Lee recently came back from a worship conference and shared these notes from a session that Aubrey Spears taught. Spears is the Teaching Pastor at Fairmont Park Church in La Porte, Texas. From Lee’s notes, these are the:
7 Reasons Why the Church Needs Artists
- Only through art can we know God more fully. A person encounters God as an artist before he encounters him as a theologian. We have reduced God’s primary interests to truth and goodness. We must remember that beauty is a primary of interest of his.
- We must see God’s world more truthfully. Only seeing one theme is insufficient. Artists must help people see both the brokenness and the promise of renewal.
- We must embrace God’s salvation more completely. Art as morality dictates that we should create more than just “religious” art. Everything is to be redeemed. Everything is worthy of artistic representation.
- We must worship God more humanly. Because of the image of God, humans make art. Humans create. No other organism on earth does.
- We must believe God’s promises more confidently. We are blinded to the glory that is here now. With art, you encourage and enlarge hearts to believe the impossible.
- We must proclaim God’s kingdom more powerfully. Truth has bigger muscles in art.
- We need to meet God. The primary place where we experience God is in our imagination–the intersection of our mind, emotions and will.
Highlight number 7! If more teams could get this right on the weekends…so many times there seems to be a disconnect between the artistic movement within a service (via music/dance/visual art, etc) and the need of the teaching pastor to “summarize it” or “close it” or in another way “left brain it” and then we lose the impact of the intersection Lee wrote about. More alignment of vision is necessary to get this done I suppose…
I will now, officially have to read this book!
Thanks Tony!
Amen!
thank you for the affirmation!
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Thank you, totally agree.
Heck, I always thought it was only through football that we can know God more fully. :-)
Seriously, great notes by Lee and a great post by you. I’ll be sharing it with our artsy staff guys.
Here’s two to add:
- because being a creator is part of being made in God’s image – The Creator.
- and because it’s fun, in a deeply satisfying way.
Hey Tony,
LOVE this post…
It seems sometimes all of the emphasis can be on developing leadership, but so few actually talk about developing artists…
I linked to you in one of my posts and it seems to have taken the liberty of posting itself in comments section… My bad…
Didn’t want to seem to pimp my blog while trying to add to the conversation…
“Only through art can we know God more fully” – jesus & the holy spirit work in many areas of this world where art does not exist. I’d say the gospel is entirely sufficient with out art.
yet we are richer for it when it has room.
really, we need art to see the world & God through someone else’s eyes.
more importantly, we’re made in God’s image, He is the creator, therefore we should also look to be creative somehow.
“some painters transorm the sun into a yellow dot, others transform a yellow dot into the sun” – picasso
at the same time the sun never stopped.
Great stuff, my wife teaches art at a Christian school and she is always trying to help the kids understand how God and our creativity are so intertwined.
Rodge, I think you’re perhaps defining “art” a little too narrowly here. Art exists everywhere, as humans are constantly producing created things. That doesn’t have to be in a gallery in NYC; it can just as easily be a functional clay pot in a Peruvian village.
Of course the Gospel is sufficient. But by that rationale alone, we’d never do anything. We’d just sit around and let the Gospel be sufficient and never do anything to support it, to remove barriers for people to hear it, to try to frame it in ways that connect with people, etc.
Josh, I hear you. i came from a place where there was lots of music and a fair amount of creative pursuit generally. I’m now at a smaller church but there’s much more missional output. That stuff is powerful in terms of people understanding who God is and what Christs love is by the way we clothe feed etc.
I make my living through art & music and I go mental without it. But I see that it is further down the chain. For instance, i’d argue that science is very under represented in church culture, but surely it has a way of revealing things about our maker that art just merely alludes to. But very few people cheer for some scientific ministry in church circles.
I should have said…. The Gospel is sufficent – but sitting on our butts is not sufficient. The gospel is an action, and we also must act – that’s how i see it anyway.
The Church needs Artists.
The Church has a lot of posers.
Artists create.
Posers copy and replicate.
The Church by in large supports and gets excited about the posers covering the safe and certain.
That is the “Art” the Church supports
One of the main purposes of modern and post-modern art — to challenge our perception of the world by making us uncomfortable — it is my experience that the church really doesn’t like this aspect of art and why artist are often not embraced. Mostly because you might not like what they do…
This discussion excites me, I want to know God more fully and I want to create!
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