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