The lost art of appreciation.

Yesterday, Philip Ryken let the discouraged artists of the Christian community have a voice on The Gospel Coalition’s blog.

Artists included those “called to draw, paint, sculpt, sing, act, dance, and play music.” My heart sunk when I saw that writers weren’t once mentioned in the list or in the whole of Ryken’s address to the art-wary church.  “The church doesn’t even consider writers artists anymore!”

I’ve had a day or so to sit on it. I think that in my knee-jerk reaction I lobbed the arrow at the wrong target. There’s an even more complex issue at play behind the absence of creative writing in the church – of all modes of artistic communication – and it says far more about the culture than it does the church. It’s the primary reason I stayed away from writing in any sort of public forum for years:

If it requires critical thinking, it is too cumbersome for our commodity-driven glocal community.

Those that have the most appeal and are gathering the largest followings online through social media are in no way artists. Form rarely strays from the numbered and bullet-pointed or long-winded, “stream-of-consciousness” rambling. The essay and the fiction piece are lost amidst hoards of proud armchair philosophers waxing eloquent at a 9th grade reading level. If a quick, practical application is not presented at the end, the words were obsolete. In a world where we can press a button and have an entire album downloaded to our hard drive, or type a few words – 140 characters, to be precise – and broadcast our thoughts to a hundred or a thousand perfect strangers, we can’t imagine having to spend longer than 30 seconds on anything.

We don’t know what to do with writing that isn’t immediately accessible. So, we ignore it.

Under the list of offenses made in the modern church toward word artists, this is the greatest. But I hope others like me who read TGC’s blog post yesterday are prepared to give careful (albeit painful) consideration to the possibility that church’s dismissal of the arts is actually a contextually-appropriate and expected response. However, that is not to say it is a biblical response.

Consider with me for one moment that the blame does not actually fall upon the church: the absence of writing or any art form that requires prolonged meditation in the church is actually a symptom of sin’s degradation of culture.

If this is the case, then the answer is not simply to let artists hang more of their paintings in the gathering space or make more time during the service for performing artists.

As believers, we are conduits of life. We revitalize the cities and rebuild the desolate lands through the presentation of the gospel.  We teach other believers and not-yet-believers anew what it is to see beyond the surface of a thing.  Jesus exemplified this perfectly during His ministry, providing not only a template, but a wellspring of inspiration for the artist longing to restore a deeper appreciation for the arts in his or her community:

His disciples came and asked him, “Why do you use parables when you talk to the people?”

He replied, “You are permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but others are not. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given, and they will have an abundance of knowledge. But for those who are not listening, even what little understanding they have will be taken away from them. That is why I use these parables,

For they look, but they don’t really see.
They hear, but they don’t really listen or understand.

Matthew 13:10-13

Jesus, our perfect, holy and beautiful Creator: the original frustrated artist. Those few who longed to understand did understand, but can you imagine God incarnate communicating life-saving truths about the kingdom to a thousand other blank stares and glazed-over expressions?

What I see in Ryken’s blog is evidence that we as artists feel we shoulder the burden of keeping the arts relevant in the church. But Jesus knew that to embed the mysteries of the gospel and eternal life a little deeper in His words was to make them deliberately inaccessible.  Only the movement of the Spirit could drive a man to mine deeper and work harder for the pure gems of truth that lay below the surface.

As sin erodes our understanding and does its work in the culture by transforming our desires from truth to convenience, beauty to accessibility, mystery to omniscience, the arts will be further pushed aside.

Perhaps what we need is not prayer for a revival of the arts in the modern church, but for a revival of souls that rekindles a passion for the arts as present-day parables pointing to vast eternal truths. Whether by our will or not, all created things point to a Creator. Artists, with this truth in mind, our response should not be to beg for an appreciative audience, but to teach our audience to appreciate.

Be ready to engage in difficult discussions with leaders who are having a hard time seeing artistic expression as valid a mode of worship as song, prayer, the preaching of the word and communion.

Take time to explain your sculptures, your paintings, your poetry. Don’t scoff at those who don’t immediately understand or know how to understand.  (See Matthew 13:17,18)

Invite those few who show real interest to visit a gallery with you, attend a lecture, hear a symphony.

For those more extreme camps of Christianity who condemn artistic expression as worldly, lovingly communicate that it is not only the arts that are fallen, but our understanding or appreciation of them as well.

Be long-suffering, my artistic brother or sister. This is the already and not-yet kingdom of God. When this broken world is restored, eyes and ears will be opened once more to beauty and mystery and truth. The arts are a weathered and age-worn canvas, but not beyond the restorative hand of Creator God.