Hey guys!
Here are three things to spark your inner missional flame:
đź’Ą INSPIRED BY
Propaganda Versus Allusive Art
Driving along the great American countryside, a European man observed a billboard.
This particular billboard shocked him. It featured an artistically rendered image of a mutilated unborn child.
The billboard's obvious takeaway for the European tourist shouted, “YOU SHOULD BE PROLIFE! LOOK HOW INSANE AND STUPID YOU ARE FOR NOT BEING PRO LIFE.”
This European man explained to me how insane it was to try and “win” people with artwork so explicit. He said in his country, if they wanted to see a door open for gospel conversations, they’d express it much more subtly. The allusiveness of a more indirect and metaphorical artwork is much more conducive to provoking thought. It opens the door for dialogue rather than screaming and turning someone off.
When we create art like this, as propaganda, we do damage to the purpose of art. Calvin Seerveld said,
“Art is not a means to an end, it is not a function of something else. Art stands or falls on its own artistic contribution in God’s world. To think of art, or practise it, as a tool for some other purpose is to sell it out to a technocratic bent of mind, damning it to a permanent identity crisis and reducing it to a kind of colonial status at the beck and call of touring VIPs for approved cultural missions.”
An Example Of Allusive Artwork
Allow me to provide an example of a less direct, more allusive, expression of art.
Nestled quietly in the Prague train station rests a life-size sculpture. I remember getting off my train, wandering around in search of a bathroom. The first thing that struck me was how off the beaten path this sculpture was.
The piece is made up of a large train door with glowing glass. Somehow floating in the glass are a series of detached hands (some with their arms). The hands of children on one side. Their parent’s hands on the other side.
The sculpture’s description reads:
This Farewell Memorial is a symbol of courage and love of parents, who in 1938 and 1939 regardless of what their own fate awaited them, boarded their children on trains and with heartache and tears in their eyes waved good bye, sending them away to safety to save their lives. Most parents perished in the Holocaust.
Winton Children
The “Winton” in Winton Children is an homage to Sir Nicholas Winton who was nicknamed the “British Schindler” for helping Jewish children escape Prague just before World War 2. He helped over 650 children escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
One art work shouts. The other invites the viewer into a story.
One closes doors. The other opens the heart of “those who have ears to hear.”
🛠️ EQUIPPED BY
We Live In A Post-Babel World (Why We Need Arts Ministry)
Before Babel, there was unity. But it was a profaned harmony.
Mankind’s imagination was “evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5). Even after God’s judgment with the flood, man's pride led them to build the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-4).
God’s solution was to confuse man’s language and scatter humanity across the earth. That was thousands of years ago.
Now, in a post-Babel world, division and discord seem to rule. Mass of confusion and misunderstanding cocktailed with man’s sin creates a mixture of the utmost wickedness towards each other.
We do well to remember this.
American ministers and artists must heed the warning against ethnocentrism.
We must reach beyond literacy, assuming it (especially English) is the only means of communication.
Artists function in another realm: the imagination.
Artists can touch the imagination even where literacy cannot. Because, as C.S. Lewis said, “Imagination is the organ of meaning.”
Artists tend to specialize in other symbols (from Donald K. Smith) besides written or even verbal:
- Pictorial
- Artifact
- Audio
- Kinesics
- Optical
- Tactile
- Temporal
- Spatial
- Olfactory
This means that love can be communicated through all kinds of artistry, not just through what we commonly consider “arts” (like music, painting, dancing, etc.). It expands to all things such as scrapbooking, cooking, ritual, spectacle, clothing, play, humor, poetry, etc.
🚀 SENT WITH
What is "imaginative discipleship?" Here's my definition:
“All the ways we make the context for moments of discipleship which aid other’s mental fashioning of an overall content which they interact with."
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