Healing the Faith-Art Divide

One Church, Myriad Arts: Excellence & Economics

Should the arts offered by the church even attempt to match the subtlety, grace, and power of those offered by secular enterprises? The short answer, to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor: If not, I say to hell with them.

Yes, the objectives are different. Yet how many church arts programs declare excellence as a core value? One of the main reasons the church finds itself restyling and regurgitating secular offerings is that the church’s only real interest in the arts is an umbilical cord to Sunday services. More on that to come.

At present, the church relates to the arts under significant duress. The church has 52 weeks to fill and not much of a budget to fill them with. Even the most wealthy, well-resourced churches feel the pinch of the calendar, the “always another Sunday” factor.

Consistent excellence is not an option under such conditions. This is simple economics. The movie clip the pastor uses to illustrate his sermon was part of a project two years and $20M in the making—at least. The sermon took 15-20 hours start to finish.

Yet lack of resources is always cited as the reason people go unreached. When it comes to church and the arts, the problem isn’t only cash or resources. It’s an often myopic, overly practical view of mission. As Bono said, “The God I believe in is never short of cash, mister.”

The depth of the church’s mission shouldn’t be equivocated with the quality of the artistic offerings it “utilizes” on Sundays. There’s far more to it. But one of the seismic shifts the church must make in order to reach the first world missions field is a significant investment in talent and resource sharing.

What’s missing from local worship arts communities are the long, life-giving, luxurious stretches of time needed to produce excellent original art—art that reflects on, serves, and reaches out from the community (communities) from which it comes.

Partnerships between churches are not uncommon, and many churches share buildings and equipment. But sharing worship arts resources can release an extraordinary amount of potential.

If three or four churches within a reasonable geographic distance fully commit their arts resources to each other, several benefits emerge:

• The congregations are exposed to a wider artistic vision and ministry
• The worship arts teams meet the opportunity to grow into and minister in a new context
• The teams and congregations gain opportunity to learn directly from each other
• Each team can take a significant amount of time away from the Sunday to Sunday routine in which to receive in worship, create, bond, rest, and study

The end result is more time for preparation and development, which leads to increased quality and creativity across every form at every church. Over time, the bonds between churches and even between denominations are strengthened by joint worship experiences—just as other divinely ordained human relationships are.

The arguments against talent sharing are obvious: finance, logistics, shared equipment, disparity in church size, etc. But under all of these is the central argument of church identity. How will a joint program be led? How will the money work? The service form? People come to this or that church in part because of the music, don’t they? If people wanted to hear the crappy worship at xyz church, they’d go to xyz church! (I’d love to check out ‘xyz church,’ by the way.)

Here’s the thing: people need to lighten up. The model, the directive, is one church, not thousands. How do we get to that place? What unites the people of God more fluently and powerfully than worship?

Maybe the music at xyz church is crappy because they don’t ever make time to practice, or they don’t know how to organize their rehearsals. How will they learn? If talent sharing is led and communicated well, the congregations are energized and happy, especially when they see the long term benefits begin to take root.

Besides, and more basically, the church is supposed to share. A lot. All the time. Deeply.

If we can’t share worship, what can we share?

The Church and the Worship Arts

Almost three decades after Frankie Schaeffer wrote his polemic Addicted to Mediocrity: 20th Century Christians and the Arts, the twenty-first century church is still using.

Churches always change slowly, but in this area the hour is late indeed. Many artists find it more difficult than ever to serve the church directly without feeling they are selling out. It's hard to find worship arts leaders who have worked in the secular arts world, and when you do find them it's hard to convince the church of their value. And most excellent works of art created today have little or nothing to do with organized Christianity.

The church has often had a strained relationship with the arts; both lay claim upon the primary right to articulate the meaning of human existence, and at different times and places each has served the other with varying degrees of deference, hostility, and understanding. As in any marriage comprised of two highly capable, passionate partners, mutual respect is a hard-won prize. And as in any realm of love, the divorce rate is tragically high.

The Christian church, however, has at least a singular mission, which holds the claim and purpose of unity (however eventual or abstract) as a central asset: something the arts have never aspired to. As it happens the most widespread and powerful expressions in the arts—film and popular music—rarely if ever perceive their need of the church.

This need, though critical, is often difficult for the church to perceive as well, at least with any clarity. But there is little doubt that the church needs the arts in order to reach the world, and now more than ever before in its 2000+ year history.

Everyone looks for meaning and context somewhere, of course. Considering the omnipresence of television/cable, music, movies, and internet offerings, more people look for these things in the media than in the church. In fact the saturation of the media is so deep and pervasive that we can scarcely quantify it.

It’s not going away, either. The church can’t wall off the world, and as Schaeffer pointed out decades ago, whole decades have been wasted trying to build a distinctly “Christian” culture. As ever, this isn’t an issue of resources, but of design.

The church is designed to change the world from the inside. The design is made both implicit and explicit by the gospels, and cultural transformation—like personal transformation—must be incarnational. Culture must be transformed from within, not by some crusade of conquest that forces a value system upon the unwitting world by argument, manipulation, and cajoling.

The media-saturated/worldly soul must be won by beauty and truth and love, and it has ever been thus—which is why Jesus told stories instead of reciting doctrine.

This is hardly news. Yet the church continues to expend huge amounts of energy issuing its derivative offerings to the world. Healing this unhealthy status quo means two seismic shifts in the church’s strained relationship with the arts.



Heaven and Earth/S. Brooke Anderson