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Christian Community and the Importance of Shelter with Houston Coley
19 Plays2 years ago
In this episode Jon speaks with filmmaker, youtuber, and podcaster, Houston Coley. They chat about his upcoming documentary about L'Abri, a Christian Organization that calls itself "a shelter for honest questions". They also unpack the topic of community, looking at God's role in community, why community forms around artistic projects, and what the digital world means for community.
Houston is a documentary filmmaker, theme park theologian, movie philosopher, and self described "appreciator of beauty". Through his youtube channel he seeks to "cultivate spiritual imagination around art and pop culture". He is also the host of the Art Within Podcast, where they have recently done an entire season on the idea of community in the digital era.
The Art Within Podcast: https://artwithin.substack.com/
Houston Coley Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@houston-coley/featured
Find out more about the L'Abri Documentary: https://www.labridocumentary.com/
Sign up for our newsletter: https://www.artistsoftheway.com/contact.html
Find out more about Godspell: https://www.artistsoftheway.com/godspell.html
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:01
Speaker
And sometimes life is like that, which is nice, but sometimes not.
00:00:06
Speaker
And so I think the film in many ways is us processing, and I think the people on screen processing, what does it mean to have experienced this beautiful, rich picture of the new creation, and yet also have to go back to living your life in normal life?
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello everybody, welcome back to Artists of the Way.
00:00:31
Speaker
I'm John the host.
00:00:32
Speaker
Today I am joined by Houston Coley, who is somebody I discovered through the internet years ago.
00:00:40
Speaker
But Houston is a filmmaker, a YouTuber, which is how I got involved when I was in my YouTube video essayist era.
00:00:51
Speaker
Is it Houston Productions 1 is what?
00:00:52
Speaker
Because I feel like the YouTube channel name changed at some point.
00:00:56
Speaker
Yeah, it used to be.
00:00:57
Speaker
That was my, I named it Houston Productions 1 when I made the channel when I was 11 years old.
00:01:02
Speaker
Then it was like, it was the era when you put a number in your name to like, that was just what you did.
00:01:08
Speaker
And then it was a nice acronym, it was HP1.
00:01:11
Speaker
Now it's just my name, Houston Coley, but a lot of people still know it as Houston Productions.
00:01:16
Speaker
So it's quite a nostalgic thing.
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, awesome.
00:01:20
Speaker
Um,
Life Transitions and Community Seeking
00:01:21
Speaker
you've done some work at the rabbit room, which I think I've mentioned on the podcast before, but it's kind of this creative community organization thing that kind of promotes art and community based out of the Nashville area.
00:01:34
Speaker
Um, and then he's also the creative director of art within, uh, which is a nonprofit that currently has a podcast going, which is super cool, uh, which he co-hosts.
00:01:42
Speaker
If you like this podcast, you're probably going to like that podcast because it talks about a lot of the same art community.
00:01:49
Speaker
A lot of the same kind of jazz and they do it quite well.
00:01:53
Speaker
So how are you doing today?
00:01:56
Speaker
I'm good.
00:01:56
Speaker
Yeah, we it's funny to mention the rabbit room.
00:01:59
Speaker
I can almost see it out my window.
00:02:02
Speaker
Nice.
00:02:02
Speaker
We came back to Nashville last night after having been in Atlanta all summer.
00:02:08
Speaker
And we're going to be here until we go visit my
Exploring Community Through Documentary
00:02:11
Speaker
wife's family in Czech Republic for Christmas for a couple of months, which has kind of been the pattern of our lives in the first few years of our marriage has been we've been
00:02:20
Speaker
back and forth between multiple countries and multiple cities and stuff, kind of looking for some rootedness, but also having all these reasons to be in different places.
00:02:29
Speaker
But whenever we're in Nashville, which we've kind of been trying to be more, we are around the rabbit room a lot, which is a
00:02:37
Speaker
as you mentioned, a lovely faith and arts nonprofit that kind of tries to create community between artists around good, true and beautiful things.
00:02:46
Speaker
So, yeah, we were artists in residence with them for the first half of this year, working on our documentary.
00:02:52
Speaker
And now we're kind of back living, living in the area and being around lovely people.
00:02:57
Speaker
But that's,
00:02:58
Speaker
That's what our podcast has been about.
00:03:00
Speaker
That's what our lives have been about is like searching for some sense of community and rootedness and yeah, embrace of our art around other people.
00:03:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's been a lot of what we've been doing as of late.
00:03:17
Speaker
And that's kind of what our documentary is about as well.
00:03:19
Speaker
So yeah.
00:03:20
Speaker
Yeah, well, that's a great segue into our first conversation topic that I ask everybody.
00:03:27
Speaker
You've mentioned the documentary.
00:03:29
Speaker
What are the things that you're working on right now, including the documentary and maybe outside of it?
00:03:34
Speaker
And what is the documentary for people who aren't subscribed to your YouTube channel like I am and maybe don't know?
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:03:40
Speaker
So the documentary is called A Kingdom of Tea and Strangers.
00:03:43
Speaker
It is a documentary about this place called Labrie Fellowship in England.
00:03:48
Speaker
The original Labrie was founded by Francis Schaeffer in the 1950s, and it's in Switzerland.
00:03:53
Speaker
And that's kind of, I think it's the one that most people are most aware of.
00:03:57
Speaker
It's in the Swiss Alps and these beautiful chalets.
00:04:00
Speaker
And it was kind of founded as a place, especially in the 50s and 60s.
00:04:04
Speaker
You had all these
00:04:06
Speaker
hippies and agnostics and people all over the spectrum kind of trying to figure out what's the meaning of life, how did God let World War II happen, like all kinds of stuff that everyone was processing.
00:04:18
Speaker
And it's kind of in that 60s era of all these like communes and communities are springing up and stuff.
00:04:25
Speaker
And Labrie is not a commune, but it was kind of part of that movement, I guess, a little bit of like very intentional community at the time.
00:04:34
Speaker
But it's kind of outlasted all of the things that sprung up in the 60s and then kind of fell apart.
00:04:38
Speaker
It's still around today.
00:04:39
Speaker
There's nine locations around the world.
00:04:42
Speaker
The biggest one is in England, which is the one where I met my wife, Debbie, who's from Czech Republic, which we met in January of 2020 at Labrie.
00:04:52
Speaker
And then the pandemic happened.
00:04:53
Speaker
And we were separated for a year and a half.
00:04:55
Speaker
And then finally we got back together after a long distance relationship and got married and started making films together.
00:05:02
Speaker
But Labrie is...
00:05:05
Speaker
infamously hard to describe.
00:05:07
Speaker
I often use a metaphor of it.
00:05:10
Speaker
It's a bit like Rivendell in Lord of the Rings.
00:05:12
Speaker
It feels like a place that is made for, especially now, I think spiritually homeless people who have maybe been a little bit disaffected by the church, but still kind of want to seek some relationship with something that
00:05:29
Speaker
to kind of come and rest and recuperate and process and engage with reality and what it means to be human together and then kind of be able to set back out on their journey after a couple months.
00:05:40
Speaker
That's terms at Libri are two months.
Challenges and Philosophies of Filmmaking at Labrie
00:05:43
Speaker
So it's,
00:05:44
Speaker
Yeah, for me, it was a really big part of kind of forming who I am, both as a person and as a Christian and as an artist and also as now someone who's married to someone who I met there.
00:05:59
Speaker
And we kind of felt that we wanted to make a film about it.
00:06:02
Speaker
I think I am especially like...
00:06:06
Speaker
oddly obsessed with, especially in films and documentary kind of things that I make, wanting to capture place on film is a big just obsession of mine for some reason.
00:06:17
Speaker
I think having experienced so many lovely places, I'm just always like, I want to distill this into something, like be able to show it to other people.
00:06:25
Speaker
And Labrie especially,
00:06:27
Speaker
being notoriously hard to explain has always felt like, oh, it'd be cool to make a documentary and people would maybe understand a bit more of what it is.
00:06:37
Speaker
When Labrie, the organization, agreed to let us make the documentary, which is another thing.
00:06:44
Speaker
Some people ask, so how much are they paying you to make the documentary?
00:06:48
Speaker
And I'm like, oh, no, no, they did not want this at all.
00:06:52
Speaker
We had to ask them and they prayed for several months and finally came back to us and said, yeah, like, we'll, we'll let, we trust you to make the documentary.
00:07:01
Speaker
You guys have been around.
00:07:02
Speaker
Debbie, my wife had been coming to Labrie for several years at that point.
00:07:05
Speaker
So they knew her quite well.
00:07:07
Speaker
So they said, we trust you, but the one condition is this can't be a commercial for us.
00:07:12
Speaker
One of the key aspects of Labrie is that they don't advertise.
00:07:15
Speaker
They don't promote themselves.
00:07:16
Speaker
They don't fundraise.
00:07:17
Speaker
They don't recruit people to come.
00:07:20
Speaker
And so, yeah,
00:07:21
Speaker
It's quite a, yeah, you know, that's their testimony, is the fact that after 50 years, Labrie is still around, despite the fact that they don't, you know, do anything to further themselves.
00:07:35
Speaker
And they...
00:07:37
Speaker
they kind of live in this intentional vulnerability that, you know, they believe that if the money stops coming, if the students stop coming, if the workers stop coming, then God doesn't want them to be around anymore and they'll shut down.
00:07:48
Speaker
And that's kind of been their philosophy for a long time.
00:07:52
Speaker
So when they agreed to let us make the film, we were kind of like, yeah, we totally, we don't want to make a commercial either.
00:07:57
Speaker
We have no interest in that.
00:07:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:00
Speaker
But maybe this is something that could explore kind of a way of being that this place embodies and kind of captures, but also that could be embodied elsewhere.
00:08:10
Speaker
And that isn't like, you know, the films about, oh, you should go to LaVrie to solve all your problems, but more a film about this kind of
00:08:18
Speaker
sense of being human together and a vision of community that might kind of re-enchant people, especially with what Christian community can look like.
00:08:26
Speaker
I think I, both my wife and I, you know, have, as many artists do, we've had struggles with church throughout our lives and not quite fit and felt like we fit in our church or felt like we had, you know, exactly the kind of church life that we were hoping for, and yet also have lots of
00:08:45
Speaker
visions and dreams and like high ideals and aspirations for like what the church can and should be and a huge belief in that and so labrie was the first christian community i've ever experienced that was like oh my gosh like this is this is what christian community should be um and yet the difficulty of it i think
00:09:05
Speaker
is that life is not like Labrie.
00:09:08
Speaker
Like life is not, you don't get to live.
00:09:10
Speaker
I didn't even mention the setting.
00:09:11
Speaker
It's this beautiful 16th century Victorian manor house in the English countryside with dozens of different apartments and dorm rooms in it and stuff.
00:09:21
Speaker
And people from all ages and backgrounds and cultures come and stay together in this Victorian manor house for two months.
00:09:27
Speaker
Life's not always like that.
00:09:30
Speaker
Much to our chagrin, it's not always like a beautiful Jane Austen movie where you can walk along the English countryside and have a log rolling in.
00:09:38
Speaker
And sometimes life is like that, which is nice.
00:09:41
Speaker
Sometimes not.
00:09:43
Speaker
And so I think the film in many ways is us processing and I think the people on screen processing.
00:09:51
Speaker
What does it mean to have experienced this beautiful, rich picture of the new creation?
00:09:59
Speaker
and yet also have to go back to living your life in normal life.
00:10:04
Speaker
I sometimes used to use the dichotomy of like, oh, back to the real world.
00:10:07
Speaker
I don't say that anymore.
00:10:08
Speaker
I think Labrie is the real world.
00:10:11
Speaker
In fact, in some ways, maybe places like Labrie encourage you to engage with the reality more than you do in your normal life when there's a lot of things that are dehumanizing you about using your phone all the time and all these things.
00:10:23
Speaker
Like people, you don't use technology at Labrie.
00:10:25
Speaker
That's another thing very often.
00:10:29
Speaker
And so, yeah, the film, the kind of central tension of the film is we're capturing one summer at English Libri and the kind of main characters are all students who were there that term.
00:10:41
Speaker
And all the students are kind of wrestling with what does it mean that the term is about to end and go back to our lives?
00:10:48
Speaker
And, you know, we've had many of them have had kind of a profound experience there and we capture some of that, but also wrestling with with going back.
00:10:56
Speaker
And now we're kind of looking at
00:10:58
Speaker
doing some follow-up interviews with the students in their home countries, which has been another thing.
00:11:03
Speaker
We've done everyone we can in America, but when we go visit my wife's family in Europe in December, hopefully we're going to go to England and Scotland and Norway to visit some of the other students in their lives and kind of be like, so what happened after LaGrie?
00:11:16
Speaker
Like how is that?
00:11:19
Speaker
Has it transformed anything about how you do community, how you engage with being human, other people, art, that sort of thing?
00:11:28
Speaker
So yeah, I can do my tea and strangers.
00:11:30
Speaker
That's, that's the main thing I'm working on.
00:11:32
Speaker
We have a podcast, like you mentioned, I have a YouTube channel that I do videos from time to time, but that's kind of been most of my life this year.
00:11:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool.
00:11:40
Speaker
I'm really excited to watch it.
00:11:42
Speaker
I love the,
00:11:43
Speaker
The idea of, because I feel like at least me working in theater a lot, like there's like this two month span of like, you're together with this group of people like every night and then you do the production.
00:11:54
Speaker
And if it's like an amazing, profound production, it's like this crazy, surreal, transcendent thing.
00:12:03
Speaker
And you do it over and over and over again.
00:12:06
Speaker
And then you close and the next morning you wake up and
00:12:10
Speaker
decide if you're going to go to church or not, because you were up till 2am taking everything down.
00:12:14
Speaker
And it's like, and then Monday comes and it's back to work.
00:12:16
Speaker
And like, like we just recently did Hamlet, which I've talked about on this podcast way too much.
00:12:21
Speaker
But it was like such this surreal thing.
00:12:24
Speaker
And Hamlet died closing night.
00:12:26
Speaker
And it was like, oh, he's really dead.
00:12:27
Speaker
And there was just all these moving emotions.
00:12:30
Speaker
And then I'm back at work in a call center.
00:12:32
Speaker
And it's like, okay, well, that that happened.
00:12:34
Speaker
And now it's just
00:12:36
Speaker
again, like back to day to day, but how does that live on and inform?
00:12:41
Speaker
Does it have a life beyond the moment in the experience?
00:12:45
Speaker
I think that that's a really interesting thing to chew on.
00:12:49
Speaker
I'm doing my chewing hand signals for anybody that's not watching.
00:12:54
Speaker
That's going to be cool.
00:12:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:56
Speaker
As you've been working on that or in taking...
00:13:00
Speaker
art engaging in that community?
00:13:02
Speaker
How do you feel like God's been using art in your life personally right now?
00:13:08
Speaker
That's a good question.
00:13:10
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like... Yeah, I feel like God is always using art in my life.
00:13:17
Speaker
I guess there's a question of whether it's the art that I'm making or the art that I'm watching or
Art, Faith, and Trust in the Creative Process
00:13:23
Speaker
reading.
00:13:23
Speaker
I guess in terms of the art that I'm making, this film in particular has...
00:13:30
Speaker
given me a lot more trust in God and a sense of kind of easygoing, like that he's guiding the process, I guess.
00:13:44
Speaker
When we were making the film at Labrie, we kind of can't, we had raised some money to make the film and to pay for our term there and that sort of thing.
00:13:52
Speaker
And we came in and came at the start of the term and we were kind of like, all right, we need to get going.
00:13:58
Speaker
We need to start filming.
00:13:59
Speaker
We need to capture everything.
00:14:00
Speaker
This is a beautiful place with wonderful people.
00:14:02
Speaker
I'm sure we haven't really met them yet that much, but we're going to start.
00:14:05
Speaker
No, let's go.
00:14:09
Speaker
Very quickly, there was a sense that, oh, we need to gain people's trust before we start just filming everything.
00:14:17
Speaker
Like, oh, oh, yeah.
00:14:19
Speaker
They're not okay with us getting into their business.
00:14:22
Speaker
You're like, hi, I'm going to record your bedroom now.
00:14:25
Speaker
LaBrie is a shelter.
00:14:26
Speaker
That's actually what the word means in French.
00:14:29
Speaker
And so many people come there seeking shelter from some form of like spiritual trauma or the busyness of their lives or big decisions that they're processing through and all sorts of things.
00:14:41
Speaker
And so we were coming in with cameras to that place.
00:14:44
Speaker
It was a very difficult thing to do.
00:14:47
Speaker
And I am fully confident that LaBrie will never let anyone make a documentary about them ever again.
00:14:52
Speaker
because it was such a such a messy process um and we were you know i think very uh desiring to make the most of our time at the start because it's like well we've raised money to be here and time's ticking we need to get some good stuff you know imagine all the things that we're going to be missing if we don't you know film all the time but very quickly kind of the workers at labrie um observed that
00:15:18
Speaker
This wasn't working.
00:15:20
Speaker
I was trying to do this at the start.
00:15:22
Speaker
Wasn't working.
00:15:23
Speaker
And they said, okay, I'm going to, they said, can you guys please take a week, don't film anything?
00:15:29
Speaker
And I was like, all right.
00:15:31
Speaker
I don't know.
00:15:32
Speaker
I don't know.
00:15:33
Speaker
That's a long time.
00:15:34
Speaker
Imagine how many good things we're going to miss.
00:15:37
Speaker
We got to the end of a week and the author said, just take maybe another week.
00:15:42
Speaker
Don't film anything.
00:15:43
Speaker
And we were like, okay, all right.
00:15:46
Speaker
And then we got to the end of that week and the worker said, hey, take one more week.
00:15:50
Speaker
Don't film anything.
00:15:51
Speaker
Just be in community, be yourselves, be human with these other people, be known by them, allow yourselves to know them.
00:16:01
Speaker
And when those three weeks were over, suddenly we were friends with everybody and we were friends outside the context of filming things.
00:16:09
Speaker
We saw each other as just people and they didn't see us as just cameras.
00:16:12
Speaker
They saw us as people who washed dishes with them and did gardening with them and played volleyball and had a bunch of inside jokes and all sorts of things.
00:16:20
Speaker
And so...
00:16:22
Speaker
That was a big thing was like learning to slow down.
00:16:24
Speaker
And I think that has informed a lot of the process.
00:16:28
Speaker
And even like putting people over project was a big thing and something that still challenges me sometimes.
00:16:35
Speaker
There was, we came into this term to film and no one knew that we were gonna be making a documentary.
00:16:41
Speaker
And so our kind of philosophy at the start, very stupidly had been, let's just assume that everyone is okay with being filmed.
00:16:51
Speaker
And if they're not, they can come tell us and we'll work around that.
00:16:55
Speaker
That's fine.
00:16:56
Speaker
And after those three weeks, we were kind of like, oh, no, we need to assume that no one is okay with being filmed.
00:17:02
Speaker
And we need to let them come to us and say, yes, I'm okay with it.
00:17:06
Speaker
And that was a challenging thing.
00:17:08
Speaker
And the thing that was like, oh man, like,
00:17:10
Speaker
You know, even in terms of like filming, you know, Labrie is, the film is about community.
00:17:16
Speaker
And yet when you have several people in the community who don't want to be filmed, that means you can't get the big group shot of everyone, if they're there, like, you know.
00:17:25
Speaker
And so we kind of had to like work through that relationally and figure out, all right, we're going to schedule like this work crew, we're going to film with these people and this sort of thing.
00:17:37
Speaker
It was a very relational thing ultimately and something that caused us to slow down.
00:17:42
Speaker
But ultimately, I think that that shows in the film.
00:17:46
Speaker
I think that people, the people who did want to be in the documentary, which ended up being almost everyone,
00:17:55
Speaker
are very comfortable on screen and very comfortable in their own skin because we knew each other at that point, because it was just like, we'll just, and they like, Labrie also allowed us to show one of our previous films to all the students for a movie night one night.
00:18:09
Speaker
And it was like, people suddenly saw like, oh, this is what you guys make.
00:18:12
Speaker
Like, this is what you wanna do.
00:18:13
Speaker
And so suddenly, oh, people, we're kind of seeing each other and seeing what we want to do and seeing how we can work together to do that.
00:18:20
Speaker
And one of the workers mentioned how he hates being filmed.
00:18:23
Speaker
He hates being on camera.
00:18:25
Speaker
It makes him really uncomfortable.
00:18:26
Speaker
But he saw this as an opportunity to bless other people and that that's why he was going to kind of push himself to do that.
00:18:34
Speaker
And so it ended up being this very like organic kind of process.
00:18:39
Speaker
And even I think you see in the film that like we have a relationship, like the person behind the camera has a relationship with the person in front of the camera.
00:18:49
Speaker
They talk to us from time to time.
00:18:51
Speaker
Sometimes I am almost embarrassed by this at times, but sometimes like someone will say something really funny in the movie in front of the camera and you can see that the camera is shaking because I am also laughing.
00:19:03
Speaker
They have set.
00:19:04
Speaker
I love that.
00:19:06
Speaker
But yeah, so you asked what God has been doing through art in my life.
00:19:12
Speaker
And I think slowing me down and showing me that people matter more and that ultimately that that actually does make the art better.
00:19:19
Speaker
That's a big thing.
Future Projects and Supporting Art
00:19:22
Speaker
And then in the editing process, I think we still, by the time that we finished filming,
00:19:29
Speaker
We kind of walked away and I particularly was like, do we have a story?
00:19:33
Speaker
I don't know.
00:19:34
Speaker
I feel like we captured a bunch of stuff.
00:19:35
Speaker
There's a bunch of good stuff in there, but I also, there's a hundred things I wish we had been able to capture that we hadn't.
00:19:42
Speaker
And is there anything here to make a film out of?
00:19:45
Speaker
But then we spent six months here at the Rabbit Room editing.
00:19:50
Speaker
And the first of several of those months was just transcribing everything that we had, like literally watching through 70 hours of footage and being like, all right, this person says this, this person says this.
00:20:03
Speaker
Now we have a database of keywords and everything that's ever talked about and all this sort of thing.
00:20:08
Speaker
But doing that, suddenly we were like, oh my gosh, like,
00:20:13
Speaker
There are common threads in this film that we did not see at the time.
00:20:16
Speaker
There are motifs that carry throughout everything.
00:20:19
Speaker
There's a motif as we've been editing recently that we just suddenly realized, oh my gosh, like all of these people, the only lecture that we filmed is a lecture about harmony and sort of how music can give us a picture for what community can look like and how to resolve dissonance into harmony and things like that.
00:20:41
Speaker
And even before that lecture had happened in the term, tons of our other interviews somehow have these threads of like talking about harmony and talking about music and talking about sort of how we, other people use the metaphor of like, you know, being in a community is like singing in a choir or being part of a symphony.
00:20:58
Speaker
And that was something that we didn't create and we didn't encourage and we didn't like, you know, do, but looking back, it's a huge theme.
00:21:08
Speaker
And I think even the fact that the workers made us wait several weeks to start actually meant that there was a more compelling tension in the film because we were starting towards the end of the term.
00:21:23
Speaker
And so everyone's already processing leaving and that becomes the dramatic question of the film.
00:21:28
Speaker
And I don't know if it would have been if we'd started it at the beginning.
00:21:32
Speaker
And so...
00:21:34
Speaker
that has just given me more trust, like God's telling the story he wants to tell.
00:21:41
Speaker
One of the things that Labrie does is they, they pray for the people who will come and they, they pray that, you know, God will send the right people and that he'll keep the wrong people away.
00:21:50
Speaker
The people who are supposed to come will be there.
00:21:52
Speaker
And the people who aren't supposed to come won't, you know, and maybe if they're supposed to come another time, that they'll be there at that time, you know?
00:21:58
Speaker
Um,
00:21:59
Speaker
And I remember at the start of term being like, is this, you know, I had been to LaBrie before and had a wonderful group of people.
00:22:08
Speaker
And now all of a sudden you're at the same place again, but with a totally different group of people.
00:22:11
Speaker
And you're like, is this going to be as good of a group as it was the last time I was here?
00:22:16
Speaker
And yet now watching the footage and even having been there, A, many of the people who ended up being in the film and who were there that term ended up becoming some of our best friends.
00:22:25
Speaker
In fact, two of them ended up being in our wedding.
00:22:29
Speaker
But B, I look at the film and I'm like, these are the characters who were meant to be in the film.
00:22:36
Speaker
And God, as they always say at LaBrie, God sent the people of his choice to be there.
00:22:43
Speaker
Not just for our film, not just for all these people to be in a movie, but also for them to be there because they needed to be there at that time.
00:22:50
Speaker
And that also co-existed with what we were doing.
00:22:54
Speaker
So I think, you know, Edith Schaeffer, who was Francis Schaeffer's wife, you know, described
00:23:01
Speaker
Christian life or life in general as a tapestry and that, you know, God is weaving this complex web of relationships and art and beauty and, you know, trust and community together.
00:23:16
Speaker
And that, you know, on the back, it looks all messy.
00:23:19
Speaker
And, you know, on the back of a tapestry, you just see all the loose ends of threads and stuff.
00:23:22
Speaker
But on the front, you see the beautiful image.
00:23:25
Speaker
And I feel like I'm glimpsing a bit of that beautiful image sometimes.
00:23:30
Speaker
And so, yeah, that's what the art that I've been making has showed me.
00:23:35
Speaker
I've also, I feel like God speaks to me through movies that I watch all the time, but that's another thing.
00:23:41
Speaker
That's cool, though.
00:23:42
Speaker
I love the idea or the sense that God is...
00:23:48
Speaker
Well, A, I love the idea that God's like creating with us.
00:23:51
Speaker
And I've talked about that briefly before in like some of my own experiences, but the idea that he's shaping the art.
00:23:58
Speaker
My wife wrote a poetry collection because she'll do poetry.
00:24:02
Speaker
And she had like a very similar experience to what you guys had in the editing room where she just had, our whole table was just filled with these little note cards of poems.
00:24:09
Speaker
And she was like, let's just pull some that have some sort of a common topic.
00:24:14
Speaker
And she put it all together and,
00:24:15
Speaker
And it wasn't until like the week of the release as she was reading this book.
00:24:18
Speaker
And she was like, wow, God like put together like a narrative with like three characters that you can trace and their relationship with God.
00:24:26
Speaker
And there's like an arc to the emotion that she had not planned at all.
00:24:30
Speaker
But it has just this beautiful sort of, it starts in this really despairing place and kind of slowly kind of pulls you up towards hope.
00:24:38
Speaker
And she had not planned any of that.
00:24:40
Speaker
And she was just like, wow, God's like,
00:24:42
Speaker
made this thing almost to minister to me through my own work.
00:24:46
Speaker
And, and, and then the sense of like that unknown piece, that's something that I'm like chewing on a lot this week too.
00:24:55
Speaker
Cause, cause there's some definite areas in my art and in the community that my art is in, where I feel God being like, do this thing.
00:25:04
Speaker
And I'm not going to tell you why, but just do this one action.
00:25:08
Speaker
And, and then I'll give you the next action.
00:25:10
Speaker
And it's like,
00:25:12
Speaker
Again, we're only seeing little bits from behind that tapestry.
00:25:14
Speaker
We don't see the full thing that he's making there.
00:25:17
Speaker
But...
00:25:19
Speaker
just the way that he continues to use art and those moments to form people and bring just the right people like baffles me every time.
00:25:29
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:25:31
Speaker
Hey friends, I hope you're enjoying today's episode.
00:25:33
Speaker
I just wanted to take a second to share with you guys the exciting project that's in the works here at artists of the way.
00:25:39
Speaker
We're going to be staging a production of God spell in 2024.
00:25:43
Speaker
Godspell is a musical based on the Gospel of Matthew.
00:25:45
Speaker
The script is comprised mostly of excerpts from the Gospel of Matthew.
00:25:51
Speaker
And the songs are mostly old hymns or straight scripture, which has been recomposed into kind of a rock musical theater style song.
00:26:00
Speaker
It's a wonderful show.
00:26:01
Speaker
I grew up on it.
00:26:02
Speaker
It's been a passion project of mine to direct for five years, and I'm so excited to tackle it.
00:26:07
Speaker
If you want to know more about that, you can visit our website, artistsoftheway.com, and visit our Godspell page.
Cultivating Community and Lessons Learned
00:26:14
Speaker
There you'll be able to find show details and information on fundraising if you're interested in helping support the production.
00:26:20
Speaker
If you want to stay up to date with everything regarding Godspell or our podcast, sign up for our email newsletter.
00:26:27
Speaker
We have a newsletter that goes out every two weeks.
00:26:29
Speaker
We'll let you know when new episodes are posted.
00:26:31
Speaker
I'll share some thoughts that I've had over the last couple weeks, and we'll be keeping you guys up to date on everything Godspell related.
00:26:38
Speaker
Thanks.
00:26:39
Speaker
Enjoy the rest of the show.
00:26:42
Speaker
So on your podcast and on your YouTube channel over the last couple years, you've talked a lot about cultivating community in the modern era and kind of been unpacking.
00:26:54
Speaker
What does it look like to be in relationship with different people to be in a community?
00:26:59
Speaker
There's not a better word than community.
00:27:01
Speaker
I kept trying to find a way to rephrase it.
00:27:03
Speaker
I was like, community.
00:27:04
Speaker
That's the word.
00:27:06
Speaker
But as you've been pondering that and having discussions about that, working at the Rabbit Room, working at Labrie,
00:27:14
Speaker
Do you feel like there's some, some principles is not quite the word I want to, I want to use, but just, I guess some things that you feel like you've learned about how we do that healthily in our modern era, in an era where community so often like happens through a phone with me typing to other people or getting outraged on, on Twitter and all that.
00:27:37
Speaker
What are some healthy ways you feel like maybe even just in your own life, God has shaped you through,
00:27:43
Speaker
that to create kind of a healthier view of community?
00:27:50
Speaker
It's a good question.
00:27:50
Speaker
It is the question.
00:27:53
Speaker
I feel like I still am processing that and trying to figure out the answer to like, how do you do community well?
00:28:02
Speaker
Because I experienced such a profound picture of community at Labrie.
00:28:09
Speaker
And then I feel like
00:28:12
Speaker
I've just been seeking that ever since, you know, and yet also wrestling with like trying to figure out, again, like I was talking about, what if that is like, this is what, this is something that only Labrie can do because you're living with people for a couple months and that's not what daily life is like, but what are the things that daily life can do and what can that look like and trying to translate that somehow, I think.
00:28:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny to be asked advice on this because I feel like I would like to ask for advice on this.
00:28:44
Speaker
Like, I don't think I'm doing community any better than anybody else, maybe even worse than some people.
00:28:52
Speaker
Like, I...
00:28:54
Speaker
We have had really rich seasons.
00:28:56
Speaker
And this is part of also, you know, our kind of lack of rootedness in the first couple of years of our marriage has been moving around for different reasons.
00:29:03
Speaker
We have some really rich seasons and then some seasons where it's like, man, we're just not seeing anybody, you know, and during those seasons where we're not seeing anybody, I just end up being,
00:29:11
Speaker
spending more time on the internet, you know, than I should probably.
00:29:16
Speaker
And yet also I do have a passion for like trying to figure out how to do community well on the internet too.
00:29:22
Speaker
I would say that I've learned some things.
00:29:23
Speaker
I think especially this year, yeah, there's little things like one of the things about Labrie that I appreciate is that they are not prescriptive.
00:29:32
Speaker
They are not like, here's the template, here's the 10 step program for community.
00:29:37
Speaker
Here's how you do it.
00:29:40
Speaker
It's not a formula and Christian life is not a formula and art is not a formula.
00:29:45
Speaker
It's a relationship and it's something that just has to be worked out in the context of where it is.
00:29:52
Speaker
At the same time, that can be frustrating because like, I want the four, how do you do it?
00:29:57
Speaker
Well, like what's the 10 steps?
00:29:59
Speaker
Where's my steps by step plan in one of the epistles?
00:30:02
Speaker
God, just give me the 10 steps.
00:30:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:05
Speaker
So I think,
00:30:07
Speaker
that's what our film is processing.
00:30:08
Speaker
That's what our podcast is processing.
00:30:13
Speaker
There's a few different episodes of the podcast where we're processing specific things.
00:30:16
Speaker
Like how do you get people to show up to stuff?
00:30:19
Speaker
And how did the Inklings and like Disney Imagineers creatively collaborate so well?
00:30:25
Speaker
And what's the key to that?
00:30:28
Speaker
Like I said, there's not a formula, but also there, I want to be practical about some of these things.
00:30:34
Speaker
Like I want to offer something practical and not just be like, oh, it's this ethereal, you either have it or you don't kind of thing.
00:30:41
Speaker
That's not useful.
00:30:44
Speaker
One thing that I've learned at Labrie and learned through the making of film is the value of side by side community.
00:30:53
Speaker
That's
00:30:54
Speaker
I think often in kind of our daily lives, and this is actually something that a character says in the movie, we sort of, we have a lot of face-to-face community, even like you and me right now, we're talking to each other face-to-face on Zoom and we're sharing our experiences, but I think
00:31:13
Speaker
the relationship between you and me would actually be even more fruitful and real if we were washing dishes together or if we worked on an artistic project together or if we needed to do gardening together or something.
00:31:29
Speaker
And so even when like my wife and I invite people over for dinner, and that's another thing that we've especially post kind of Labrie,
00:31:37
Speaker
tried to do and make a rhythm of our lives is like hosting people for dinner.
00:31:41
Speaker
Frequently, we've tried to make it into a weekly thing like Friday nights, we have people over for dinner.
00:31:47
Speaker
When we do that, we don't say, here's, all right, we've made the beautiful meal, come enjoy it.
00:31:53
Speaker
We say, all right, we're cooking at six.
00:31:55
Speaker
Whoever can get here at six, come help us cook.
00:31:57
Speaker
And then at seven, we'll eat when the meal is done.
00:32:00
Speaker
And because of that, we end up having really rich, beautiful conversations with people as we're cutting kale together and, you know, making the bread and all this sort of stuff.
00:32:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:32:11
Speaker
That's a direct result of like Labrie having influenced us because so much of Labrie is you end up, I fell in love with my wife as I was grating cheese next to her.
00:32:21
Speaker
So it's stuff like that, that creates an environment for more like,
00:32:28
Speaker
I think it puts people at ease.
00:32:29
Speaker
It allows you to rest and it allows you to see them in a context that's not just them like presenting themselves to you and their opinions and experiences.
00:32:39
Speaker
It's being human together.
00:32:41
Speaker
By the same token, like experiencing art together, I think is a really valuable thing.
00:32:45
Speaker
I love going to see movies with people.
00:32:47
Speaker
I love, I mean, a big, in my life particularly, like showing movies to other people and inviting people over to watch movies is a big part of my,
00:32:57
Speaker
rhythm of community and stuff.
00:32:59
Speaker
Like we've watched the Indian movie RRR 11 times because we just constantly are like, oh, here's a new person who hasn't seen it.
00:33:08
Speaker
Come over, let's watch it together.
00:33:09
Speaker
And it's just such a fun experience to watch together.
00:33:11
Speaker
And then that creates a shared bond.
00:33:13
Speaker
We're actually talking about getting a matching tattoo of RRR with a friend of ours when we first showed the movie to.
00:33:22
Speaker
Stuff like that, that kind of creates a bond as well.
00:33:27
Speaker
And then I guess like consistency is, as I was talking about, like we try to do like dinners once a week, the same night every week to kind of create a consistent rhythm of that rather than just being like, here's a sporadic kind of we're doing that.
00:33:41
Speaker
You know, if you look at J.R.R.
00:33:42
Speaker
Tolkien and C.S.
00:33:43
Speaker
Lewis, like in the Inklings, they would meet at the Eagle and Child pub the same night every single week.
00:33:48
Speaker
And they always knew that if, you know, as they're working on their writing that week, they can come share it with their buddies at the pub that night.
00:33:56
Speaker
and were kind of even expected to have something to share.
00:33:59
Speaker
Like, what have you been writing this week?
00:34:01
Speaker
And so that helps their art and it also helped their relationship to just have a consistent rhythm that they could stick to and then kind of rest into rather than trying to always create the next thing.
00:34:12
Speaker
And by that token of the dinners as well, I think,
00:34:16
Speaker
it's in a book about LaBrie called By Demonstration God.
00:34:19
Speaker
One of the workers, former workers named Wade Bradshaw, says something along the lines of, and I repeat this so often because I think it's so good.
00:34:27
Speaker
He says something like, at LaBrie, as we invite people into our homes for dinner, our job is not to entertain you.
00:34:37
Speaker
We're not trying to put on a show.
00:34:39
Speaker
What we're doing and what we believe Christ would do is to just invite you and include you in what we're already doing.
00:34:49
Speaker
And that's been a big thing as well for me is like as we talk about creating community, you know, I think only God can create community.
00:35:01
Speaker
you can't generate it from scratch.
00:35:03
Speaker
And if your goal, this is something that Labrie workers have said to me and said to us in interviews, and I still go, man, that's hard to hear.
00:35:13
Speaker
Because we talk about like, oh, the film's about community.
00:35:16
Speaker
But many workers have said to us at Labrie,
00:35:21
Speaker
If you go into creating community, just saying, I want to create community, that's my goal.
00:35:27
Speaker
It's not gonna work because community is so much, A, like the workers would say, you need to be just like, and I still find this so ethereal when they say it.
00:35:38
Speaker
I'm just like, I wish that it was more like practical, but they say, they're often talking about how like Labrie,
00:35:46
Speaker
is as rich and beautiful as it is, not because it's trying to create community, but because it's just trying to demonstrate the reality of God and Christ.
00:35:57
Speaker
And that they're just, they're trying to follow Jesus.
00:35:59
Speaker
Like that's what Labrie is.
00:36:01
Speaker
And so even when Francis and Edith Schaeffer founded Labrie, their
00:36:06
Speaker
goal wasn't to create a community it was just to invite people into what they were doing and to you know create a space for people to wrestle with stuff that they were wrestling with and meet that need of of love that they could meet and then it kind of became a community out of that um yeah that's hard for me to hear because i'm just like i want to create community you know and i don't think it's bad to want that
00:36:29
Speaker
Um, but there also has to be a basis of some kind of love and pursuit of the transcendent underneath that.
00:36:38
Speaker
I think it can't just be, we get together cause we get together and that's what we, that's what getting together is what you, is what you do.
00:36:48
Speaker
Like, no, like it, it,
00:36:51
Speaker
Yeah, I don't even fully know how to articulate what it should be.
00:36:55
Speaker
Right.
00:36:55
Speaker
Because it's so hard.
00:36:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:58
Speaker
And I wonder if that's why so often, at least for me, I've seen some of the strongest communities, like they're built out of
00:37:08
Speaker
like things that don't seemingly promote community.
00:37:11
Speaker
Like all my close friends I've met doing a play and then it's grown out of that.
00:37:16
Speaker
And we're all just coming together, working on this thing or like doing martial arts or making a film or making music.
00:37:24
Speaker
It like, it starts from the love of the thing.
00:37:27
Speaker
And yeah,
00:37:28
Speaker
The pursuit of creating and capturing truth in that thing, which ultimately could be some kind of pursuit of that transcendent and God through that, even if they don't know it.
00:37:37
Speaker
But then it's like people coming alongside in this journey.
00:37:41
Speaker
And it just happens in a sort of mysterious way that we Western world hate to not be able to quantify.
00:37:51
Speaker
But yeah, that's cool.
00:37:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:37:55
Speaker
I wish I had more of a concrete answer, but these are some of the things that I've been processing and wrestling with for most of my life the past few years.
00:38:05
Speaker
Yeah, and I do feel like it is one of those things where it is just kind of mysterious.
00:38:13
Speaker
And I
Philosophy of Community Building
00:38:14
Speaker
think especially in America and post-enlightenment and whatever, we want to have the textbook of how to do it.
00:38:21
Speaker
at least I know I do when I was like 15 I remember being like I'm gonna search the bible for like the the method on how to like get a get a relationship and get married and I'm gonna like figure that all out and figure out how do you make art and the buy and it was just not there it was just like oh it's just kind of there's a couple principles but this doesn't like help me do like do the thing so I feel like
00:38:45
Speaker
maybe even just being open to, again, that idea of God leading us into the unknown and the fact that, like, he made community, and that's a good thing that he wants for us.
00:38:59
Speaker
And there will be seasons where that's stronger and seasons where that's less strong because that's life.
00:39:04
Speaker
But the idea of just as we live our life with God in the mystery of his life,
00:39:12
Speaker
sovereignty or forming the world or forming us and engaging with us.
00:39:18
Speaker
Like he'll promote that and foster that and create, like he creates the spaces and puts us into those spaces and brings us to the right people at the right time, which makes it less in our control, which is a little more scary.
00:39:35
Speaker
But yeah,
00:39:38
Speaker
definitely makes it not like a satisfying answer because again, it's that kind of nebulous ethereal thing.
00:39:44
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like there are ways that we do it wrong in the Western that I think can be corrected.
00:39:57
Speaker
And that's the closest to something practical that I can say.
00:40:02
Speaker
And maybe a lot of those ways are
00:40:04
Speaker
the way that we think we can create a program for a community.
00:40:09
Speaker
We create like, oh, this is the step-by-step kind of, especially in church, I think we do that sometimes.
00:40:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:17
Speaker
Small groups.
00:40:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:18
Speaker
And there's nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing wrong with small groups, but like,
00:40:24
Speaker
yeah i i still see so much of that especially in western church i see so much of that instinct to entertain and the instinct to put on a show to create a spectacle to create a um yeah to to to perform um rather than simply to to include and to just kind of rest into that um
00:40:49
Speaker
And I guess, ironically, one of the more fruitful forms of community that I've had in recent months
Digital Community and Online Engagement
00:40:57
Speaker
has been trying to engage the digital space.
00:41:04
Speaker
I used to think that the internet and technology and social media was like a neutral tool and you could use it for good or for bad.
00:41:12
Speaker
Now I'm like, no, no, it's rigged for bad.
00:41:14
Speaker
It's algorithmically rigged for the bad.
00:41:17
Speaker
You have to fight to use it for good.
00:41:20
Speaker
And I find that a worthwhile fight, especially having been on the internet as long as I have since I was 11, started my YouTube channel and
00:41:28
Speaker
having a lot of relationships and friends that I've made through that and collaborations and projects and all sorts of things.
00:41:35
Speaker
Um,
00:41:37
Speaker
that that's become a big part of my life.
00:41:39
Speaker
I don't blame anyone for not being on the internet.
00:41:41
Speaker
In fact, if you're not good for you, continue that please.
00:41:45
Speaker
But I find it a very important space to engage for me at least because I'm like, this is the language that I speak.
00:41:52
Speaker
And so I should engage the people who speak that language and try to help them find space to process things.
00:41:59
Speaker
And so as I, when I came back from Dream,
00:42:03
Speaker
I have been doing kind of video essays on my YouTube channel, like you were talking about Nerdwriter and stuff for a long time.
00:42:08
Speaker
And they were fine.
00:42:10
Speaker
Like I think some of them are still among some of my favorite videos that I've made about Into the Spider-Verse and Kung Fu Panda, theme park design and all different things.
00:42:20
Speaker
But many of them felt like things that anybody could make.
00:42:24
Speaker
Like it felt like this, you know, anybody could talk about why Into the Spider-Verse is a great movie, you know?
00:42:30
Speaker
It's a great movie, obviously.
00:42:31
Speaker
Because it's awesome.
00:42:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:34
Speaker
And I came back from LaBrie and I was like, man, I want to kind of make the things that only I could make.
00:42:39
Speaker
The things that might not gain me a lot of views in the algorithm, but would make me more satisfied that I'm doing something only I could do.
00:42:48
Speaker
And ultimately, I think that that will... I saw this with some other YouTubers.
00:42:54
Speaker
The YouTubers who were making the things that... If they weren't around to make that,
00:43:00
Speaker
then it wouldn't get made.
00:43:02
Speaker
Those were the people with like the most passionate fan bases.
00:43:06
Speaker
Because the people who watched their videos were very, they could see that like, if they're not doing this, no one is, you know?
00:43:12
Speaker
The stuff that I've been making kind of pre-pandemic was good, but I think it was, if I didn't make it, someone else would make a video about why it's the spider versus gray.
00:43:21
Speaker
And they did, then many people did, right?
00:43:24
Speaker
After I came back from Labrie, I started making a lot more videos about,
00:43:30
Speaker
like talking on the edges of faith and the bible and spirituality i talked more about theme parks and spirituality which is a weird niche thing that i'm obsessed with i talked about the last jedi and the bible i talked about why bible movies should be better and more colorful um random kind of niche things that i was like i'm probably the only person who thinks about this
00:43:53
Speaker
And suddenly I got all these comments and people being like, thank you for talking about this.
00:43:57
Speaker
I am also someone who, you know, I was raised Christian.
00:44:01
Speaker
I'm not anymore.
00:44:02
Speaker
But the way that you talked about it was really interesting.
00:44:04
Speaker
And it made me want to kind of engage with it again.
00:44:07
Speaker
I am Christian, but I feel like there's no spaces to talk about this online.
00:44:11
Speaker
I don't know how I feel, but I'm glad that you're creating a space to talk about these kind of things because I think it's interesting.
00:44:16
Speaker
And I really like your passion for talking about it and not preaching it at me, but just like talking about it because you're passionate about it.
00:44:23
Speaker
Um, and suddenly, so like, I felt like, oh, here's all these like same as Labrie, like spiritually homeless people who are going about their days on the internet, but don't have any space to engage with these things.
00:44:36
Speaker
Um, and I, my job is not to preach to them or create a program to engage, but simply to be who I am and to talk about the things that I love to talk about.
00:44:46
Speaker
And that, you know, it's the same kind of, and just include them in that conversation.
00:44:51
Speaker
Um,
00:44:52
Speaker
As I've done that, and I've really tried to engage my Patreon a lot this year as well, it's grown a lot.
00:45:00
Speaker
My channel has not grown.
00:45:01
Speaker
I think it's, if anything, my channel has actually lost subscribers more in the last couple of years than it's gained them, which is fine.
00:45:09
Speaker
I'm like, you know, I'm making the stuff I want to make and gaining the audience that I want to gain.
00:45:14
Speaker
Who cares about that?
00:45:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:17
Speaker
And I had a lot of subscribers from the before times who, you know, like the stuff that I was doing back then.
00:45:23
Speaker
And that's fine, but don't, don't love all the stuff that I'm doing now.
00:45:25
Speaker
And I don't think my stuff has changed drastically.
00:45:28
Speaker
It's just that I sort of talk a bit more personally about some, some things that I didn't used to.
00:45:35
Speaker
But now, like, I love my Patreon.
00:45:39
Speaker
It's so great.
00:45:41
Speaker
It's really grown in the past few months.
00:45:43
Speaker
And a lot of the people, those people who were commenting on the videos when I first started talking about that stuff, have now become patrons.
00:45:49
Speaker
And we have really cool discussions about life and theology and, you know, their experiences in the church and art and movies and the general stuff that we talk about that's completely apart from that.
00:46:02
Speaker
But, you know, yeah.
00:46:05
Speaker
And that's been really lovely to just like be able to include people in that.
00:46:10
Speaker
Not to believe that online digital community is a replacement for physical community because it's not.
00:46:18
Speaker
I try to encourage that in my videos and be like, I don't think, you know, community cannot be as good online as it is in real life.
00:46:26
Speaker
But still believing that like this is a space worth engaging and
00:46:31
Speaker
People do spend a lot of time on the internet.
00:46:34
Speaker
So there should be, I want to engage it well.
00:46:38
Speaker
And even figure out how to engage it well with others and figure out like, how do we use this without giving into like algorithms and attention economy kind of things.
00:46:47
Speaker
And that's sometimes what we process in those videos.
00:46:50
Speaker
And I try to make the videos more of a discussion, more of a inviting people to speak into it in the comments and get so many lovely comments from people writing long paragraphs of their experiences and things.
00:47:02
Speaker
So I don't know if that is maybe a little bit helpful.
00:47:05
Speaker
I, yeah, I feel like I've in recent months seen internet community being a beautiful thing and even around the podcast as well.
00:47:17
Speaker
It's not perfect and it still is influenced by all these outside factors.
00:47:25
Speaker
it can be good.
00:47:26
Speaker
And I think it can be, it can start to be good, especially when you stop trying to please algorithms and you start doing the thing that you feel called to do and including people in that.
00:47:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:45
Speaker
So.
00:47:46
Speaker
No, that's cool.
00:47:47
Speaker
And I think that's encouraging to hear because I, I, I feel like
00:47:52
Speaker
I was talking about this to somebody.
00:47:53
Speaker
I don't remember who.
00:47:54
Speaker
It might have been on the podcast.
00:47:55
Speaker
But I feel like living out the life of an artist in the 21st century almost guarantees that you have to be online in some sense.
00:48:03
Speaker
Like it's so much harder to just like exist in a physical space as an artist.
00:48:09
Speaker
You have to like almost be a marketer and like learn all these different skills that an artist historically wouldn't have had because we had like
00:48:22
Speaker
benefactors and and the church and all that sponsoring that so i feel like a lot of times at least i've seen this like in myself i've seen the draw towards it as i've been doing this podcast and um i'm trying to stage a production myself next year and so i'm very much in like gotta earn the money so that i can like get that thing off the ground mode
00:48:45
Speaker
But then I think it's so easy to slip into that negative people are numbers.
00:48:49
Speaker
I'm trying to get the algorithm to work with me so that I can achieve this thing.
00:48:54
Speaker
But knowing that there is actually a healthy way to engage that, and it might even be more fruitful long-term for you than playing with the algorithm and doing that thing and being a part of that system.
00:49:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:13
Speaker
But when you kind of take the time to engage with community in a healthy, humble way, in a way that God probably intends community to be, at least as much as it can be online.
00:49:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:28
Speaker
Like, I think even just the fact that you can do that.
00:49:31
Speaker
Like, for me, I'm like, what does that, like, even look like?
00:49:34
Speaker
Because I've never had, like, super healthy online community.
00:49:38
Speaker
And I tend to not be...
00:49:41
Speaker
quite as involved.
00:49:41
Speaker
I'm very much like that ghost watcher that like watches things and once every five years will comment something.
00:49:47
Speaker
So, but the times that I do like engage, it's like, oh, and I started an argument and we're going to back off, you know?
00:49:57
Speaker
So I just think it's encouraging that there are people out there and that there is space for
00:50:03
Speaker
community that can healthily walk through things and think through things in the digital space that isn't all influenced by this algorithm outrage, you know, make money kind of system.
00:50:15
Speaker
So yeah, that's cool.
00:50:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:18
Speaker
I feel like it, uh, maybe part of the lesson is like, I I've made a lot of connections through something like Twitter.
00:50:28
Speaker
Uh, but
00:50:30
Speaker
Twitter is not a space for community.
00:50:32
Speaker
Neither is Instagram.
00:50:33
Speaker
Like the best community that I've had has been on Patreon.
00:50:37
Speaker
I think in part because it is...
00:50:39
Speaker
a somewhat exclusive thing.
00:50:42
Speaker
Like, I hate to say like, oh, you know, you need to pay a dollar a month to get community.
00:50:49
Speaker
But at the same time, that like low bar creates a threshold for like, all right, you actually care.
00:50:55
Speaker
Right.
00:50:56
Speaker
Because like Bill off the street can't come in and be like, I'm just going to spam about how I hate this because they're not going to want to pay a dollar a month for that.
00:51:04
Speaker
Exactly.
00:51:04
Speaker
And you're not worried about someone quote tweeting what you said, because everything that you're saying is public.
00:51:10
Speaker
Like it's a more slightly private circle.
00:51:15
Speaker
There's a little bit more intimacy.
00:51:16
Speaker
And so it's existing outside of, you know, as we talked about algorithms and feeds and public kind of behavior and more in sort of a private public digital space.
00:51:28
Speaker
Even YouTube comments, I think have become that recently.
00:51:31
Speaker
I mean, YouTube comments can still be awful.
00:51:34
Speaker
But I, at least my YouTube comments, I'm just like, oh my gosh, like is YouTube?
00:51:40
Speaker
It's not.
00:51:40
Speaker
I was going to say, is YouTube the most healthy social media platform now?
00:51:45
Speaker
It's not.
00:51:46
Speaker
It still has awful things.
00:51:48
Speaker
But I actually think that YouTube might at least have the capacity to be more of a healthy social media platform than Twitter.
00:51:55
Speaker
Because you can type a comment
Digital Space Renewal and Resources
00:51:57
Speaker
on YouTube and it can be any length.
00:52:00
Speaker
There's no character limit.
00:52:01
Speaker
And so I get lots of long comments of people really saying what they want to say rather than a trimmed down version of it.
00:52:07
Speaker
And then someone replies to them and says a long thing.
00:52:11
Speaker
And there can be awful arguments in YouTube comments, but mine at least tend to try to create a space where that's not.
00:52:18
Speaker
a little bit more respectful.
00:52:21
Speaker
And like the fact that YouTube is public, but like no one follows each other, like commenters don't follow each other on YouTube.
00:52:28
Speaker
So it's not like you like quote tweet what someone said and mock them and block them and stuff.
00:52:33
Speaker
It is still a little bit more anonymous, which is actually...
00:52:37
Speaker
helpful in some ways.
00:52:39
Speaker
And I feel like it almost in a digital sense could reflect that idea of place, right?
00:52:44
Speaker
Like you have to go to the video or go to the channel.
00:52:47
Speaker
Exactly.
00:52:47
Speaker
That's where that all happens.
00:52:49
Speaker
It doesn't just happen in this long term.
00:52:50
Speaker
And you have common ground.
00:52:51
Speaker
You have common ground because you're both talking about the video that is at the top of the page, like rather than on Twitter where anybody can jump in from anywhere and... Let's talk about this president, blah, blah, blah.
00:53:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:05
Speaker
He's a president here.
00:53:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:06
Speaker
So YouTube is still has so many powerful traits and attributes and things, especially now.
00:53:13
Speaker
But I think I still have a lot of belief that it can be good.
00:53:18
Speaker
And as a broader rule, I think that and Patreon have shown me that like these sort of.
00:53:25
Speaker
Yeah, when you when you create digital community kind of away from the limelight a little bit and.
00:53:34
Speaker
more around common ground, more around a common thing that you have to talk about together.
00:53:40
Speaker
It can encourage a little bit more intimacy and relationship, which is good, I think.
00:53:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:46
Speaker
Something I love about that too is it's not, I think it was around COVID probably because COVID was crazy, but you started like seeing all these like alternative platforms, you know, that were like, oh, we're going to do Facebook, but we're going to do it good.
00:53:58
Speaker
Or we're going to get rid of the censorship or we're going to do it healthy.
00:54:01
Speaker
And then you get on and you're like, I don't know anybody.
00:54:03
Speaker
There's three people.
00:54:06
Speaker
But I love that that is happening and that you're engaging with that and people are engaging with that.
00:54:13
Speaker
in the marketplace of today.
00:54:15
Speaker
Like it's, it's in the, like the public forum, you know, it's not, oh, we're going to make our little Christian circle here where our community is going to be healthy, but it's going to be its own website because we don't want the Facebook people or the Twitter people here.
00:54:30
Speaker
But, but it's just happening where people already are because some people care about it and some people are, are
00:54:41
Speaker
like pouring into that.
00:54:44
Speaker
Um, I think that's cool.
00:54:46
Speaker
I think just even from like a theological perspective, like that's cool to see, I guess, God redeeming that it's not like God is destroying it and making something completely different, but like that, that renewal thing that he's always doing in us and in the world.
00:55:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:04
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:55:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:06
Speaker
That's good.
00:55:07
Speaker
Cool.
00:55:08
Speaker
This has been lovely.
00:55:10
Speaker
We are getting near an hour, so I'm going to ask my final question.
00:55:14
Speaker
You know, I have like eight questions left, so I'll have to ask those some other time.
00:55:20
Speaker
But something I'm always trying to do is promote resources, because as I grew up, I was like, I don't know how to do any of these arts things, and I was trying to figure out that, and I've had this weird dual call to ministry and art, and I was like, I don't know how to navigate any of this, and
00:55:37
Speaker
I think there's been a lot of resources over time that I just didn't know about.
00:55:42
Speaker
So I always want to create some room for people to find a new thing to help them kind of grow.
00:55:46
Speaker
So if you were to recommend some resources either for people to like grow in their faith and kind of deepen their walk with Christ or their relationship with him or grow as artists or grow as both, what are a couple of resources you'd recommend there?
00:56:03
Speaker
Well, yeah, mind immediately goes first to the rabbit room, which I think you said you've mentioned sometimes on the podcast.
00:56:10
Speaker
They are dear friends.
00:56:13
Speaker
One of the people who works kind of prominently at the rabbit room now was a library worker who was there.
00:56:19
Speaker
working at Labrie at the time that we were falling in love when Debbie and I met.
00:56:25
Speaker
And so that was kind of how we eventually kind of got into relationship with a lot of the people at the Rabbit Room was because we knew him and then he started working for them and then all this kind of stuff became artists in residence.
00:56:36
Speaker
The Rabbit Room was founded by Andrew Peterson, who is a
00:56:39
Speaker
Christian singer songwriter, he wrote a fantasy series called the Wing Feather Saga.
00:56:44
Speaker
And his brother, Pete Peterson, who's also a dear friend, who is a playwright who goes under the pen name A.S.
00:56:49
Speaker
Peterson.
00:56:51
Speaker
I guess it's not a pen name, it's his real name.
00:56:53
Speaker
Just abbreviated.
00:56:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:57
Speaker
And he just recently produced The Hiding Place stage play, which then was released in theaters as a movie this past summer.
00:57:05
Speaker
The Rabbit Room is great.
00:57:06
Speaker
They are when I discovered them during COVID, I was so
00:57:11
Speaker
momentously encouraged by their presence because they are engaging both the digital and physical space so well, creating community again.
00:57:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:26
Speaker
For, for Christian artists and trying to, yeah, create spaces that allow people to, to engage the good, the true and the beautiful together.
00:57:37
Speaker
They are good.
00:57:38
Speaker
They are curators, I think of like good,
00:57:41
Speaker
art and really appreciate good art, not bad Christian art and have a strong desire for it to be good.
00:57:50
Speaker
Lovers of the Inklings and Tolkien and Lewis.
00:57:53
Speaker
It's called the Rabbit Room because that was the name of the room in the Eagle and Child pub where Tolkien and Lewis would meet.
00:58:01
Speaker
And just very thoughtful, nuanced, rich people who appreciate beauty well.
00:58:09
Speaker
The website is great.
00:58:10
Speaker
They have a great blog.
00:58:12
Speaker
They have a lot of podcasts that are lovely.
00:58:15
Speaker
I write for their blog sometimes.
00:58:17
Speaker
They do a lot of different articles about pop culture and music and yeah, all sorts of wonderful things.
00:58:23
Speaker
And then they have a conference once a year called Hutchmoot, which is in Nashville.
00:58:28
Speaker
And then they have one in the UK and it's a...
00:58:31
Speaker
beautiful gathering of people to kind of celebrate art and faith together.
00:58:38
Speaker
We actually just showed an hour of our documentary at Hutchmoot two weeks ago here in Nashville, which was lovely and wonderful and exactly the audience that was primed to love it.
00:58:49
Speaker
So that was a beautiful experience.
00:58:52
Speaker
And even just having people experience and like see our art, that was only the second time that we'd ever shown our art to a room of people.
00:58:59
Speaker
Like it was just a cool thing.
00:59:02
Speaker
So the rabbit room is lovely and wonderful and the people are so genuine and really care about all the things that we're talking about.
00:59:09
Speaker
I think also in terms of just faith, I would say like the Bible project is huge for me.
00:59:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:16
Speaker
Their podcasts are great.
00:59:18
Speaker
They have a YouTube channel.
00:59:19
Speaker
I'm sure many of you have heard of it.
00:59:20
Speaker
They have animated videos.
00:59:22
Speaker
I think that the Bible is best expressed through the medium of animation.
00:59:26
Speaker
I think that animation can express the abstract and the kind of synthesize imagery in a way that live action can't always.
00:59:36
Speaker
And so...
00:59:37
Speaker
Their videos are lovely and wonderful and so well-researched and culturally thoughtful and engaging all these different contextual aspects of the ancient text and depicting it beautifully.
00:59:48
Speaker
So that's great.
00:59:50
Speaker
And then I would hope that the stuff that I'm doing might be a resource as well.
00:59:54
Speaker
So the podcast is called The Art Within Podcast.
00:59:56
Speaker
We've done a whole season kind of engaging a lot of the things that we talked about today.
01:00:01
Speaker
And then also we're doing a second season soon where we hope to have a lot of different guests on, which is going to be exciting.
01:00:08
Speaker
So that's been a fun kind of journey.
01:00:10
Speaker
We have a sub stack.
01:00:12
Speaker
It's on Spotify and iTunes and all that stuff under the Art Within podcast.
01:00:18
Speaker
But then we also have a sub stack that you can subscribe to called artwithin.substack.com where I think the most recent article
01:00:26
Speaker
is a reading library that we did for like season one of the podcast.
01:00:31
Speaker
Here's all the books that we recommend.
01:00:33
Speaker
So that's another, like if you're looking for a resource of just a bunch of great books about art and faith.
01:00:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:39
Speaker
lots of great books on that list that we put together at artwithin.substack.com.
01:00:45
Speaker
And then my YouTube channel, that's, it's, yeah, you know, I think I still, I wouldn't say like, it's a faith YouTube channel, but I think that it, someone actually said at Hutchmoot, when we were there two weeks ago, someone said, I think what you're doing is encouraging spiritual imagination around current pop culture.
01:01:03
Speaker
And I was like,
01:01:05
Speaker
that's it.
01:01:06
Speaker
I've been saying for a long time, like, oh, I do move videos about movies and the Bible sometimes and theology and stuff.
01:01:15
Speaker
And he said that and I was like, that's all I'm ever going to say forever.
01:01:18
Speaker
That's it.
01:01:19
Speaker
So I think that's been a big thing for me.
01:01:23
Speaker
And then the documentary when it's finished, we'll
01:01:26
Speaker
we'll release there.
01:01:28
Speaker
So that's, that's going to be fun too.
01:01:30
Speaker
We're looking at starting at Kickstarter to get the finishing funds for the film soon, maybe in November.
01:01:37
Speaker
And so that'll be, you know, if we do that, I'll put up the info about it there.
01:01:42
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:42
Speaker
That's, that's all I can think of right now, but it's, it's been lovely to be on here.
01:01:47
Speaker
Really enjoyed the questions and just the experience as well.
01:01:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's been awesome to talk with you and kind of, I don't know.
01:01:54
Speaker
Yeah, just hear stuff.
01:01:55
Speaker
I'm fizzling out.
01:01:56
Speaker
So I should end it quickly, audience, before I make this weird.
01:02:00
Speaker
Get out the door.
01:02:00
Speaker
Get out.
01:02:01
Speaker
Get out.
01:02:02
Speaker
Awesome.
01:02:02
Speaker
Well, thank you for coming on, though.
01:02:03
Speaker
This has been a lovely discussion.
01:02:05
Speaker
Yes.
01:02:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:06
Speaker
Thanks for having me.