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A Conversation with Mark Nelson
341 Plays2 years ago
"The most creative people in the world should be those that are empowered by a Spirit beyond our understanding. And yet, the least creativity, the least “good reframing,” is happening by followers of Jesus."
In this episode, Lisa dives deep with Mark Nelson of 100 Movements Publishing, and co- author of the book, Reframation: Seeing God, People, and Mission through Re-enchanted Frames. Mark sounds the alarm on our "crisis of interpretation" and the essential Christian task of becoming better storytellers.
Get the book: https://reframationbook.com/
My Name is Asher Lev: https://www.amazon.com/Name-Asher-Lev-Chaim-Potok/dp/1400031044
For more Be. Make. Do. follow now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:12
Speaker
Hello, welcome to Be Make Do, a soul maker's podcast where we talk about what it takes to pursue your calling as a culture maker with spiritual wholeness and creative freedom. I'm your host, Lisa Smith, here with our producer, Dan ABH. Hello, everyone. And it is our passion to encourage and inspire you to become who you are created to be, make what you are created to make, and do what you are created to do.
Recap and Guest Introduction
00:00:38
Speaker
In our last episode, we wrapped up the overview of Be Make Do and the Soul Maker's three-fold way of call. I focused on doing what you're created to do, which on one level is about taking all your character and spiritual formation, your gifts and talents, and then mobilizing them into action within your current context.
00:00:59
Speaker
But on another level, it's a call to artists of faith to consider their role as prophetic critics and imaginative visionaries. And I mentioned the book Reformation by Mark Nelson and Alan Hirsch. Well, I am so excited because to wrap up this series, we are going to have a conversation with Mark Nelson. I'm really excited to get to ask him more about how he sees the role of the artist in the world and the importance of story.
Understanding 'Reframation'
00:01:27
Speaker
I really love from what I already know about the book is both Mark and Alan's perspective of how they're re-looking at things. Yeah, yeah. I wish we were all like enough to have that lens on. You know what I mean?
00:01:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And that goes to the title of the book, which is Reformation. You'll hear me say Reformation probably because I keep slipping into Reformation. And I thought I said it wrong. I thought I was saying it right. No, it is Reformation, which is cool because it's a nod to the Reformation and the idea of
00:02:02
Speaker
changes and shifts that are happening in our culture and in the church today, but also this idea of reframing the story, not telling a different story, but reframing the way that we talk about the story. So I'm really excited to dig into this conversation with Mark. All right. Well, let's get started.
00:02:28
Speaker
Mark Nelson is the executive director of Three Rivers Collaborative in Knoxville, Tennessee, and served as lead pastor for a faith community called Crossings. In 2019, he co-authored Reframation, Seeing God, People, and Mission through Reenchanted Frames with Alan Hirsch. He serves on the boards of Forge Global and Church Partners of the Smokies, as well as serving with 100 Movements Publishing. And I'm so grateful that you are with us today, Mark. Thank you.
00:02:56
Speaker
Thanks for being here. I appreciate the invitation. It's great to meet you and great to have a chat. Can you tell us a little bit about Reformation, why you felt the need to write it, who it was for, what was your impetus for addressing that?
Mark Nelson's Artistic Journey
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I've been in vocational ministry for 36 years or so, and so I've done youth ministry, campus ministry, plan in church, etc., etc.
00:03:24
Speaker
And I didn't grow up with the arts. I didn't grow up thinking that I grew up as a sports guy. That's all I did. I just played, played, played. And then something happened when I got a vocational ministry and I said, oh, there's a side to life that I have missed. I didn't, I wasn't cultured and nurtured by my parents necessarily, wonderful parents, but they just didn't push me that way. But something happened in ministry and it, I think it happened from this idea of understanding that
00:03:53
Speaker
I have felt in 36 years of vocational ministry, I've been called to put new frames around old pictures. That's my calling, regardless of what I've done in ministry. And that is this whole idea. And Frederick Buechner has a quote that kind of led me to this understanding, but when you put a frame around a picture, you don't change the picture, but you change the way that picture is seen. You give it a chance to be seen a third or a fourth or a fifth time.
00:04:22
Speaker
It's the same analogy as the wonderful movie Dead Poets Society, when Robert Williams has them stand on the desk and see the world from a different place. You didn't change the room, but you changed the perspective of it. I believe in ministry, this picture of Jesus is the picture. And I felt a calling, again, Youth Mission Gives Mystery Church Plan didn't matter. What I do now is to put a frame around this picture. So having felt that calling always, regardless of what I've done,
00:04:52
Speaker
Um, it kind of intersected then. And the impetus for the book is I walked the Camino de Santiago in about a decade ago now with my son. And it's a spiritual pilgrimage across Spain. Um, quarter of a million people do it every year. And in walking this pilgrimage, uh, you meet people, you talk, you had your go to, Hey, what do you do for a living? You know, et cetera, et cetera. And I couldn't get people to understand on a spiritual pilgrimage. I couldn't get them to understand what I did as a vocational pastor that.
00:05:22
Speaker
Uh, I give my life to the church. They say, so you're a priest. I said, no, I'm not a priest. Well, what do you do? And I would describe what I do. And they'd say, Oh yeah. So you're a priest. And, and we, we could never connect. And what I felt was here, I am a follower of Jesus with this, this passion to reframe the story of Jesus in a way that people will give it a second and third
Motivation Behind 'Reframation'
00:05:46
Speaker
or fourth look. And I couldn't articulate that.
00:05:49
Speaker
And I'm walking this communal for 30 days. We walked 28 days across Spain and I felt helpless and I felt a crisis of interpretation is what Walter Brueggemann calls it. Well, Alan Hirsch, my co-author in this book, felt the same way based upon his experience in Burning Man and Playa of Nevada. And so it was this crisis of interpretation. We said, what has happened to this wonderful mystery of the gospel?
00:06:17
Speaker
that we kind of give our lives to that we're not able to tell it in a way that's fresh and new. And even though I felt called for 30 years previous to do that. And so this book is a wrestling out of what it means to take on this crisis of interpretation head on and to call out the church, to call out followers of Jesus, to say, we have missed something in our storytelling. We've taken a story.
00:06:46
Speaker
that changes our own lives and changes the world. And what we say is we've been bad stewards. It's not a bad story to tell. It's not a bad picture to show. It's the best story. It's the best picture. So the problem is not the story we have to tell. The problem is our stewardship of the story. And so that was the impetus to write this book and say, how do we do this better? The most creative people in the world should be those that are empowered by spirit beyond our understanding.
00:07:14
Speaker
And yet the least creativity, the least reframing, good reframing is happening by followers of Jesus. Something's got to give there.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the reasons that your book is so helpful is because it is very honest about what the problems are, but also very clear about the questions and the things that we can be addressing. Why are more Christians and people of faith not putting things into that cultural stew to shape that
00:07:51
Speaker
shape the culture that we live in. Another quote from the book that we seem powerless to communicate a story of God and its real potency. And that is it. What is that about? Yeah, I think we drain it. I think the phrase you use, we siphoned out the power of the story of the gospel. It should blow our minds. The analogy we use is Don Everett's analogy, who talked about
00:08:20
Speaker
the difference between tofu and the Warheads candy.
Gospel's Vibrancy and Cultural Impact
00:08:24
Speaker
Yeah. Tofu is, which nothing against tofu, you do use on this, but tofu just absorbs the flavors of whatever it's around. And so it becomes that. That's one way to tell the story of the gospel. But if you've ever had Warheads candy, you realize that when you put that in your mouth, it either is get this out, it's the worst thing I've ever tasted or oh my, I see colors I've never seen before.
00:08:50
Speaker
And the gospel of Jesus, the story that we tell of this resurrected Jesus, it should be warheads. And the church has siphoned it. And I think they've siphoned it because I think we're afraid of what it means to challenge people with such a countercultural message. I think we also want to make it easier.
00:09:13
Speaker
Because if we make it easier, more people will join it, more people join, then we can keep giving them our tofu and our church numbers will grow and we'll keep having a job and that's antithetical to the gospel. And so there's got to be a way to allow that power to come out in a way. And I think the imagination, I think the arts, I think good storytelling is the way to do that. We should not be the worst storytellers in the world. We should be the best storytellers in the world.
00:09:41
Speaker
One of the quotes that I've had for two decades that I finally got to use in this book was the story from Tolbert Fanning and David Lipscomb, where they talk about how Lipscomb always believed that the Bible should be, here's the quote, the Bible keeps men on safe ground and clips the wings of imagination.
00:10:08
Speaker
and we should make the Bible the only and safest teacher of duty to man. And at a funeral for Tolbert Fanning, a eulogy was given for him, who was a mentor of Lipscomb. And here's the quote that is the status of all the men, but I think describes our struggle and our challenge and what you're trying to do with your calling, what I'm trying to do with my calling. He said in a eulogy, and let me remind you, a eulogy is intended to be a good thing about someone.
00:10:38
Speaker
He said he weaved no plume, he waved no plumes, he wreathed no garlands, he was destitute of poetry and barren of imagination. That is just horrific, but that is also what the church has become because somewhere this whole theological idea that we're not supposed to be imagining, we're just supposed to take the scripture literally and allow it. So I'm all about the word of scripture. I rarely would get questioned or pushed on that.
00:11:07
Speaker
But I think the authority of Scripture allows me to be more creative and more imaginative. And that's what we have missed. And that's the hill we're trying to climb in the stories that we're telling. And do you find when you explain that within ministry circles that there's a, yeah, is that the general sense out there at this point? Well, that's really good news. It is. But we don't know how to do it. And because it's been suppressed for so long,
00:11:36
Speaker
Yeah, the church doesn't know how to handle that. I'll tell you the book that one of the it's my favorite. It's it's it is my favorite book. Probably the one that's been most impactful to me was I was at a theater conference probably 2530 years ago. And I wish I could remember who recommended it to me. But someone said read the book. My name is Asher left. I don't know if you familiar with the book by Chaim Potak.
00:12:00
Speaker
It is a book about a young boy named Asher Lev, who's growing up in the 50s in an aesthetic Jewish, Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York. And he has the gift of art. He cannot stop drawing. He cannot think differently. And, and the whole story is this father-son relationship, the son with the church, the son with the, you know, the Jewish school that he's in. How do they take someone with the gift of art and implement that into a faith that doesn't know how to handle art?
00:12:28
Speaker
changed my life. I have multiple copies of myself here in my office that I hand out to anybody that is struggling with this. Those are the type of discussions that we need to have in the church and we're not having them in the church. That's why this challenge is so huge to us.
00:12:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. When you're talking about the power of and, you know, that immediately I'm thinking about improv and yes, and, and, you know, paradox and all these kinds of things. And I think, yeah, I think like if I were in charge of everything, the end result of this, it all adds up to we need to really invest in artists and storytellers and poets and performers. And that it would be good. It would be really good news if that starts to become part of that conversation.
00:13:15
Speaker
It is exciting to hear that people are thinking maybe more deeply about how do we make that happen. We're trying to overcome decades of the artists being marginalized in our churches. And so if they've been on the edges for so long, how do we make a space for them to come back to us? And I understand there's a prophetic edge to the artists, but I also understand that the church is lacking the prophets today.
00:13:40
Speaker
And so we have to provide that space for them to speak those words to us, not just speak those words, but create that art. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really interesting, um, I think that's, that's part of what we're trying to approach through soul makers is understanding, okay, there's this cultural need in the larger culture. There's a need within the church, but at this time where it's past time for, for that to be essential,
00:14:08
Speaker
artists are, in a large part, not equipped to take on that role because they feel insecure about their gift or their right to speak into things theologically or even to know how to do that. Is this going to delegitimize me as an artist? Is it going to delegitimize myself as a Christian? There's just so much
00:14:35
Speaker
fraughtness at this point, but also creating discipleship and spiritual formation pathways that really speak to what does it look like to be prophetic and an imaginative visionary and that kind of what's the responsibility that goes with that. And so that yeah, you're this deeply formed mature person who can have the freedom to create whatever and not be controlled by
00:15:04
Speaker
structures that are limiting from an artistic perspective. Well, I mean, you're speaking prophetically there to pastors when you get us to think about how are we spiritually forming people? Because there are a lot of different ways to spiritually form people. One of them that I think is some of the most ineffective is engineering spiritual formation. If you're a part of our faith community, then do this, and then do this, and then we'll move you from here to here, and we'll move you here to here.
00:15:33
Speaker
I think it can happen. I'm not trying to invalidate that. But what I think we should be about are creating environments for spiritual formation to happen. And that allows a freedom, both artistically, but intellectually too, to say, I'm not going to engineer your spiritual growth. I'm going to create spaces for spiritual formation to happen. Right. And again, churches have fear of doing that, of what that means, because then you're going to end up wrestling with questions you don't want to wrestle with.
00:16:03
Speaker
And the whole point of the faith is not to make it easier. And the whole point of faith and a vocational pastor is not to give you the answers. I was, like I said, I planted a church 15 years ago. Every Sunday, almost every Sunday, I would say, look, if you leave here today after I've taught and you have your questions answered, I will have failed. But if you leave here with more questions and answers, I will consider that a huge success.
00:16:27
Speaker
I am not to be your Bible answer man. All I'm trying to do in my role then as a teacher, preacher, and lead pastor was to have the first word on a subject, not the last word on a subject.
00:16:38
Speaker
That freedom is so powerful. There's so much there that artists can do. I find this, you know, the conversation about what artists who are Christians might look like or what we produce might look like seems to be so limited. And I think it goes back to that justification model of show, you know, that you outline in the book. Yeah, it's a quote this later in the book that this is what you're reminding me of G.K. Chesterton.
00:17:08
Speaker
talked about, quote, I don't deny that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange times in history, it is necessary to have another kind of priest called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. That quote for me, we wanted the rejected titles of the book was another kind of priest, because we we we believe in that. And
00:17:34
Speaker
And who are these priests? They are the poets. They're the visual artists. There's the theatrical artists, et cetera, et cetera. These are the prophets. I look at, some would disagree with me here, but I think the comedians of today are our prophets. I mean, they're speaking words from culture into culture that the church has to seriously consider. And we don't even think about giving them a place to listen, a platform to hear.
00:18:04
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think as I've been doing this work and working with artists for almost 20 years, it's interesting to me that I think I'm getting to a place where I'm seeing that the difficulty is deeper than I expected to free the artist as one of our hashtags.
00:18:27
Speaker
And it depends on what tradition you're from as to what your hang up is. But it does seem that this limited perspective around what story we can tell and how we should be thinking or questioning in the church has kind of really wormed its way into the heads of a lot of Christian artists. So it's not even just a matter of
00:18:54
Speaker
It's not just a matter of churches and church leaders giving permission, it's reorienting artists to trust their own thoughts and instincts and believe that the questions are okay to engage and it's okay that it doesn't answer the question and all that kind of stuff. Even if they know intellectually and they've been saying, give me the freedom, give me the freedom,
00:19:21
Speaker
It's like that caged bird kind of thing. It's very difficult at this point to kind of undo the limitations, even if they're crazy, even the ones who, you know, it's like either it's super integrated and they only do art in church and it's Jesus art, you know, or it's worship art. And there's been a lot of focus and a lot of, we've come a long way with creativity in church in the last 15 years.
00:19:46
Speaker
Or it's, I'm an artist out there and I do all kinds of crazy and amazing things, but it doesn't have anything to do with my spiritual life. And I wouldn't go there for a variety of reasons. Yeah, or the sense that like my most powerful witness is my life as a Christian. But again, it doesn't have anything to do with my work. And you're talking about
00:20:19
Speaker
Well, you know, disrupting and illuminating and inspiring and discomforting and all these things that artists can do. And, and this other kind of priest, what does that look like? Like we don't need artists as preachers. Right. But you suggest these new kinds of priests and prophets. What, what does that, what does that look like? Yeah. I think it looks like.
00:20:47
Speaker
I think it looks like people understanding to follow Jesus is a calling and a mission. And I think it looks like people understanding that nothing should get in the way of that call. No structure, no controlling person over someone else.
00:21:11
Speaker
but that nothing should get way of what you've been called to do. And, you know, it's the story, it's fresh in my head of Mark chapter two and the paralytic being lowered through the roof for Jesus to heal him.
Creative Ministry and Storytelling
00:21:27
Speaker
And they were willing to do anything to get their friend healed, even if that meant climbing a roof, digging a hole, and lowering him down, which I think is one of the most creative acts in all of scripture. They refused to allow the literal structure to get in way of their mission, which was to get their friend healed. If we understand our calling is to, and I think it is,
00:21:56
Speaker
You know, there's a lot of different debates on, not debates, but there's a lot of different answers on, if you ask someone, why did Jesus come into this world? And there's a lot of scriptural answers to seek and say the lost, et cetera, et cetera. All those are good and true. I'm going to answer the question. If you ask them, why did Jesus come into this world? It was to give people a picture of God that they'd never seen or experienced before.
00:22:20
Speaker
And I think that's our calling is to give a picture of God that people have never seen or experienced before. Jesus did that with the Samaritan woman at the well in John chapter four. He did it with Nicodemus in John chapter three. Time and time again, that's what Jesus was doing. And he did it in a way that religious leaders could not understand, could not comprehend, could not make sense of. And yet that's what he did. So for artists, my call is to go, how do you give the world a different picture?
00:22:47
Speaker
of God than they've ever seen or experienced before. And then that takes the form of all the traditional arts. It does take the form of living creatively. It does take the understanding that we are all called to live a story with our lives. And that's what you're talking about. I think it's Charlie Peacock that said years ago, our lives are going to tell a story whether we want them to or not. Right. And that's true. So I'm going to I'm going to be
00:23:21
Speaker
never seen or experienced before. And I think that can be done in any way that you are gifted to do it by God. Right. And so I don't know that answered your question, but that's what we're trying to call people towards. Yeah, I think that that's the core and
00:23:39
Speaker
The freedom that then couldn't come from that is just this multiplicity of creative artifacts and outpourings and innovations and all kinds of things to really focus on that living out that story.
00:23:56
Speaker
And I think that matched with what you talk about in the book around disenchantment and demystification and all of that stuff. I think understanding the level at which that kind of naming that at the level at which that is a part of our culture could be a real clue for artists to understand. Oh, OK, well, that I could I can get in there. Can you talk talk a little bit about what what the problem you know, what's what are we talking about when we're talking about this disenchantment?
00:24:26
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the conflict of the book is when we talk about how we've taken a God that is far wider than I can ever reach or understand, and we've reduced that God down to a napkin. If you can explain my God to me on a napkin, I don't think that's my God because my God is bigger than that, which then has resulted in us reducing the story of Jesus.
00:24:55
Speaker
of the gospel that should be a warhead and not a piece of tofu. And then that has then as a result, reduced our lives. We live far reduced lives. That's the conflict of the book in a way. And the way that we say that and propose that the story has been reduced the way that we call it three ways to make tofu. And that it's this whole idea of we have taken the myth out of the story.
00:25:21
Speaker
Now, when people think of myth, they think of, oh, you mean like a fairy tale, like something that's not true. No, no, no. We define myth as something that is more true than what we can understand. A myth as we define it is something that helps us make sense of a senseless world. We have taken the myth out of the gospel story. We have taken mystery, so we have demystified it.
00:25:44
Speaker
We have taken out wonder and we want a very logical, rational faith. When our faith is not logical, it's not rational. It wouldn't be faith if I can prove it to you. And we've taken that wonder and that mystery out. And mystery doesn't mean that it can't be understood. Mystery means it can be endlessly understood.
00:26:05
Speaker
And that's what we have taken out from the story. And then we call it depoeticizing. We have taken the poetry out. We have become bared of imagination and destitute of poetry. And so those are the three that we focus on early in the book, where we say, we've taken the myth out. We've taken the mystery out. We've taken the poetry out. And then later in the book, in what I would call the crucible of the book is,
00:26:30
Speaker
What if we considered re-mythologizing and re-mystifying and re-poeticizing? And I hope that people read that part regardless of what context they come as part of their calling. If you're a pastor reading that, yeah, you need to be thinking of different ways that you can talk about this and tell the story of God because you've been, it sounds very critical. We have at times all of us told it very poorly. How do we do that? But if you are an artist,
00:26:59
Speaker
Um in whatever art form that may be how do you bring mystery back to the story? How do you bring the myth back? How do you? Uh, how do you use the story of god to make sense of a rather senseless world that we live in and we live in a Incredibly senseless world at times. How do we reinsert the poetry and the emotion? How do we use those as frames? So that's that's the journey we're taking people on in the book is is go. How do we
00:27:30
Speaker
First, acknowledge and recognize the reduction that we have given to God, to His story. And then how do we allow that to become what it was intended to be in the first place? Because our calling as followers of Jesus is to participate in putting the world back together. But putting the world back together does not consist of reducing it.
00:27:50
Speaker
to a pamphlet that I can hand my neighbor. It doesn't also consist of a painting that may be the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. Those are just starting points to enter into a mythology and a mystery and a world of emotion and poetry and imagination that gives the proper space to the story of God.
00:28:13
Speaker
that is about how he puts the world back together through Jesus and how as we as followers of him participate in that same story. That's the challenge that we're trying to nudge people, push people at times, kick people towards as we unpack it in the book.
00:28:30
Speaker
I don't think people in the church today are looking for the easy paint by numbers gospel. I don't. I don't think people today are looking for the tofu type of Jesus. I really believe they're looking for transcendence. I really believe they're looking for the burning bushes all over the world. And we've doused out the burning bushes so that we can just make it easier for people to understand. I say all the time that
00:28:56
Speaker
Most churches, and I think that's fair, most churches are pretty good at exegeting scripture, of taking the word and authority of scripture and explaining it. But we are horrible at exegeting culture. We don't know how to understand the longings of the people that we say we want to tell the story to. I call it a lack of missional anthropology. We don't understand, anthropologically speaking,
00:29:25
Speaker
this mission that we've been called to, this calling that we have of God. And without understanding that, we're going to keep feeding people the same thing we've been feeding them over and over. But when you realize they're looking for something deeper and broader and wider and more mysterious, that causes us then to understand people in a different way and say, look,
00:29:48
Speaker
I'm having the same struggle as you, but I'm searching for the same thing. So can we understand what they really are longing for? What they're really searching for? What they really deep down? What is the German words? Just those rights about it is Zinsuch. We all have this, this longing or D. H. Lawrence has a poem called the humming of unseen harps. He has a line in a poem called that. I think there is a humming in all of us that the church,
00:30:17
Speaker
as a whole, sometimes refuses to recognize because we need to make it easier so we can have more people come. But if we can get a handle, just a finger on the pulse of that humming, we will realize that what they're longing for is not necessarily what we're giving them because we have siphoned it of its power and potency.
00:30:40
Speaker
So how do you think, and you may or may not have an answer to this, but how do you think artists who want to be a part of this, how can we approach our ministry leaders as partners in this? I feel like sometimes there's a little bit of a, it can feel threatening to this open-ended questioning, that kind of stuff.
00:31:08
Speaker
And also, when you're talking about shifting in an institutional culture, that's a huge, huge shift. Yeah, they need to have the conversations. It's very simple, but we're talking about relationships. We're talking about community. We're talking about having a type of conversation where you can say, have you thought about this? Artist, regardless of what it is, but an artist doesn't want to come in and say, here's what we should do at your church. Nobody's going to come into that approach. But artists will go, we'll come in and say, hey,
00:31:38
Speaker
Have you thought about this? I have some questions. And things like, honestly, take something, for example, take My Name Is Ashley Lab, that book, and say, pastor, I'm looking for a small group of people that will read this with me, because I want to think and consider what might be, you know, Reformation would be the same way. That's why the book Reformation has impacted more people through learning communities and sometimes the singular reading of them. Yeah, that's why
00:32:07
Speaker
When we lead learning communities around the book, yes, people read the book, but it's not, it's not a book study. It's, it's, we provide places for people to share art every time we have a learning community or what is a frame that you want to put around this picture of Jesus. And it's, it's a fascinating thing. And these are small groups. This is not content delivery. This is relational.
Relationships for Change in Churches
00:32:29
Speaker
And so I would think any change of institution,
00:32:33
Speaker
comes through these relationships in these communities. And I think you quoted the Avon Illich thing earlier where Avon Illich talked about how do you change the world? And is it through systems? Is it through this? Is it through this? He said, you change the world by telling an alternative story. And so there's a chance that a lot of pastors have these opinions of artists that are this and this and this. Well, tell them an alternative story. Get in a relationship with them. Learn together.
00:33:00
Speaker
Um, that's, that's the practical ways that I would encourage artists to, to, to think about it. And, and there comes that, you know, there's a lot of different ways to say it, but, uh, uh, it's the tipping point, you know, there's this thing about the diffusion of innovation and you've got, you've got early adopters to an idea. You have, I don't know what they all are. Uh, you have the innovators, you have the early adopters, you have the early majority, then you have the late adopters and you have the laggards.
00:33:29
Speaker
You're never going to get the laggards in a church to come around to this idea of the place of art. But you do have conversations with the innovators and the innovators have conversations with the, you know, the early adopters. And at some point you come over that ridge and there was a tipping point where you go, oh, this is a regular part of my faith now.
00:33:48
Speaker
But it does take the time and it also takes the conversations with the right people the innovators and the early adopters who want to wrestle with the questions like that we write about in the book or wrestle with the questions that The Jewish community wrestled with and my name is national lab. So practically speaking I That's where I would start is finding those relationships with people of faith. I
00:34:11
Speaker
I think that's fantastic because it's so doable. And in the midst of those conversations, you relay your heart for the passion you have, for the place of art in my faith. And some pastors don't understand that. And some pastors understand it, but they don't know how to implement it. And that's where those conversations happen. And it's a slow process.
00:34:39
Speaker
And honestly, in some places, it's not going to happen. I'm not telling people to leave churches, but there are some churches that are open to that, and there are some that aren't. And sometimes you have to find those places that are, that are willing to ask the questions, even when we don't have the answers. Because R is a path that takes us down into the depths of those questions. I find much more meaning in those questions than I do in the answers.
00:35:06
Speaker
I think that sounds really good and really invitational. Again, that's so practical, the relational aspect of it, keeping it relational. That really does result in the most lasting foundational kinds of change and growth and that sort of thing. It's good. We all need that community. If you're an artist out there and you feel alone,
00:35:38
Speaker
then let's do something about that. Let's find people, whether it's in person or we no longer have to be face to face, although we all prefer that, but we can be together in community and support each other, encourage each other and organizations and movements that you, like your organization and the movement that you're a part of,
00:36:01
Speaker
that is integral and vital to making places for artists to become aware that they're not alone, that they're not little ash and love shoved to the side of an aesthetic orthodox Judaism, but instead they are people that are given the chance to express themselves in so many different ways. Us working together to support each other and create spaces like you are creating, we need to find those. We need to be a part of those.
00:36:31
Speaker
Well, this is kind of shifting gears, but I did really want to get your thoughts on something because you in the book talk about developing skills for critical thinking and constructive cultural engagement. That's one of the principles for soul makers.
00:36:56
Speaker
I'm just wondering what are some of the things that you think about that are essential or we should be thinking, we should be practicing, we should be developing. You talk about that some in the book and I'm wondering if you would talk about that now. How do we help people develop those skills? Because I think that that is essential.
00:37:18
Speaker
for preparing artists and Christian, anybody to go to be able to connect and engage the world in a way that's really meaningful. To be able to do that from a very deeply mature place is, that's not everybody's ready for that. So how do we get ourselves ready for that? Yeah, I think it's kind of cultivating the ground a bit. There is a phrase that we use in our faith community
00:37:45
Speaker
Uh, all I know is not all there is. And this whole idea, no one, I don't, I've not met anybody yet. That's arrogant enough to say, look, all I know is all there is. There's nothing else. I got nothing else. So, but I believe that, that, um, even though not saying it, we are believers in that sometimes that we're like, look, I've, I've learned this seminary college, my job, whatever. And really all I know is all there is.
00:38:15
Speaker
I think, first of all, you have to cultivate that ground and dig it up and say, you know what? All we know is not all there is. And it goes back to what I mentioned earlier about all we're trying to do is give the first word on the topic, on a subject, on an idea, not the last word, because that last word is not for us to define, but the conversation is for us to have. And so I, like I said, I turned 60 this year.
00:38:44
Speaker
I have learned more in the last 10 years of my life than I did in the first 50 years combined. And as I get older, that's going to be harder. But I want to always be able to say that I want to be able to say I've learned more in the last 10 years than I learned in the previous however many years beforehand. And I think there's maturity that comes when we teach people a way of thinking
00:39:11
Speaker
that says, I want to learn more, but I'm expecting to understand less. I'm not going to read just the authors that I already agree with.
00:39:22
Speaker
I'm not going to look for just some content input. I'm going to look for somebody that pushes me to a whole different place. That means I read people that I don't necessarily always read or that I've been told to run away from. I'm going to understand that when I finished reading that book, and I hope Reformation has been that for people is, and maybe that's one reason why sometimes it's hard to get completely through the book because it's like, wait, these are way too many questions. I can't go anymore.
00:39:50
Speaker
But that's the whole idea is could we push ourselves to learn more, think more, and understand less? Not learn more and think more and come up with more answers, but come up with more questions. I'm sitting in my office here and I look over here and I've got
00:40:06
Speaker
three shelves on a bookshelf that I call my heretic shelf because most people that I know would would call a lot of those authors heretic. But I have learned so much about Jesus and my faith and I've been so spiritually formed. Do I agree with everything in those books? Absolutely not. Right. And I understand this is a slippery slope. I one of the first places that Alan Hirsch and I spoke
00:40:30
Speaker
I won't say which college it was, but we were, we were, uh, the book was being released that week and they had to speak and do a couple of workshops. And we were talking about this idea of questions and learning more and understanding less. And, and also talking about our cultural engagement and the fact that I can learn more from the stories that are told in, in this episodic show or this movie than I can other things. And the person set up and said, well, isn't that a slippery slope?
00:40:58
Speaker
because you're inviting people and maybe they'll fall and never come back. And I said, it is a slippery slope. I'll affirm that in you. But I think it's a much more dangerous slippery slope if we don't encourage them to go there. If we don't encourage them to think critically. If we don't encourage them to go, like, if you just take your pastor's word for interpretation of the scripture without actually reading it yourself,
00:41:28
Speaker
you to do that. And so this type of critical thinking and wrestling around, and you can see examples of it in the scripture. I mean, you look at Paul and Athens, that's the passage everybody wants to talk about from Acts 17 and how Paul and Athens
00:41:46
Speaker
understood the people's dominant stories. He understood the dominant story of what gods with small G were about. He understood the poets of the day. He understood what they were longing for and what they were searching for. He didn't do that without critical thinking. He didn't do that by going, well, let me just come in and give you the gospel of Jesus. He understood that he needed to engage again back to relationship.
00:42:11
Speaker
in a way that gives, that gave himself a hearing with the people because he was willing to wrestle around. And it's fascinating. A couple of times in Acts, Paul never even mentions the name Jesus, but he's teaching the resurrected Jesus. But what Paul did was give the people a view of God, a picture of God that they'd never seen or experienced before. It's really easy to look at the New Testament and see that time and time again. Acts chapter 10 with Peter and Cornelius and the vision he had.
00:42:41
Speaker
And he's called to love people and churches and faith communities and small groups and one-on-one conversations. We need to cultivate that in each other. If we are going to think critically, if we are going to wrestle with these things critically, then we're going to have to cultivate that and give each other a safe space. Not expecting people to come to small group with all the answers, but it's not expecting them to come to small group or to come to church or to be in a conversation.
00:43:07
Speaker
with more questions. That will lead us to think about things and learn more and learn more all the time entering into a mystery that helps us, that propels us to understand less.
00:43:19
Speaker
There's nothing wrong with that, which there'll be plenty of people disagree with me on that, but I would fight for that one. No, that is so hopeful and life-giving. I really appreciate all that you just said. As I was preparing for our conversation, I started realizing more and more, this is
00:43:42
Speaker
really helpful. We talk about calling in three phases of be, make, and do, becoming who you're created to be, making what you're created to make, focusing on developing your skills and gifts and talents, and then doing what you're created to do. That's where this principle is about developing the capacity for critical thinking and developing the fortitude really for courageous action.
00:44:06
Speaker
That is such a huge, that do piece is such a huge one. And I just, going through the book again, I was like, oh, this is a great tool for helping people to get there without necessarily going to seminary or, you know,
00:44:23
Speaker
setting a whole to develop those tools for doing theology really through their work, which is just exactly what you've outlined of asking those questions and asking the question in the context of God's story and saying, okay, how does this play? How does this, this doesn't line up. That feels uncomfortable. Why is that? What's going on there? Like that's theology, but being able to
00:44:50
Speaker
provide a way that's relational and conversational is really helpful. Well, it's understanding too, that the bigger picture of theology and life of faith is not about what we've reduced it to over the years. I have, um, behind me here in my office, a huge window and it's a window from a house I used to live in.
Final Reflections and Insights
00:45:11
Speaker
And this is a four foot by four foot window. I mean, it's old and antique. And as I, this hat, this window is my favorite part of the house that I lived in.
00:45:20
Speaker
I did in this little rural town in Indiana for 10 years. And it was my favorite part of the house because I would look out that window and, and there was a street light and it was a main street of this little town. And especially when it would snow, it was the most gorgeous thing you've ever seen. And we turn off all the lights in the house and stand there and look out that window. And those snowflakes looked as big as my head falling down. It was like my own private Narnia out there. And it was just, it was just gorgeous.
00:45:48
Speaker
Well, one day my kids were playing, my boys were playing and they threw this little soft, this little ball of cushiony, but somehow it cracked this window, just the bottom right-hand corner of the one of the panes, the one of the four panes. And so I would go and I would look at that and every now and then I didn't get it fixed. It didn't need to be fixed, but it just, it was there. And every now and then I would go and look at this window and I would see that crack and I go, Oh, I need to get this. Oh, this is broken.
00:46:15
Speaker
And oh, wow, look, there's a lot of dirt between this green and this window. And, oh, man, there are thousands of dead ladybugs there. I really should get something to remove those. And this is, ah, man, this, this is bad. But this was the same window that I would go to and look out on a snowy morning or a snowy evening and just have my breath taken away. What I realized was there's such a difference between looking at a window and looking through a window.
00:46:44
Speaker
When I look at a window, I see all the bugs. I see the crack. I see what's broken and needs to be fixed. But when I look through, I see a beauty that is beyond my current life. I see a beauty that transcends the dead lady bugs and our calling in the church. And what we've reduced it to is to look at the bugs, look at the cracks, fix your life, do this, get rid of sin. Here's the solution.
00:47:09
Speaker
believe this prayer, write this on a napkin when I'm going, okay, cool. But let me look through this window and understand that I have a God who will excuse me, that is after me, that invites me into a mystery that is far beyond my normal life, that invites me into a story that I get to play a part in. I'm just not a reader of this story. I'm a participant in this story. And however he has gifted me and called me, I'm supposed to live that out. That's what I see when I look through the window.
00:47:39
Speaker
artists, non-artists, followers of Jesus, non-followers of Jesus, if we could give them this view of what the bigger picture is.
00:47:53
Speaker
that sense of longing being met, the humming that is in their heart will find things that reach out to it, that comfort it, that give them purpose and meaning. If we can stop looking at the window and look through the window, I think it changes us. So we're pushing people through this book, through your ministry, through churches that understand
00:48:19
Speaker
them to this bigger picture of God. Stop reducing God to a little pamphlet. Allow God to be God. Allow the story of the gospel to be the story. Again, it's not the story that's the problem. It's our stewardship of the story. We can tell and live better stories. We can tell and live more beautiful stories than we're doing.
00:48:39
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. I just feel like that is such a perfect note to end on because it's such an invitation and it says so much. I'm just so grateful for this conversation and the chance to get to meet you and connect. And I hope it's just the beginning of a conversation. Absolutely. I'm thrilled.
00:49:03
Speaker
Obviously, we could talk about this all day. I feel like we could. Well, thank you so much. Mark, this has just been a great, great conversation, and I really do appreciate it. I appreciate the work that you're doing, and I appreciate the encouragement that you've shared as well. I'm looking forward to being able to share this with all my friends and people that are all the artists that we're connected with. Thank you. I'm grateful for the conversation. I'm grateful for the calling that you're answering your life. This is great stuff.
00:49:33
Speaker
We should all be talking about this all the time. So thank you for the opportunity. Yeah. Thank you.
00:50:01
Speaker
Wow, there is just so much in that conversation. He has so many great thoughts and suggestions and ideas. I just want to go away and process them all. I know. I love his approach. I love the approach that
00:50:16
Speaker
There was a problem in the communication. There was a problem of how maybe the organizations were approaching it and he took the discipline to do the work. He didn't whine and complain or start a blame who type of thing or blame this and that just to really think about it to
00:50:41
Speaker
do the work to write this book with Alan to get it out there just takes a lot of strength and I don't know a lot of faith.
00:50:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it is refreshing to have something that's so constructive and that gives you tools to do something. Yeah, and you learn stuff. Imagine that. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I mean, I can't tell you how meaningful it is, I think, for artists to hear from ministry leaders, from pastors like Mark,
00:51:12
Speaker
that that what we have to offer is valuable. I really do think that that's something that's going to really be a resonate for people and feel really good to hear. I think if artists had spiritual mentorship on a weekly basis, I think that would change a lot of things on how artists work and approach their work.
00:51:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, I really hope that this conversation is healing and encouraging to a lot of people. I'm really grateful that he took that time. Thank you so much for listening to Be Make Do, a Soul Makers podcast. We'd love it if you could like this episode and subscribe and follow the podcast. This has been our first season of Be Make Do and we've taken a quick overview of the call of the artist
00:52:00
Speaker
But we've got so much more coming up for you with more great conversations and concrete ideas and suggestions. And we're going to start with an in-depth look at the wise-hearted ones in Exodus. I cannot wait to get started.
00:52:18
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Be Make Do, a Soul Makers Podcast. Let us know what you think about this episode on Spotify, or leave us a rating review on Apple Podcast. If you'd like to interact or ask us a question, leave us a comment on Instagram at Soul Makers Podcast.
00:52:36
Speaker
be sure to sign up for our exclusive newsletter at soulmakers.org. All links and resources pertaining to this episode can be found in our show notes, including where to find Mark Nelson and Alan Hirsch's book, Reformation. See you next time!