Transcript
Speaker: Hello friends, welcome back to Artists of the Way.
Speaker: I'm John, the host.
Speaker: Today we have another audio-only episode, just because I had to travel to record this one.
Speaker: Not super far, that makes it sound really, really bougie.
Speaker: I went to another person's house, so I didn't end up setting up any of the video equipment there.
Speaker: But today we have my priest Father Chris on Chris Rolls.
Speaker: We're going to talk together about art and the church and the importance of what the church does, how the church does it, and how that connects to artists and its relationship with artists.
Speaker: This is the first in a series of discussions I'm hoping to have with clergy and with artists just talking about that relationship.
Speaker: There's a lot of tension there, so we're trying to figure out how do we, what's the state of that, what's the relationship between art and the church, and the church and artists, and just hopefully kind of build a catalog of those conversations.
Speaker: But our first one is here with Father Chris.
Speaker: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker: We talk about just some ecclesiological, so fancy word for churchy,
Speaker: church-based kind of things um and what the church is meant to be uh and how that intersects with art and the artistic community so hope you guys enjoy the episode so how are you doing i'm good yeah um feeling like maybe i'm
Speaker: coming into a new semblance of normalcy after lent and holy week and falling back into the the regular if you can say regular about the church rhythms uh rhythms of the church but yeah it's certainly less pomp and circumstance um however i say that in pentecost is coming up in a couple weeks and
Speaker: All the charismatics are super excited.
Speaker: All the charismatics are really excited about the Holy Spirit and what's coming.
Speaker: So yeah, it feels like a rediscovery of normalcy maybe is kind of what the last, yeah, two weeks it felt like, which is good.
Speaker: And then all the other extra things in parish life that sort of come up.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: So first I wanted to just ask a little bit about like you as a priest and minister, just to kind of
Speaker: set up our conversation.
Speaker: So what is it that you do as a priest and what was it that led you to this point in your life?
Speaker: Ah, yes.
Speaker: Let me attempt to be succinct.
Speaker: Yeah, so as a priest, well, so yeah, I'm Father Chris or just Chris is fine.
Speaker: I am the rector, which is a really fancy title for senior pastor, essentially, of Christ Church Anglican here in Grand Rapids.
Speaker: It's senior pastor in like King James English.
Speaker: Exactly, yeah.
Speaker: Anglicans have really pretentious titles for everything.
Speaker: Like the church doesn't have a basement, it has an undercroft.
Speaker: We don't have an elder board.
Speaker: We have a vestry.
Speaker: We just want it to sound gothic.
Speaker: Yeah, we want it to sound just really cool.
Speaker: And most of the time this comes off as pretentious.
Speaker: So I'm a rector, which means I'm the priest in charge of our parish here in Grand Rapids.
Speaker: I also have a unique background in the fact that I planted our church.
Speaker: which we're not really a church plant anymore.
Speaker: So it's like we're in the process of planting, but we are planted.
Speaker: I don't know where the present tense ends and the past tense begins.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But so my day-to-day life essentially is just managing our staff,
Speaker: communicating with our vestry, which is our leadership team, um, and working with any lay volunteers or lay leaders.
Speaker: I shouldn't say volunteers, volunteers.
Speaker: It was like a four letter word, um, lay faithful who offer their gifts in service of Christ's body and pastoral care.
Speaker: Uh, primary responsibilities are the domains of word and sacrament.
Speaker: So the, the ordinal, the vows that I take are very specific in terms of, um,
Speaker: what my job function looks like in terms of the eyes of the church and my role.
Speaker: So it's really a minister of the word on Sundays and then sacrament on Sundays and sacrament throughout the week with folks who are sick.
Speaker: So that's kind of how my weeks look.
Speaker: How I got here is a bit more of a sordid tale.
Speaker: I think...
Speaker: Yeah, there's a couple contributing factors over the course of about
Speaker: I would say 11 or 12 years that brought me to where I am.
Speaker: I grew up in largely non-denom Bible church contexts.
Speaker: Was a part of one church plant in Rockford growing up early, you know, early elementary through late middle school.
Speaker: That was a technically a Christian reformed church plant, but really didn't present that way whatsoever.
Speaker: And, and theologically really didn't, didn't present that way.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: broadly evangelical non-denum some of those things growing up but there's there's three sort of three contributing factors that landed me into the the the wing of the church that I find myself in the first was a bit of an intellectual pursuit it was reading some books I was a biblical studies major at an evangelical university here in Grand Rapids and
Speaker: Began just reading a bunch on biblical interpretation and how we go about the methodology of biblical interpretation and quickly discovered myself longing for choosing a tribe of people to belong to just so I could be honest about my interpretive paradigms.
Speaker: And I just saw a lot of really faithful, lovely, committed scholars that disagreed on different texts, mainly because of their interpretive paradigms and what they're bringing to the text in terms of their expectations.
Speaker: And so it became kind of an academic desire to sort of find a tribe, not to say like find the right one, as it were, but just to find one that fit me the best so I could be most honest about it.
Speaker: To feel like you could kind of plant a flag somewhere instead of being like always in the like, I don't know, middle back and forth.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like, can you interpret the biblical text by yourself?
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: You can unpack that later.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: And yeah, I just want to be honest about.
Speaker: where I'm coming from theologically and where my blind spots are and other things.
Speaker: So that was a developing desire over the course of many years.
Speaker: And then there's a sort of spiritual existential component.
Speaker: that longed for a coherent way of forming myself as a Christian person.
Speaker: So I was a part of worship teams.
Speaker: I was a musician.
Speaker: We can get into that maybe when we start talking about arts and stuff specific.
Speaker: And as part of a big worship bands ministry at Cornerstone that, um,
Speaker: you know, was really thoughtful.
Speaker: We rehearsed and were well rehearsed.
Speaker: We rehearsed a lot.
Speaker: But as like the drummer percussionist, right, I'm like in the back repping the bridge of oceans, you know, for the fifth time.
Speaker: And if I hit, you know, the floor time just a little bit harder, I might get a couple more hands raised kind of thing.
Speaker: And from just a discipleship level, as like a ministry and Bible student, I started asking questions about like, what are we doing?
Speaker: And I didn't come out the other side cynical about what we were doing per se.
Speaker: Maybe there was a season where I was, but I'm much more moderated on that.
Speaker: But I did come to the honest question, like we are doing something to someone when we do that.
Speaker: So let's just be honest and intentional about how we do that.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And that started really kicking up a lot of things in my own faith life on liturgy and the prayers that I'm praying and the books that I'm reading.
Speaker: And to get more art specific, maybe to say is like I began to realize that the medium is the message.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like.
Speaker: what we win people with we win them to her well you know um so if it's you know three songs a ted talk and a rock concert with some lights like that's what people are going to expect and we shouldn't be surprised when people treat church like starbucks you know or the local concert hall you know so when there's a better speaker or you know more titillating conversation or a better band or better coffee or whatever at the next place like
Speaker: or functionally ripping off the forms of the marketplace and appropriating them, if I have to be honest, worse than the marketplace in church, usually a decade behind the trends and not doing them as well.
Speaker: And we're kind of surprised when we get to the other side and realize that people, you know, have a shallow discipleship.
Speaker: So I started asking some of those questions.
Speaker: So like, what's the answer to that?
Speaker: You know, the dream then.
Speaker: And then I guess emotionally, I longed for a place where the faith was waiting for me.
Speaker: And we spent some time overseas and went to an Anglican cathedral in Jerusalem.
Speaker: when we were living there and had a couple close friends that were also a part of local Anglican churches, Episcopal churches here in Grand Rapids that gifted me prayer books and were instrumental in kind of forming my life.
Speaker: So it was a breath of fresh air for me to walk into sacred space and feel a sense that like the faith isn't dependent upon my sense of connection to God, although that is important.
Speaker: But that I'm joining in the great cloud of witnesses, both...
Speaker: temporally here and amongst us, but then also atemporally with the church triumphant.
Speaker: So I'm swimming in the same streams as, you know, Augustine or Aquinas and other, you know, church mothers and church fathers that have gone before me.
Speaker: So it was a settling experience for me to walk into a liturgical context where
Speaker: I didn't feel like the only metric for whether or not church was a good experience for me was how I felt after I left.
Speaker: But that I participated in the life of an institution that God ordained and that the New Testament literally calls the body of Christ.
Speaker: And I don't think that's a metaphor anymore.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Those three streams all converged over a course of about 12 years and found Anglicanism.
Speaker: Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker: I think the discipleship thing that you mentioned is really interesting.
Speaker: And I probably won't get too far into it because we could find some weeds and just explore them for a while.
Speaker: But I do feel like, I mean, I really appreciated the Nazarene church I grew up in, but I never felt like I connected...
Speaker: and fellowshiped with the people there as much.
Speaker: Um, and I don't feel like most of my discipleship came from there.
Speaker: Um, cause I definitely think discipleship can happen in any church for sure.
Speaker: Like deep, but I, I do feel like for me at least, and obviously this is subjective.
Speaker: So like you were saying blind spots, you know, um, but I, I do feel like something about the, the,
Speaker: what you said about giving people or, you know, like they're, they're, what am I saying?
Speaker: I don't even know what words I'm trying to find.
Speaker: Like the, them, you know, taking what you give them.
Speaker: And if it's kind of a copycat of the world and that shallowness, like there's something just so different about liturgy and the rhythm of the church that,
Speaker: Which also keeps going outside of myself, which is great.
Speaker: So it's not like spiritual life stops if I'm not there.
Speaker: But something about it I feel like has been more forming to me on Sunday mornings, which is my primary engagement with Christchurch.
Speaker: I mean, I do some other stuff.
Speaker: but we're often busy with the arts.
Speaker: So that's the primary engagement, but it feels like I'm able to fellowship and, and get like enough to have formation there.
Speaker: Maybe not everything, but which I feel like I kind of lacked in my previous church life.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I just think that's, that's interesting because I've, my discipleship, I feel like largely came through the artistic world prior, which I was blessed to have some really great people in that world who really helped me deepen my spirituality, um, and my, my relationship with Christ and faith in Christ.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But now I feel like I don't need to have a notebook and like take notes on the lecture to be spiritually formed, you know?
Speaker: So I think that's cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I want to chat a little bit about your artistic background.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which I don't feel like we've done a lot.
Speaker: We've talked a little bit about it.
Speaker: Yeah, this is new.
Speaker: I know you've played drums and instruments, and I know you have taught band before.
Speaker: Is music kind of been your primary artistic outlet, or have you pursued other ones or dabbled in other ones?
Speaker: Yeah, my own personal outlet music has been the primary one.
Speaker: Certainly interested and have been interested since college in fine arts, interested in painting.
Speaker: And I love film.
Speaker: So movies have been big.
Speaker: Movies and now TV shows, the way we're streaming and digesting media these days, everything's cinematic quality, miniseries.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: Yeah, for my own personal, I guess, life, the biggest one has been music.
Speaker: feeling a sense of draw or call toward writing as of late.
Speaker: I think that's maybe more of a charism that's emerging out of my priestly life and vocation.
Speaker: But I'm a lover of words.
Speaker: I do appreciate poetry and good novels and obviously theology and philosophy.
Speaker: But yeah, music is my big background.
Speaker: So I...
Speaker: I got very involved in band in junior high and high school, as one does.
Speaker: My dad was a drummer, so I've had a drum set my whole life.
Speaker: I've got pictures, or had pictures at least, of me at two and three sitting on a drum kit, just wailing away.
Speaker: I still remember really early memories of an old house we lived in Metro Grand Rapids here up in Rockford.
Speaker: Sitting at a drum kit.
Speaker: My dad had like a radio set up next to it with headphones.
Speaker: There's like a Duran Duran tape.
Speaker: A Rush tape.
Speaker: Joe Jackson looks sharp.
Speaker: I think a Michael Jackson tape.
Speaker: I think it was Michael Jackson bad.
Speaker: A Journey, I think.
Speaker: 2112, John Cougar Mellencamp Scarecrow.
Speaker: So a pretty diverse range of music that put headphones on and just try to play along to this.
Speaker: It became kind of an organic thing growing up.
Speaker: But then junior high and high school, got into band.
Speaker: You know, by my senior year, I was in, I think, five band classes.
Speaker: I was like a TA for junior high band.
Speaker: I was in a percussion class.
Speaker: I was in regular band, wind ensemble, jazz band, and whatever else.
Speaker: Got really into marching percussion.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So Wintergard International indoor competitive drumline.
Speaker: They call themselves the sport of the arts is their tagline.
Speaker: So very acting adjacent.
Speaker: So shows were themed and costumed and your body movements.
Speaker: was less like marching specific, like on a football field where you've got dots and more, uh, choreographic, you know, stuff.
Speaker: So you've got a nine minute show to memorize with music and body movements and you're in a costume and trying to, you know, one of the things you're scored on is they call it general effects.
Speaker: So it's like, how well are you acting the part, right?
Speaker: Like what, you know, what, what was the theme of your show and how is that coming across both in musicality and acting and, um,
Speaker: So I got super into that activity until I was 22, both indoor and outdoor, and marched drum corps, which is like professional marching band, so it's super nerdy.
Speaker: And then, of course, once you're in those worlds, you're teaching other high schools and then helping write scores for other marching bands.
Speaker: And so I taught through college and was in...
Speaker: moonlit in one of my brother's bands for a bit here in town uh on drum set and and then just all the church worship stuff so yeah yeah that's cool it's a long answer i'm sorry no that's good do you still have you had any outlets for that recently or is that kind of something that's taking a back seat amidst priesting
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The music itself has taken a backseat and that's something I'm longing to get back into.
Speaker: I miss, I miss, um, I miss the feeling of, I don't know, laying down a good pocket or, you know, being in the groove, you know, improvising with people or, you know, as a,
Speaker: trained percussionist like as it like as i approach the drum set like more textured and um adding highlights to music more so than just kind of providing the backbone so really appreciate that so if anyone that listens to this wants to like start a jam band in grand rapids i'm i'm on the lookout because i would really like to just go play like billies or mulligans or something like that a couple times a month and just comment on this post and we'll get yes comment please yeah great that's awesome
Speaker: So having come from something of an artistic background and now being in this sort of pastoral role, I
Speaker: the relationship between artists and the church is not necessarily always the healthiest.
Speaker: Um, which, you know, part of why I wanted to have you on and I'm wanting to have a whole bunch of conversations about this.
Speaker: Um, I know you and I have talked very briefly about that.
Speaker: I'm just curious.
Speaker: I have to remember the exact phrasing of my question.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Oh, I skipped a question.
Speaker: That's fine.
Speaker: I'll get back to that question later.
Speaker: We're riffing.
Speaker: We're riffing.
Speaker: To use musical terms.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is jazz.
Speaker: This is not symphony.
Speaker: No one would ever describe my podcast as a symphony.
Speaker: It is so haphazard.
Speaker: I guess...
Speaker: what's your perspective on that relationship on the relationship between like from the church's perspective towards artists and then from an artist perspective towards the church and how they are or are not working together or engaging and things like that.
Speaker: Yeah, I think at least from the background that I have come from sort of broadly, you know, non-denominational evangelicalism, um,
Speaker: It taught me how to love Jesus well, but if I might offer a critique, it feels like we sold our birthright a little bit on beauty and transcendence and not just those as aesthetic values, but as, as theological categories in sort of what is the good, what is, what is wholeness and beauty
Speaker: in a thing as it's intended to be or something like that, right?
Speaker: So I think the church in general should be chiefly concerned with arts because it should be chiefly concerned with the good.
Speaker: And that is a, what's the word I'm searching for?
Speaker: I think that is like a definable category theologically.
Speaker: Now, it's not prescribing aesthetic values on what is beautiful or something, but it is like, what is the good?
Speaker: And how do we make things beautiful?
Speaker: So as in general, I think the church, I mean, for most of the last two millennia has been sort of one of the premier patrons of
Speaker: And perpetrators of the arts, you know, because what do humans do when they get together?
Speaker: Well, they make things.
Speaker: Well, it's almost impossible to go to an art museum or something and look through art history.
Speaker: You're going to find massively influential things that were sponsored by the church or kicked off by the church or.
Speaker: Music, architecture, you know, paintings, you know, stained glass windows.
Speaker: So in general, I think like the church, before we even get into like its relationship to artists personally, you know, like the church as an institution.
Speaker: as a gathered body of saints, as a collection of humans knit together by God himself to be siblings and agents of new creation life, which is a fundamentally like procreative activity, right?
Speaker: That we should be concerned with art.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: concerned with the good or the beautiful because that's, I think, in a lot of sense what it means to be human.
Speaker: There's a one thing I'll quick share is there's a I took like an art history class in undergrad and the guy's name was Calvin Seerveld.
Speaker: He's an artist, I think, or philosopher.
Speaker: He taught at Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto.
Speaker: And it's a book called Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves, and it's about art.
Speaker: And he basically just said the one chief value in art that good art should have is elusivity, so a component of being elusive.
Speaker: So the difference maybe between good art and bad art is that it's not... Or maybe good art in propaganda is that it's not overtly...
Speaker: flat yeah or like kind of communicating one thing something but there's a degree of elusivity like we can't quite get at all of it yeah there's always something there left more for you and i think that that is a window into transcendence and the good um that like good art should always leave us pondering more i feel like that hits on something that i feel like is a common
Speaker: like easy answer to the why is Christian art bad question, which is not always bad, but like in the modern day we have Christian movies, which by and large are not the best, you know, if God uses that great, he does for sure.
Speaker: But like, he also uses Balaam's ass.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And he uses me every Sunday for preaching.
Speaker: So like, uh, it's even worse.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But like, there is that like, that interesting thing I feel where when you're looking at the art to try and create something beautiful, I think it's normally richer.
Speaker: And when you're looking at the art with the message as your primary thing, I think it usually deflates a little.
Speaker: Like I was just talking to, um, one of my mentors about a thing in Godspell and an idea with, um,
Speaker: with the character of Judas and just like, uh, just some different ways of like, how can we like portray the gospel in this show that in the way it's written, isn't supposed to have Jesus coming back.
Speaker: So even though we're doing that, there's not like time to have an in-depth, let's talk about atonement and justification and sanctification and all of that.
Speaker: And so it's like, Ooh, I have this idea.
Speaker: And then I was talking to him about, and he was like, do you like need that though?
Speaker: Or it's like the whole thing, a presentation of the gospel.
Speaker: And I was like, ah, shoot.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: I'm trying to boil down this rich, multifaceted thing to one stage picture that I can get to, like, pal the message through.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As opposed to just creating something that's beautiful and reflective of the nature and transcendence of God and is elusive to me as the creator of the art or one of the creators, because now there's actors in it.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: of it like it's elusive to me as to what exactly it's saying and doing I love that yeah that's super cool yeah so to get specific about your question in terms of like at the church in relationship to artists mm-hmm
Speaker: I mean, one, I guess, coming from where I come from, we can say that aside from, you know, worship bands that, you know, really empower people to flourish with power chords and like two or three keys because modern worship music is not that great.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: there's really we've we've done a poor job right at at building a culture of of thoughtful and rich art in general i guess at least from where i come from i can't i'm not speaking for you know other other traditions or other you know avenues or people's individual you know churches that may have had great experiences but
Speaker: And then certainly with the artistic community, it's, you know, I think been a frated relationship a little bit, you know, because, you know, right brain and left brain folks tend to be a bit like oil and water.
Speaker: So just shooting from the hip, like I would hope, I mean, the primary vocation of the church is to
Speaker: at least it's clergy, I should say, as representatives of the church as institution is to equip the saints for the work of ministry.
Speaker: And, um, it's not the clergy doing ministry.
Speaker: It's the church.
Speaker: Um, and artists in particular are, um,
Speaker: at least to me, there's plenty at our church.
Speaker: Several people who are like full-time vocational artists where they...
Speaker: Yeah, have unique sets of questions and unique gifts to offer.
Speaker: And if we don't have a robust enough culture together as a community to include the expressions that those folks have, we're missing a fundamental member of the body of Christ.
Speaker: We're functioning without our pinky toe or something.
Speaker: That seems like a really...
Speaker: Minor example.
Speaker: We're functioning without our left arm or something.
Speaker: If you heard it here first, artists, we are the pinky toe.
Speaker: Maybe like the big toe, right?
Speaker: Stabilizing or something.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But yeah, anyway.
Speaker: That's a general thought.
Speaker: Do you...
Speaker: I feel like it's always a little risky or hard to think about.
Speaker: I'm going to try and impose this onto the culture of the thing that we're making, you know, speaking as somebody who's been in leadership.
Speaker: Usually when you're doing that, the culture of the, like, ground floor people in an organization or in a church don't always fall in line.
Speaker: But have you given thought or have ideas of ways where...
Speaker: the church or people in leadership at the church could try and build cultures or frameworks that can be more inclusive or welcoming to artists or can make more space for creation and beauty to sort of fill out and and
Speaker: be a present reality and aspect of church life?
Speaker: Or do you feel like that's something that's more down to the congregation and the people inside it and how they engage with each other and what they tend to kind of pursue themselves as the church?
Speaker: Yeah, that's an insightful question.
Speaker: I guess, yeah, as a church planter, I didn't set out
Speaker: I guess to say that, I mean, just being honest, as this particular organization, we're going to value the arts.
Speaker: I think, however, with that, our fundamental posture toward the way we do things as Anglicans, if the medium is the message, or at least significantly influences the message,
Speaker: then it already begins to create a context culturally that is friendly toward artists.
Speaker: So I don't know that I like set out that we just really need to have like a space that's great for artists.
Speaker: Although like I've always envied like really beautiful church architecture.
Speaker: I've always loved good music and as an artist myself of sorts, um,
Speaker: If you would have asked me academically, that was a value, but did we set out with our mission vision values when we first planted it?
Speaker: That's the thing.
Speaker: But somehow, because of the way we do things, because we're attentive to the way we do things, it's attracted a bunch of artists, lo and behold.
Speaker: And that could just be because it's Grand Rapids, Michigan, and we've got a robust artistic community here, and there's all sorts of different reasons why that could be.
Speaker: Yeah, I would say it's maybe not like necessarily
Speaker: No, I mean, it is a universal call to all churches.
Speaker: But I don't know anything.
Speaker: You've got to, like, force a painting class on your church.
Speaker: Everyone's really good at basket weaving or something like that.
Speaker: There's a sense in which the church is, in terms of the local body or the local community, like a parish or a congregation, is...
Speaker: what the gifts that are present are, you know, like in terms of its personalities.
Speaker: So you may not have a full-time bronze artist.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like a sculptor like we do or a fine artist, you know, or actors or musicians like we have, but you may have woodworkers, you know, in your community.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: you may have tradesmen.
Speaker: Like that in itself is like a craft that's an art that's a fashioning of beauty and the good, right?
Speaker: And I do feel like there's a lot of, I think when we talk about art and artists, like we have a very particular picture of like,
Speaker: starving artist who's kind of like obsessed with their craft and is a little like bohemian or whatever, you know.
Speaker: But I like my uncle does photography and does really beautiful photography and doesn't view that as art himself, even though...
Speaker: I'm like, I like look at it.
Speaker: I'm like, no, it is.
Speaker: You've like captured moments here.
Speaker: Like he just snuck around at my wedding and like took some like background pictures.
Speaker: And I'm like, some of those are my favorite wedding pictures just because he captured beautiful moments and then edited them really nice.
Speaker: And I'm like, this is lovely.
Speaker: I'm so glad that I have this.
Speaker: But he, he's like a car mechanic guy.
Speaker: And like that is that and like a tech geek or like his personality.
Speaker: But there's still something in him that's,
Speaker: creative and artistic.
Speaker: And so I wonder if even in the difference of makeup in a congregation and in a congregation where it might be like, well, it doesn't, you know,
Speaker: We pulled our congregation for artists and we came up short.
Speaker: There's like, we've got no painters.
Speaker: Therefore we have no artists.
Speaker: It's like, well, okay.
Speaker: There's still like that, that part of us that mirrors God's creativity and desire to create and make things around us good and beautiful.
Speaker: so like maybe churches being artistic churches if you will like looks different dependent on the people yeah 100 yeah yeah yeah the gifts and charisms like i any i would any pastor that i would talk to um
Speaker: needs to be an artist of their own church and so far that you can only work with what's there and that's not a limitation that's like the same way a good woodworker kind of works you you have to work with the grain of the the wood like you're given um
Speaker: that yeah you you the second you come in with an agenda that is alien to the gifts of your people right you know which is probably why christ church still doesn't have a mission vision value statement because it's like i don't need to be moses to go on top of the mountain sign and come back and say like this is what grand rapids needs it's like no like sort of a kevin costner like uh feel the dream scenario or if you build it they will come well who's the day well
Speaker: whomever is like this this ragamuffin group of people and you're gonna have people who are you know gifted at underwater basket weaving and people who are gifted at the harpsichord and people who are gifted at gregorian chant and like your job i had a person in a church planning conference call church planters church artists and that was the first time that i felt like i can do that
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like I'm not, I'm not a small business owner.
Speaker: I don't have an administrative, like, or I have administrative bones in my body.
Speaker: I don't have like a,
Speaker: organizational leadership, you know, like small business scale, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: Like, but like, tell me to look at a group of people and see a beautiful painting of blessed humans that offer unique gifts that only they can offer in the universe.
Speaker: Like, yeah, I think I'm all for that.
Speaker: So anyway, I think that's cool too, because I think
Speaker: we often just as people in America and maybe people worldwide are like, we have to, we have to make the thing and we have to make the thing what we want it.
Speaker: And we have to structure it a certain way and make it successful and this and that.
Speaker: And we want to kind of control the trajectory.
Speaker: But I, I think I've found that.
Speaker: I think I have found, and it echoes what you're saying that usually, um,
Speaker: When we take our hands off as scary as that is, and then say, okay, Lord, I want you to bring the thing for this.
Speaker: That's happening right now with gospel casting where I've gone through my entire Facebook friends group trying to get enough people.
Speaker: I'm like, okay, I'm clearly, I don't know who's supposed to be in the show, I guess, but it's like just letting go of what is this?
Speaker: piece of art supposed to be or this church community or this business or this or that.
Speaker: And then just saying, okay, God's going to, God's going to set it up.
Speaker: And then what he gives me, I will work with and I'll offer it up to him, which is scary because we don't see always God's hands working as clearly, but he always is.
Speaker: And I was always setting that up.
Speaker: St.
Speaker: Paul has this line and I'm going to theologically riff off what he says, because this is not at all what he's intending to mean.
Speaker: What do you have that you have not been given?
Speaker: I think that's a really, really good existential question.
Speaker: I didn't even choose to wake up this morning.
Speaker: Like my body kept me alive.
Speaker: You know, the sun rose, the ecosystem's doing its thing.
Speaker: So I think any human made in God's image
Speaker: in work, in play, in art, and art is the best teacher of this value, is that we should ask, what's there?
Speaker: What do I have to work with?
Speaker: Even incredibly abstract fine artists or painters are still working with raw materials.
Speaker: They're working with what's there.
Speaker: And they may be painting a super abstract take on a landscape.
Speaker: or something.
Speaker: Um, but it's still a take on something, right?
Speaker: Or it's still a,
Speaker: Even if it is just a strange mental image, there's still something in there that you're working with and you're working with the colors and the shapes that you see.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we're working with our medium.
Speaker: We're working with our, you know, the tools at our disposal.
Speaker: We're working with the people in our lives.
Speaker: We're working in the cities that we live and the families that we were born into.
Speaker: You know, I did not choose to be, you know.
Speaker: you know, 36 year old, you know, average white dude, uh, with an MDiv from a general seminary and like living in West Michigan with a bunch of Dutch people.
Speaker: And like, um, what do I have that I have not been given?
Speaker: So I think cultivating, everyone's can take from artists, like cultivating a curiosity to ask ourselves, like what's there and how do I work with it?
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: That's super cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm curious about outreach, which is a word that I don't particularly always like, because I don't like the idea that you're sitting and like, I'm going to grab this thing and like pull it in and not do a lot.
Speaker: But that concept of like, okay, let's go out to the world.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I feel like unchurched artists are a hard group of people to reach.
Speaker: Like, A, I think artists tend to be very insular with our communities, and we tend to be very passionate and have really strong opinions.
Speaker: And there's just so much hurt there.
Speaker: So this might even just be a general question, too.
Speaker: But do you have any thoughts about trying to reach out or pursue...
Speaker: people who've been hurt by the church or people in artistic communities who feel like they don't have a space or are welcomed by the church.
Speaker: Because I don't think that's a pastor thing only or a priest thing only.
Speaker: Like that's a church-wide.
Speaker: That's what we're all called to do as the church by Jesus right before he was like, peace out.
Speaker: I was like, that was, that was, that's why we celebrate Pentecost in a couple of weeks.
Speaker: Cause Jesus said, peace out.
Speaker: But he also said, peace out.
Speaker: And I'm going to send someone else.
Speaker: Um, that's a really grotesque.
Speaker: This is not endorsed by Christ church.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Yeah, I think in some ways, what we were talking about earlier, I think the last couple of generations, millennials for sure, and then millennials on down, so Gen Z and Gen Alpha, whatever.
Speaker: We've marketed to...
Speaker: literally from conception yeah you know um most of us are digital natives and so we can smell we can smell coercion we can smell bait and switch we can smell lack of sincerity um we can smell propaganda you know from my way you know like again i don't want to
Speaker: No, I'll go here because it's a really easy example.
Speaker: You know, like the God's Not Dead films.
Speaker: I'm sorry if you benefited from them.
Speaker: I'm sure people have.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But like, that's bad art.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Objectively, you know, it's it's it's playing on tropes.
Speaker: And although tropes and stereotypes have a degree of truth because we've all experienced like they only work in so far as they have a degree of truth.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The angry college professor that wants to ruin your faith.
Speaker: Like, well, actually, there are no angry college professors that want to ruin your faith.
Speaker: Like.
Speaker: They all want to teach you to think, and some of them might think that your faith is dumb.
Speaker: Very rarely are they vindictive.
Speaker: So it's like taking the extremes of all sorts of whatever.
Speaker: Anyway, so reaching a community of people who spend their lives reflecting well on these things are not going to be reached by, you know,
Speaker: A text that says God's not dead.
Speaker: Yeah, insincere Facebook memes or, you know.
Speaker: Minions being like, hey, Jesus.
Speaker: Or, you know, any of our, you know, outreach campaigns.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: yeah, we can smell a marketing campaign from a mile away.
Speaker: And even if the heart of the marketing campaign is Jesus, it's still, you know, it's still marketing campaign.
Speaker: So I think with artists, like sincerity, I don't know.
Speaker: I'm, I'm, I'm beginning to, I've been reading a lot of existentialism lately and I'm trying to reject the term authenticity, even though that is a value within existentialism.
Speaker: Um, um,
Speaker: I don't... I sometimes wonder if our... I hate using the word our culture as if there's some monolithic kind of thing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But just in our... What's in the air and what's in the running is we all want to be authentic.
Speaker: And sometimes I just wonder if...
Speaker: We don't quite know who we even are enough to know if we're revealing that authentically.
Speaker: So I'm using the word sincerity.
Speaker: Like I know in this moment, I am sincere in however I'm approaching.
Speaker: So are we being sincere?
Speaker: Yeah, are we...
Speaker: Are we being honest and then in forthright in our positions and our convictions and our thoughts on different things?
Speaker: And can we back those up with going back to art, the good?
Speaker: Like, is it good and beautiful?
Speaker: Like, is our community living into rhythms of life, you know, that are only intelligible if Jesus Christ is truly risen from the dead?
Speaker: You know, or are we just kind of a...
Speaker: you know, social club that, that moonlights as a, you know, partisan political arm for, uh, whichever side of the aisle you happen to fall on.
Speaker: Cause you know, mainline Protestantism has its, has its constituency and conservative evangelicalism has its constituency.
Speaker: And like, people can see that.
Speaker: Like, um, yeah,
Speaker: I'm just talking about now a general apologetic for culture, but not really artists.
Speaker: I feel like I'm failing to answer your question.
Speaker: No, that's fine.
Speaker: I like general apologetics.
Speaker: But no, I do think that's interesting, though, because the thing that draws people to Christ is Christ, not what we've set up in our church.
Speaker: So if the gospel that we're preaching is not like a genuine, sincere,
Speaker: Christ loves you, not in a packaged, you know, he gets us campaign, but like a genuine, like raw, messy love that somehow they see reflected in the church.
Speaker: Cause I feel like from the outside looking in on a lot of major churches, it isn't always super apparent, you know?
Speaker: And a lot of that is cause the ones that blow up are like the ones that are
Speaker: problematic because everybody's like look at this problematic church so then we're talking about that one but i feel like a lot of times the narrative becomes that it is political on either side depending on the denomination and the tradition and it becomes more about the agenda than about the person yeah and i do feel like there's a lot to chew on there and i don't think it has a
Speaker: like a solid perfected answer.
Speaker: I don't think it ever really does because God's really the one doing the work and we're just kind of here blindly trying to follow and be his tools.
Speaker: But good things to chew on as we think about engaging with those people, well, with those people, with artists and well, with our people and people we love and people who have been hurt and
Speaker: I guess what I'll say is specifically to artists, like thinking about what you just said, like if we're going to reach an artistic community that understands their craft and believes in creating beautiful things, then we, yeah, we need to,
Speaker: Yeah, have a common life together that's more robust and a sort of constructive, beautiful thing that we can offer for them to understand how their gift fits beyond sort of the cheap rip-off Christian culture that we've developed since the 80s and 90s.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Whatever the marketplace does, we're just going to do it, and we're just going to label it Christian.
Speaker: We're going to have Christian bookstores.
Speaker: We're going to have Christian coffee shops.
Speaker: We're going to have Christian, you know, which isn't necessarily bad, but...
Speaker: It always just seems to be a little behind and not genuine.
Speaker: It's not a fruitful, you know, it's like it's trying to copy what's trendy and ride the wave.
Speaker: And sometimes I feel can be like overdefined.
Speaker: Like this is what we do and then this is how we do it in a Christian way.
Speaker: And then if you're this kind of person, we can slot you in here.
Speaker: Even though it's like, well, I'm not really passionate about it.
Speaker: But you do these things.
Speaker: So, you know, that's where you slot.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's good.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: I'm going to ask you the question I was supposed to ask you at the start because I forgot.
Speaker: What are some ways that God's using art in your life right now as you're walking through stuff and pondering things?
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Goodness.
Speaker: Yeah, I feel like I can answer this a little bit better than I answered the last one.
Speaker: I feel like I kind of...
Speaker: No, it was good.
Speaker: We had a conversation.
Speaker: I felt anemic.
Speaker: How do we reach artists?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Um, it's a good question though.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, I think art, art right now is like keeping me afloat.
Speaker: I don't want to be melodramatic or like overstate something.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But yeah, I'm really leaning into a lot of poetry right now.
Speaker: I'm leaning into familiar novels that help me make sense of the world.
Speaker: And there's been just a couple of really good TV shows and movies that I've spent some time with in the last couple of months that just feel like it is...
Speaker: such a art is functioning right now in my life is both a means of sort of cathartic relief uh encouragement inspiration uh fuel to like get up the next morning and do everything all over again i don't know um
Speaker: Reminder of the beauty and the good in an Augustinian sense that we talked about earlier.
Speaker: Like I think when you're a pastor, sometimes you traffic so much in the carnage of life.
Speaker: You know, wrecked relationships, wrecked jobs, wrecked marriages, wrecked families, wrecked
Speaker: lives that it's like oh yeah no there's something beyond me that's compelling me forward and like art is a medium in which i am connecting well with
Speaker: transcendence and as a christian person i articulate that as god in christ uh and make sense of that through the fact that christ is a human and so it's kind of this whole circle thing but um yeah art's really helping me survive right now i think if i'm at the risk of being melodramatic but yeah no that's that's cool and i feel like
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I feel like the strength of how you stated that, it's just like, I feel like it sometimes keeps everybody afloat, whether we realize it or not.
Speaker: Like God uses it.
Speaker: incredibly, which then takes me back to what we were talking about at the start, is like, then why is the church not creating a space for, I mean, why are many churches not creating a space for genuine art and genuine beauty?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: When it is in a mysterious way, things that are not Christian necessarily at all in the plan of it, God takes and uses to form people and keep them afloat.
Speaker: Like, it is just...
Speaker: It is such a through line, at least in our, well, I think in all cultures, just in different forms.
Speaker: And so it's one of the things we use to form ourselves.
Speaker: And then God takes it and uses it to form us too.
Speaker: That's super cool.
Speaker: We are getting close to our time.
Speaker: So I want to ask, I forgot to
Speaker: send you this so you know if you haven't thought of it you can just say no john we're done all right um is there like any resources i hit my i hit my makeshift desk um are there any like resources or works of art or books or something that you would recommend to people
Speaker: If, and obviously this is a very broad question.
Speaker: So if you have like a top two or three for just deepening their spiritual life or expanding their artistic horizons or exploring something artistically.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Um, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, the first one that comes to mind is a book by Henry Nowen on the Prodigal Son.
Speaker: And I'm totally blanking on what Nowen's actual title of it is.
Speaker: I'll find it.
Speaker: I'll put it in the show.
Speaker: I want to say it's Parable of the Prodigal Son.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Um, it's, it's a reflection on, uh, Rembrandt's painting of the prodigal and it is a profound book.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So that's certainly one that I encountered in seminary that was just a gift and continues to be a gift.
Speaker: I think what has been bubbling underneath our whole conversation a little bit, at least this will make a lot of sense for musicians, but it...
Speaker: will likely make sense for all artists is there's a book by James K. Smith called You Are What You Love.
Speaker: And what the book essentially does is give us a understanding of what it means to be human that moves beyond modernity's assumption, which is that we are just a brain on a stick.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So when something's going wrong, what you need is more information.
Speaker: Like information will save the world.
Speaker: Education, the right information will.
Speaker: If you can Google the right thing and find the right Quora post, then you're good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we are not that.
Speaker: So our anthropology or understanding of what it means to be human is not that we are a brain on a stick, but rather the center of our being is that we are primarily desiring creatures, loving creatures.
Speaker: We're oriented toward a good thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is it?
Speaker: Is.
Speaker: And the book, he takes Augustine's quote, famous quote from the confessions.
Speaker: You made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.
Speaker: And we say that every Sunday in our Eucharistic prayer.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You made us for yourself.
Speaker: And he doesn't say our minds, whatever it's like ours.
Speaker: So what is human flourishing?
Speaker: Well, it's orienting our wills and our loves, shaping our loves toward God or God.
Speaker: toward holy ends.
Speaker: So that's a brilliant book for artists.
Speaker: Lastly, a bit of unorthodox suggestion, but this is my hobby horse novel.
Speaker: I will recommend Wendell Berry's novel, Jaber Crow.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Because in it, you cannot be an artist or a creative human, which we are all called to be creative humans.
Speaker: We may be not called all to be artists or depending on how we define any of these terms.
Speaker: But Jaber, you cannot be a creative human if you're not creative.
Speaker: wholeheartedly flourishing within a body of people.
Speaker: Um, we are meant for a relationship.
Speaker: You know, there is no I without you.
Speaker: And, um, that novel is a person's discovery of their vocation, their calling in life, their place within a community.
Speaker: Uh, there's all sorts of things that I, you know, recommend it as, as good and beautiful and,
Speaker: in and of itself as objects of you know demonstrating the good and the beautiful but um it's quite a lovely book and there's also just a lot of really good examples of being able to interpret our reality based in spiritual terms heaven and hell what's up and running in our life when we're kind of living in certain kind of ways and
Speaker: which I think is a very Christian imagination that's important to develop to be a creative human, let alone an artist.
Speaker: So that would be my third hobby horse, somewhat of a stretch, but we'll still recommend it because I think it's just the best.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Thank you for coming on.
Speaker: This has been super awesome.
Speaker: Fun to talk to you and great to have you on and unpack these things.
Speaker: Yeah, it's been a joy and super, super grateful and love this podcast.
Speaker: So thanks for making it.
Speaker: And thanks for being an artist in our community.
Speaker: I'm very proud to be a part of all the work that you do.
Speaker: Thanks.
