There is, sadly, still a dark underside to the idea of art in the church as espoused by The Line.
[The Line church planter Aaron] Youngren, the son of church planters in Ecuador, began to see artists through a missiological lens, thinking of these “misfits” and “extras” as a lost tribe.
This I can see. This I actually agree with. The church as I knew it had no real grasp on what to do with artists. Sure, if you could play an instrument or carry a tune they’d love to have you lead worship. But beyond that…well…
I ran in to occasional instances where church services would try to incorporate art. They’d encourage the congregation to add something to a canvas in the back of the room in an attempt to illustrate their walk with Jesus or some other such random activity. But that’s not really something that gets to the heart of what art actually is. It is expression, yes, and expression in an artistic medium. But artistic expression does not necessarily create art.[1] At the very least it does not begin to explore the depths of art itself. It is superficial and self-referential. It is also directed and constrained by the fact that the creation is a community activity in response to a specific set of instructions.
Whether or not the actual end result of such a task is art can be discussed. I’m sure that someone already has. But let’s take away that larger discussion for a moment and focus on the fact that it most certainly does not create any sort of depth of artistic experience or achievement. Leaving a table full of watercolors at the back of the sanctuary will not result in a David Hockney-esque exploration of what it means to focus and perceive. Further, it won’t result in the sort of work that we got from Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, or any of the other masters whose work we still study hundreds of years after they were created. Quite simply, it’s not worth it. Such art, if it can even be called art, doesn’t really add anything to the discussion of the human experience that is art as a whole. It is a collection of short sermons on feelings as opposed to a story about what it means to feel.[2]
Really, if any organization wants to incorporate art in a serious way it must incorporate artists. But, again, the incorporation of artists is scary, as art is subversive. Art is at its best when it’s about all those aspects of humanity that we’re otherwise hesitant or afraid to address. Consider that Dante’s Divine Commentary was really a political polemic disguised as Biblical cosmography. Or consider that pretty much every Renaissance painter put distinctly extra- or even anti-Biblical themes in to their work. This is what the artist does. The sacred becomes profane and the profane sacred in the hands of the skilled laborer.
So, again, we have a problem. But this is a logistical issue. I have a much, much larger conceptual issue with this article and, well, the central viewpoint of the people involved.
“Modern missiology says you don’t value a tribe or people group until you go in and preach the gospel,” [Youngren] said. “But at some point you have to hand it off to them and then sit under them and learn about God.”
Let me re-state the money quote here:
Modern missiology says you don’t value a tribe or people group until you go in and preach the gospel. But at some point you have to hand it off to them and then sit under them and learn about God.
Any time you start out by with a pre-emptive, “You don’t value [people] until [event],” you’re doing it wrong. You start out with the assumption that people are inherently valueless until they are the specific sort of people you want them to be. Any time you say that people aren’t worthwhile until you can infuse them with some aspect of your own beliefs you are officially doing a Bad Thing. And I feel like this paragraph was repetitive, but I cannot stress this enough.
The sad thing is that I would like to offer the benefit of the doubt here. I’d like to say, “You know what, that might have been a bad choice of words.” I really have a hard time doing that, however. Remember, I grew up in the Evangelical church. There was an implicit – and often explicit – message that people just weren’t worth all that much. It had a very “us and them” mentality. People outside of the church were simply placed in to the category of “mission field.” The really lucky ones were just declared to be enemies of the church and dismissed outright.[3] If anyone bothered to learn anything about these poor, unfortunate souls who were so in need of Jesus it was to specifically learn all of the reasons that they needed Jesus. If a decision was made to meet their other needs then those needs were met specifically as an excuse to witness to them about Jesus.[4]
So when someone says that the attitude in missions says not to value people until they’ve received the gospel I can say that the speaker is doing a bit of truth telling. It’s usually not stated in such a bald-faced way, but I’m guessing that this is either a case of someone preaching to the choir or something that’s so ingrained that they don’t really think through the implications of what they just said. When you live in Evangelical Christianity you are constantly reminded that what the world really, really needs is more Jesus, after all. You’re also constantly reminded that without Jesus the world is, like, five seconds away from going completely and totally down the shitter.
I don’t like this modern missiology bit one bit. Of course I also recognize that it’s been a strain throughout all religious missions work. Consider the huge numbers of religious wars over the years and the White Man’s Burden. Devaluing those who don’t share a specific set of beliefs and dogmas is a feature of missional religion, not a bug. If your goal was to go and sit down and learn about and from another people group you’d be an anthropologist, not a missionary.
But let’s take that concept as a whole again. The idea behind the mission of The Line came from an idea that you don’t value people until you teach them to believe the same things you do and then you learn from them. If this is your plan what, precisely, are you intending to learn from them?
See, this is the other inherent problem in Evangelical Christianity. There is an actual underlying belief that god is of a single, specific nature and that nature has been revealed in the text of the Bible, an inerrant document that is to be interpreted literally. As such, god is more of a series of proof texts than a being worthy of complex theological or philosophical discussion. The discussion of god is more of a collection of discussions about how to make god happy or at least keep god from getting pissed off.
Given that conceptualization of god, what is there to learn from someone you taught everything to? I suspect that I’ve put more thought in to the concept and nature of god since I left the church than I ever did when I was a regular attendee. When I was in church it was all about what god did or didn’t want people to do. This really doesn’t teach me much of anything about the nature of god at all, though.
Think about it. Imagine that you’re working at the drive-thru in a fast food restaurant. I pull up and say that I want a Big Mac Value Meal with a Coke. This is a very simple and straightforward instruction that tells you something about me. It tells you, specifically, that I’m hungry and I want a Big Mac. It tells you that if you want to make me happy you should probably not give me a Filet-O-Fish and a Sprite. But that tells you absolutely nothing about me other than the fact that I want a specific food and I want it now. It does not tell you where I’m going, where I’ve been, why I’ve stopped at your particular McDonald’s, or if I make it a regular habit of eating Big Macs and drinking Cokes. It doesn’t tell you what my job is, what I like to do when I get home, or if I think “The Little Drummer Boy” is the worst Christmas song ever.[5]
It would be a mistake to assume you know me because you know what I want for lunch. Similarly, in conception if not scale, it’s a mistake to think you know god just because you think you know what god wants you to do.[6] Of course if you assume you know me I can always walk up to you and say, “Hi, I’m Geds,” and proceed to do things which will either prove your assumptions right or prove them wrong. God has a rather annoying habit of not doing that. So we’re left with as many different interpretations of the nature of god as people who believe in god. And we’re forced to deal with people who are willing to fight, maim, and kill in order to prove their interpretation is right and another one is wrong.
So, ultimately, I think we need more art in church. We need more artists creating art in church. They might be able to turn a few of those sermons back towards stories and reawaken the subversive nature of art in the process. That’s what we need more than anything.
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[1]Seriously. Why the hell did I set out to define art in this little project? I feel like I say something massively and pointlessly inflammatory with, like, every other sentence.
[2]By the same token, attempting to find convoluted explanations for esoteric concepts that are difficult to conceive of, let alone conceptualize, is a lot of fun. Also, notice that I’ve drawn a bright-line distinction between the story and the sermon. Sermonizing fits in to the category of propaganda while storytelling fits in to the category of art. I can go to jessa’s comment on the last post to properly conceptualize the difference: “Perhaps current Evangelical Christians no longer understand the parables as art, but as object lessons, because they have been relying on pastors to interpret the Bible for them, and those pastors have closed off the questions offered in the parables and turned them into object lessons.”
When a story becomes a sermon the story ceases to be art. It is reduced to a morality play that is trotted out to tell and retell the intended morality of the story to its audience. As such the story has now lost its power to shed light on other aspects of the human experience.
Consider the ever-popular tale of the Good Samaritan. It gets endlessly told and retold in Evangelical churches and the moral is always the same: Christians should help anyone and everyone, for they are your neighbor. This is actually a really, really good lesson and it’s too freaking bad that so many Christians in America have been suckered in to a message that says the best way to help others is by fighting to permanently eliminate the “Death Tax” and by forcing gay people to stay as far in the closet as they possibly can. Either way, it was still shorthanded thusly in every sermon of which I am aware: Christians should be the Good Samaritan.
But if we were to take this out of a sermon and interpret it as a story we would need to ask a series of follow-up questions. Why does Jesus tell this particular story? Why does Jesus choose the particular cast of characters for it? Why do the priest and the Levite avoid the traveler? All of these questions require an examination of the culture of the time. They also require an approach to the story that doesn’t look for simplistic moralizing, but an actual attempt to better understand the world and what it means to be an actor in this world. But, you know what? I’ll let the Slacktivist take this one, as I can add absolutely nothing to his interpretation at this moment.
[3]I’d rather be consigned to hell than pestered in to heaven. At least with the former I have peace.
[4]I saw something the other day about a ministry that was trying to raise, like, $90,000 to print send picture New Testaments in Russian to needy Russian kids for Christmas. Do you know how much needy people need, like, food and shoes and winter coats? Do you know how much food or how many coats $90,000 could buy? I mean, seriously.
I also honestly think this is somewhere in the attitude of a subset of the people who want the government to get completely out of the charity business. If the government hands out welfare checks then that means that people can actually get things they need without having to be browbeaten for their horrible, sinful lifestyle. And they don’t have to sit down and listen to sanctimonious sermonizing about how the Lord provides, either.
[5]I do. It is.
[6]Especially since the Evangelical definition of what god wants pretty much revolves around pestering people in to praying the Sinner’s Prayer. Which appears nowhere in the Bible. And the Great Commission is the closest I can come to a version of that. You know, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit for the remission of sins.” Other than that most of the instructions Jesus offered were more along the lines of, “Don’t be a dick. Seriously. That pisses me right off.” And that’s a commandment I can get behind.
Counterpoint: Walking in a Winter Wonderland is a horribly, horribly awful Christmas song which is actually made worse by the fact that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas.
So while I honestly believe that it's worse than The Little Drummer Boy, I think it might get disqualified on a technicality.
Posted by: Michael Mock, who should have gone to bed much, much earlier last night | 12/07/2010 at 10:34 AM
Footnote fame!
Also, while Catholics are generally just as stubborn about enforcing their beliefs on others as Evangelicals are, I thoroughly appreciate their willingness to help people on a basic level (food, clothing, etc.) without always including evangelism. Usually they do evangelize, but they are capable of going without. Many Evangelicals aren't capable of going three sentences without evangelizing and seem to think helping people without evangelizing totally misses the point. I'm pretty sure Jesus wouldn't be upset if you fed the hungry and didn't also feed them the gospel for whatever reason. You still fed the hungry! This is a thing that it is good to do! Jesus approves! He even said so in the Bible!
There are lots of starving people who know how to play along, how to nod and smile at the right times when evangelized to in order to get food. When that is what this becomes, I'm pretty sure that means your evangelizing is counter-productive.
Posted by: jessa | 12/08/2010 at 08:47 AM