and space. Once again, moderns have disembodied the Gospel from its actual outworking in the flesh (meaning: in and through human activity and involvement). I have written in another blog about how developing a biblical aesthetic that is empowering local musicians is PARAMOUNT. They are in our midst. Can we see them? Do we honor them? Do we speak CREATIVE?”
Back to issues of the Church’s estrangement of the “creatives.”
Why would the “creatives” be so leery of the Church?
There is a highly romanticized view (allude to in my article on developing a biblical aesthetic) on what creativity and an artist is. I even think C.S. Lewis may have perpetuated this myth regarding the engagement of beauty and art. However, this is in many ways a response to the Church’s narrow, diminished, perfunctory view of the arts. Because the Enlightenment has fostered so much dualism (i.e. sacred secular split) the Church has perpetuated the idea that liturgical art is superior to what I might call life art. By remaining in the dualistic grid of secular versus sacred, they have made much of life off limits for the Christian artist. Think about it, when is the last time you saw someone paint a picture of Christ that you thought was a really great painter. In other words, the creatives eschew liturgical art as being propagandistic. Artists have left liturgical art to the artist doubles. This is sad. We (the Church) have inadvertently fostered this dualism and told our best and brightest (inadvertently), unless and until you are willing to do art as curriculum, we are not interested. This tendency for the Church to make faith technical and theoretical is another by product of the Enlightenment. We have made the Gospel information and drained it of its visceral mystical dimension. We (the Church) are not truly sacramentalists. We do not even believe in the power of the symbol. It’s all in the explaining. It is all in a second order posture of critique and observation. This is not the disposition of an artist. He/she cannot create from this space. Artists will not ultimately bow down to this perception and mandate.
Artists want to see all of life as imbued with the power and presence of God.
This of course enlivens and broadens immensely the potential subject matter. It sanctifies all of life. Early adapters are helping others see God’s glory through creation. As the secularization of life has become so intrusive via media and such, the Church must spend much of its time dialogically doing a Mars Hill on experience. In many ways the Church needs to draw its artist to Mars Hill and not Josh McDowell’s conference on the rational (note Evidence that Demand’s a Verdict). The Church has wanted evidence; the artist has wanted experience and beauty. Beauty…hum. Now there is a word you do not hear mentioned in the Church much do you? You will note that Mars Hill was a place away from the Church. Paul had to go to them. Where in our neighborhoods do artists hang, jam, and interact. GO THERE!!! GO THERE!!!!! We need more portals of entry into our communities that are fluid, porous, and revelatory of the public Face of God. He has one. Do those outside the faith see it? What do we do with our faith in those settings? We do not explain. That is not the language of this tribe. No….we
DISPLAY - DISPLAY – DISPLAY!!!!!
Creativity appears to be a skill that would come under the moniker of common or prevenient grace. Non believers as well as believers have it and we can see it in them. What is it? Simply put for the sake of this diatribe: it is the ability to interpret, fuse, and offer up experience such that our humanness is enhanced. As a believer I see this as bringing God glory. He made me to do this.
As a practical mystic, I do not want to make any part of being human un-spiritual. So….. artists are doing their art. They are namers. The Church needs namers. We need those who have entered the world of metaphor and realize that all of life is symbolized. There is no part that is purely self-evident. God, from Adam on, has empowered humankind with the task of naming. That is what art is. Great artists appear to be able to name things more accurately, noticing the nuances, the subtleties, seeing the connection between experience and knowing.
How do we know we are human? This of course is an epistemological issue but it is relevant to this discussion. Younger kids have a different epistemology than we older folks have. They desire a theology and an epistemology if you will, that is mystical, beautiful, encompassing, and holistic.
I attend way to many conferences and most of them are excursions into more abstract theological theory. I recently attended a conference where more time was spent setting up the art (i.e. explaining) than displaying. I would also contend that much of the explaining was a deep seeded fear that literalists (those who want all experience to be statically undynamic and unchangeable thus definable once and for all for all) would somehow miss the biblical truth “ behind” the art and disavow its appropriateness thus alienating it from the existing tribe.
Creativity is messy as is life. It involves jamming and improvisation. It involves dialogue and exchange. We want our art to fit tightly into some pre determined theological grid that will fit into the Church calendar rather than expand the homilies of the Church to see and acknowledge all of life.
If we want to bring artists into our midst we have to reverse the flow of knowing. By eschewing experience as untrustworthy (and it can be), we make the theoretical explanations of experience as our art double. That is what one of the mega church’s art conferences was to me. We unwittingly imply that art is for liturgical purposes only or primarily rather than sanctify the art artists are already doing.
Pastors who approach the Gospel from a position of objective proof and explanation will make the outworking of faith more about the explanations of the Gospel rather than a DISPLAY. We are called not primarily to explain but to live out, TO DISPLAY THE GOSPEL.
This is what art is. It is a display of humans coming under the Lordship of Christ and bringing all their thoughts, emotions, experiences (imagination?), etc. under His tutelage, under His mind, into His Kingdom. This submission has power. However, asking artists to submit their craft to an ill formed aesthetic, to persons that often feel threatened by the outworking of someone’s gift, is only to inadvertently communicate that God is skittish, that God is afraid, and small minded. Not so..He created the first nudes
This is why the Church does not get the “best” when it comes to the arts. We are not welcoming this enclave in a manner that allows their humanness to be honored. We have an agenda that is somehow more important than celebrating life, somehow more important than creating friendships and collaborations, somehow more important than seeing God in everyday experience. What is it?
THE SUNDAY SERVICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Church (and large churches mind you) inadvertently must come under an instrumentalist view of human consciousness and behavior. In other words:
~ We only have a few hours to do this.
~ Who only have a little money to do this?
~ Everybody get on board and dumb down the dialogue and collaboration or capitulate to some hierarchical structure that blankets creativity.
~ Therefore, let’s hurry up and get something on paper so we can have something for each Sunday service.
Why are many large churches run like businesses? They have to be. How do businesses treat and relate to humans: as machines. By that I mean in ways that organize human experience so it can be repeated and repeated for the sake of order.
ART DOES THE OPPOSITE
Art digs deep into the experience and sees it deleterious side. Art will often reveal the soul of humankind and show how easy it is to kill it through the “marketing” of human experience. This is of course so ironic seeing that I market for a living. However, I get how dangerous it is to have the marketers (art doubles) coming up with the creative side of the template. Marketers will make it
A spectacle
A necessity
An obvious choice
Art, as it has been configured in the last two to three hundred years, pushes all these boundaries. It says that there may be some inadvertent downsides to how we live out our lives. It tells us to see the beauty in things so common, the utter horror of the killing of the soul, the childlike joy in celebration and sensuality. These things are dangerous to the typical evangelical dualist who actually views much of life as being outside the purview of God’s grace.
Artists are in some ways early grace adapters. They go out like spies if you will and bring back experience and bring it under His Lordship.
More thoughts on a bit more philosophical and theological slant..........................
Much of this struggle George Lindbeck addresses in his writings. He might see the current view on art as a highly propositional approach towards hermeneutics that makes art and the church strange bedfellows.
If humanness is formed narratively and through metaphor, then would it not behoove theologians to foster an open dialogue with artists?
There is the death of modernity issues that artists need to confront while the Church needs to engage its faulty hermeneutic and epistemology regarding how humans know and how they are formed.
The artist may fault on the side of experience but he/she does so as part of the process of naming. Proper naming must take into account Church history, biblical language, and the real time involvement of the Holy Spirit in the local. However, the Church has configured this triumvirate through the lens of propositions. Thus, art as it has become accustomed to in the last 150 years, feels like a tool of the Church or state (much like those under Communist rule during the great purgings). In reality, we are all tools. However, the Church must reverse its epistemological flow and allow for metaphor to come from vital authentic communal naming and less from academic, esoteric, estranged, and distant naming via denominations, seminaries, and franchised church leaders.
Let the symbols flow liberally on a local basis and empower that engagement. Art nights should turn into prayer meetings into bible studies, into commentaries, into creeds.
No comments:
Post a Comment