Some have called Beautiful Angle a group of underground artists, but more commonly they are known as a guerilla arts project making Tacoma, WA, beautiful. Starting in late 2002 Tom Llewellyn and Lance Kagey turned their knowledge of design and printing into a now awarded effort to give Tacomans a sense of pride and activism in their city. (Check out their work and website here.)

Filling a basement full of type, plates and other equipment, they use their own presses to create monthly posters which are then illegally plastered around town—often to the sides of old boarded up buildings. Placing a work of art on something that has been discarded by Tacomans fits Beautiful Angle’s desire to restore meaning and beauty to a town that often takes on a second-rate persona to its larger, pretty cousin, Seattle.

Beautiful Angle’s Tacoma-centric efforts have inspired the city of Tacoma, which usually tears down illegal posters, to ask if they can link Beautiful Angle to their own web site. The posters have become collectors’ items as many Tacomans scour and explore all of the forgotten nooks and crannies of their own city in hopes of finding a new poster. Galleries want to create exhibits and historical societies have begun collecting as well. Even Tacoma-Pierce County’s Chamber of Commerce has awarded Llewellyn with an award of merit for Beautiful Angle’s role in revitalizing Tacoma’s downtown.

It seems that Beautiful Angle is helping to recreate a sense of ownership for Tacoman citizens and their art community as they look anew on their city with a vision for meaning, restoration and action. While it is important not to overlook the fun that Beautiful Angle has in their work, it is clear that others have taken them seriously.

Rather dramatically, one Tacoman writes on the Beautiful Angle web site, “My addiction has grown; I need more. I need to feel alive, and I only feel the surge of blood through the intricate cheese cloth of my body when I’m next to a Tacoma-centric poster. Feed me!” Take a moment to read through some of these comments and you will see a need to remember and to re-envision Tacoma that is aroused with each subversive piece of art—including a comment that urges Beautiful Angle to “keep your hands on the wheel of Tacoma.”

(HT: The News Tribune)

This morning as I read and think of the role of the artist my mind and heart has received yet one more jolt. I received this email from Makoto this morning and as I read it I’m moved deeply by the call he issues near the end of this story. Here is Makoto’s quote : It begins in a belief that our lives are to be lived for others. Arts should let “the other ones loose” from the bondage of decay, apathy and loss. To the extent we are able to do that, to that degree we will see a new language of expression that is not self-centered, but self-giving and generous. Yes, I believe that art can, and ought to, exist apart from wars. But in only place where this has been the case in the history of the world, a place called Eden where a poet named Adam dwelled, is today hidden inaccessibly beneath, or above, the rubble of Iraq. ”

We as artist are making a new culture may God grant us the courage to do so. May we rise up and speak our voices and expressions of beauty, goodness and truth.

Gary

ps

If you are interested in receiving Makoto’s periodic missives just send him an email at refractions@makotofujimura.com.

From: Makoto Fujimura

Subject: Operation Homecoming: Epistle of Injury

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 22
Operation Homecoming: Epistles of Injury

I recently found myself at New York’s Symphony Space, listening to the voices of soldiers. As a National Council on the Arts member, I was representing the National Endowment for the Arts for the release of “Operation Homecoming.” The N.E.A. gave returning soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq an opportunity to write down their war time experiences in workshops lead by Pulitzer winning Vietnam era writers. With actors highlighting the evening, (Matthew Modine, Joan Allen, and, most memorably, Stephen Lang) and sitting next to one of the soldier/writers, I had a strange and uncomfortable revelation: a revelation that surely had been bubbling up in me in recent years — How much of the world’s art and literature is linked to wartime experiences?

The writings of soldiers, or writing about wars in general, has indeed defined our literature and the arts, from Homer to Dante to Hemingway. If you remove works of art that do not in some way relate to, or respond to wars, our cultural landscape would be full of holes (think of Picasso’s “Guernica”). Perhaps that’s what Jesus meant, when he warned us “such things (wars) must happen.” He did not validate wars by saying this, but he wanted to make sure we understood the inevitability of them: that our inner malaise will surely be translated into greater conflicts. But to have the Prince of Peace tell us that wars must happen is more than troubling. Must we be haunted by wars as part of God’s plan of redemption? Must art exist as primarily funerary?

In modern times, Rothko, Mondrian and other 20th Century masters wove the horrors of the atomic age into their work, as if to visit Hiroshima over and over again. Rothko gave that post-Atomic glow an ethereal transcendence even as Mondrian stubbornly, and valiantly, insisted on the order of grids against the approaching chaos. In both cases, they were exiled to New York, because of the dark specters of evil marching into their homelands. Surrealism (as the recent MOMA/National Gallery exhibit showed) screamed against the insanity of fear birthed in the trenches of WW1. These artists are often remembered for their anti- patriotic rants, or at best being ambivalent observers, and most definitely being anti-establishment. It is ironic that they are now seen as the establishment in the institutions of museums and academia. But the best of arts still can rise above the institutions and establishment that gave permission for them, or the conflicts that they escaped. The arts speak into a void, creating a moment of clarity, a pause in the frenzy.

Then there are the J.R.R. Tolkiens and C.S. Lewis of the world, whose front line experiences gave birth to the most resonant, faith-filled literature of our last century. Tolkien imagined through the dark trenches, surrounded by dying friends, and chose to speak directly against his own fear by naming one by one characters and places of imagined reality that would later form the basis for The Lord of the Rings. Lewis too, injured in the war, later recounts that his journey from atheism to faith was paved by his sense of loss, inconsolable violation (“the problem of pain”, he called it) that he felt in his bones. Having gone through such horrors is no guarantee of a recovery of faith, but it does suggest that faith and culture are linked to the crisis that surrounds us.

T.S. Eliot would have found this dialogue not so unfamiliar. His war- time journey to write the “Waste Land” could also describe our survey of Darfur and Afghanistan. In the “Four Quartets,” he describes “The unimaginable Zero Summer” of the atomic devastation but ends hopefully in the “still point of the turning world”, producing a rare articulation of the heart’s navigation from fear to love. But today, in the shadows of our current chaos in Iraq, and bullet holes in an Amish school still fresh in our minds, such sentiment can come across as too optimistic and even unkind.

—————–

I read recently that most of early Christian art (at least the examples that have survived) were funerary in nature. Apparently, even in the world of faith, art is obsessed with death. Surely, it would be the darkest of confessions for any artist working today to admit that his/her visions are driven by the haunts of war and death, and, like Dante, that imaginative reality is filled with a vision of purgatorio. On the contrary, our recent contemporary art scene is rushing to escapism, lacking in engagement with the present darkness, and even without the disciplined skill to describe the horror. So such a confessional would seem welcome in today’s climate of superficiality. Pausing to listen to the writings of soldiers in “Operation Homecoming,” though, I have begun to see a glimpse of a new kind of realism.

These men and women chose to write staring into the abyss: to record both their fears and hopes, in this time of certain chaos, grieve over lost lives and opportunities; but they also speak well of their pets and ordinary sun-lit days. Theirs is a stark realism, observing the life surrounding the turmoil, wrestling against the fading memories of loved ones, comrades, and the stenches of war. So many of Operation Homecoming pages are filled with emails, which like radio dispatches, they will remain deeply etched in our minds as immediately potent. These are voices that are directed toward our private spheres, but now allowed to be make public: They deserve our hushed attention for their honest grappling with inner turmoil. Their accounts are true “Survivor” tales but without any shred of sensationalism. Told sometimes gingerly, sometimes in expletives, the soldiers seem to dwell, after a while, in my consciousness as my imaginary neighbors, people whom I might encounter in my street, or kick a soccer ball around with. I am surprised at how much humor fills these pages, not the sanitized kind, but the raw, grimy kind that belongs in beer halls and late night comedy shows. Refreshingly free of showmanship, in our glitz-filled cultural universe, their writings serve more than to recount the war: they speak into our lives with authenticity, and remind us somehow that, despite it all, humanity can still reign in a cruel kaleidoscope of fear called war.

There are poignant lessons, of a soldier writing home as he flew over Iraq, a geography lesson that span some 3000 years. “Have you heard of Mesopotamia?” writes Lieutenant Colonel Cohoes to his sons, “ Two great rivers of the word, the Tigris and the Euphrates, flow together here then empty into the Persian Gulf….King Nebuchadnezzar (I can’t say it either) build the hanging Gardens of Babylon about 2,600 years ago.” Of course, in the reading that took place at Symphony Hall, Matthew Modine could not pronounce “Nebuchadnezzar,” either.

There’s an account of a soldier of Korean descent who recounts his adoptive American father and grandfather fighting in their wars. Echoed throughout the book is generational lineage to wars, that it is not an isolated experience to one generation. Then there is Christy De’on Miller, in an essay she called “Timeless,” a single mom/soldier mourning over the loss of her only son, Aaron:

“At times I believe I can learn to live a life without my son. After all, I must. I am certain there are other mothers who have lost their boys – car accidents, war, illness – who can shop for dinner at the local grocer’s without the macaroni-and-cheese boxes suddenly causing them grief. Moms who can roll sausage balls without tears; perhaps the festive food would even cause a smile. But the memory of him is planted in everything around me. Inside of me. So much is gone. Him, or course. But so much of him has been lost, is fading, breaking down. His blanket, his watch, his uniform…”

The writings amplify the details of life, not just theirs, but ours. They let us into the writers’ worlds, to share in their grief, their loss, and their confusion.

Here was another revelation, then, after listening to the account after account of Afghan and Iraqi soldiers and their families that I, too, lived in a war zone. A different, milder version for sure, sanitized and packaged better. Photos of the bright new facades of “you can have it all” condominiums, to be completed in 2010, tell us that we are all better in downtown Manhattan. Their airbrushed architectural renderings are what a friend calls “architectural porn”. But nevertheless I live and raise my family in a place called Ground Zero, and reading the book opened my eyes to see the invisible collateral of a war far away shadowing us everywhere. Yes, even if there is no visible war around, there are less visible battles going on everywhere.

There are visible scars in culture though. The battle is about the imaginative territories of hope against fears, the sacrifice of love against a misplaced devotion, the anger of revenge against forgiveness. It is a battle that rages in the minds of youth as they negotiate the labyrinth of a techno frenzied universe, sharing a communion of broken promises. When the manifestation of such collateral damage ambushes us, like in the pastoral Amish landscapes recently, or in Littleton, Colorado in 1998, in a high school named after a delicate wild flower, we are astonished.

John Hewett, the development director of the N.E.A., and who also happens to be an ordained minister, told me a poignant story recently. When the evil struck the sleepy Amish community near Lancaster, when a gunman/milkman systematically shot girls one by one, there was a hidden story, in what he called “A Miracle Nobody Noticed.” He wrote:

“I’m convinced most of us get through most days without thinking about God much. I was having one of those days a few weeks ago, until I heard about Marian and Barbie Fisher, two of the ten girls in the West Nickel Mines Amish School. Marian, the oldest, was 13. Her sister Barbie, who lived, is 11. When it became obvious what was about to happen that ghastly morning, Marian turned to the killer and said, ‘Shoot me and leave the other ones loose.’ ‘Shoot me next,’ Barbie said. ‘Shoot me next.’

Two children willing to lay down their lives for their friends. Wonder where they got an idea like that? That’s another miracle nobody noticed”

Perhaps a new renaissance will be birthed out of the “mouths of babes” like these: “shoot me and leave the other ones loose.” Or it may flow out of a grieving mother/soldier like De’on grieving for Aaron, a Marine who lost his life protecting his wounded comrades. Perhaps we will see that whether we are soldiers, or housewives or Pulitzer Prize winning writers (or all of the above), we need to realize that we are not home, at least not yet. That’s the only faith that can compel us to say: “shoot me.” The girl did not complain that “this is unfair,” or argue, “this is unjust:” she just said “shoot me.”

Such fragile, but heroic, voices in the face of violence can easily be ignored, or simply not audible with our doomed ears. It certainly did nothing to stop a milkman from unloading his anger by pulling the trigger. Perhaps such otherworldly gestures look as pathetic, or beautiful, as the string quartet that played on as the Titanic sank. But I submit to you that here, in a miracle nobody noticed, is a bugle call also directed towards us artists. It begins in a belief that our lives are to be lived for others. Arts should let “the other ones loose” from the bondage of decay, apathy and loss. To the extent we are able to do that, to that degree we will see a new language of expression that is not self-centered, but self-giving and generous. Yes, I believe that art can, and ought to, exist apart from wars. But in only place where this has been the case in the history of the world, a place called Eden where a poet named Adam dwelled, is today hidden inaccessibly beneath, or above, the rubble of Iraq.

Operation Homecoming gives us authentic voices that seek be a responsible steward of their experiences. Why would that simple gesture seem so foreign and refreshing? Has our culture become so cynical that we no longer have the capacity to listen without having a wry, critical distance? Or has the media become so profit driven and sensationalistic that they no longer can mediate information responsibly? Because the soldiers have faced certain death, and stood over the rubble that might have crushed them, but having lived, they owned the experience, and chose to tell the tale artfully and carefully. If we all live in a war zone of some kind, should we not do the same? Words alone can impregnate promise or despair in such a precipice: the arts can inspire or despise humanity.

In Jesus’ realism of “these things must happen,” he was also reminding us that our sacrifice, either for just or unjust reasons, would not be the last word. Our efforts, however noble, will not end the cause of injustice. But we are all given a call for self-sacrifice nevertheless. None are exempt, not even a pacifist thirteen-year-old secluded as far away from Iraq as humanly possible. And Jesus knows, first hand, what it means to die an unjust death without picking up a stone, or a spear. Instead, he continues to breath life into us in our funerary songs. By listening to these soldiers/poets, though, we may even begin to feel that life-breath, a hint of a culture of self- giving. Despite the anguish, De’on writes with the same quiet surrender of the Amish sisters :

“My faith doesn’t equal that of Job’s. I question. Why has God cut the fruit from my vine? Taken the only child that remained? Left me with no hope for a grandchild? I‘m certain there can be no more. No more children.
And yet I have no particular animosity for my son’s killer. He’s a nameless and faceless combatant to me. Should I ever have the opportunity to meet him, I hope that I’d forgive him. To me, the buck stops with the Father. His power stings at times. But He’s listened to me; perhaps He’s even cried with me. And yes, I do know what I’m talking about here. ‘It’s a belief, man.’ Aaron’s words. ‘You either believe in God or you don’t.’ Yes, I’d forgive. I do forgive. There is absolutely nothing I’d do to keep myself from spending eternity with God and Aaron.”

Our path back to Eden is blocked, but there is a way in to the feast of the selfless. Only in these words of forgiveness, utterly stripped down to the core of faith, can echo the Timeless, or the Time-ful, promise of an Easter morning. That is our true Homecoming. Even if the condition is unbearably chaotic, or simply cruel, these authentic voices refracts in our fear dominated cultural landscape, mediating how we can choose to face a new day, and breathing certain hope into our stricken hearts.

Last weekend I attended a wedding in Durham , NC. What a beautiful celebration. Two hearts, two souls united in life. How much more can God do to delight the soul? At a point in the ceremony a friend read the following poem. It captures the heart of the artist to live out of our created image. I share it with you go and spread your wings.

Gary Bradley

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver
Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
The one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
from New and Selected Poems, 1992_Beacon Press, Boston, MA Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver._All rights reserved._Reproduced with permission

Check out http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
Welcome to Poetry 180. Poetry can and should be an important part of our daily lives. Poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race. By just spending a few minutes reading a poem each day, new worlds can be revealed.
Poetry 180 is designed to make it easy for students to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year. I have selected the poems you will find here with high school students in mind. They are intended to be listened to, and I suggest that all members of the school community be included as readers. A great time for the readings would be following the end of daily announcements over the public address system.Listening to poetry can encourage students and other learners to become members of the circle of readers for whom poetry is a vital source of pleasure. I hope Poetry 180 becomes an important and enriching part of the school day.
Billy Collins_Former Poet Laureate of the United States

A friend asked me once whether I have any means of explaining or connecting evangelism, discipleship and development. I realized that I’ve been thinking about these issues for over 20 years, and wrote out the following rough set of thoughts.

The first thing is that I’ve never seen the split as real, so it’s never actually been a problem for me, although this disjunction is where most Western Christians seem to be coming from. Fundamentally, my thinking is rooted in the concept of God’s heart, or God’s passion, for His creation. Although, as a student of Philosophy and theology, I completely recognize the need for “good” theological thinking, I have never been able to escape the balancing need for a passion that is from God and which comes from our allowing Him to break our hearts for His creation.

Whenever I examine Genesis 1 and 2, this passion is inescapable to me. When God had finished creating the world, and people, He looked at it all and was very pleased. For me, this fact and His desire to create us at all is central to understanding the rest of Scripture. Yes, the creation is fallen (that is, “broken”, “marred”, “twisted”) because of Adam and Eve’s rebellion, but who is going to send their son to die for garbage? Doesn’t all of Scripture clearly place a pretty high value on humankind as the crown of creation? Especially when it says that we were created in God’s image?

Also, when I read Scripture, I get the distinct impression that we as His children are also to be about redeeming creation out of its bondage, participating in God’s creative effort out of our own creative nature which is like His. Is this not also what Isaiah 58 and 61 are about? Perhaps even most, or all, of the Old Testament? God is continually – and creatively – reaching out to His creation, seeking to bring it back into relationship with Himself. It is only through Christ’s death and resurrection, however, that it could actually be done, once for all.

O.K. So let’s grant that creation and humankind, being made in God’s image and originally “very good,” are perhaps even worth dying for. For me, the next question is, what does all this say about the nature of man? That is, our being made body, soul and spirit. And what does this say about how we are to live?

First, as I read Scripture, when God made man he didn’t exalt one part of us over another. Instead, He intended from the beginning that we be fully integrated beings. Otherwise, why should Christ have said and done what he did throughout his ministry — e.g. Matt. 6:25ff – healing and feeding people much of the time? Why not just ignore the physical and embrace a Gnostic or Manichean form of Christianity, if we are correct to exalt only the intellect or the spirit? We should have a lot in common with Buddhists and some others.

But NO.

God is concerned about every aspect of us, His creatures, because he intended that we be integrated wholes. So, therefore, as His children, we must also be similarly concerned about our fellows. This answers the second question about how we should live. But I need to insert a side note here. Read John 10:10 where Christ says, “I am come that you might have life and that you might have it abundantly.” Is he only talking about after we die?? Does that make any sense at all? Or do the many passages in the Old Testament make no sense either, where God states, for example, that “you shall never see the children of the righteous begging for bread”?

Why is any of that stuff in the Bible at all, if it’s not also important to God? Nevertheless, true life does not consist in amassing a multiplicity of stuff – but it matters. In fact, when I read Matthew 6, what I believe that Christ is really saying is, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. Be like kids. Let me take care of the stuff you need every day – and I know that you need it – you focus on what I’ve made you for, which is relationship and service to me.”

So how does any of this connect to evangelism? Well, what is evangelism? But even before that, I think we have to ask ourselves what really is the good news?

Is the “good news” just that Christ died for our sins? That he fulfilled some arcane legal obligation of God? Or is it that God, our heavenly Father, loves us so much that He sent his only Son to become one of us, experience this life as a human, and die a completely undeserved and horrendous death – all so that we might have a relationship again with Him? Isn’t that what God desired with Adam and Eve, at the very beginning?!? And isn’t that what He wishes to restore?

Yes. We cannot minimize the holiness of God and the seriousness of sin – which must be seen as an attitude of rebellion, not as a list of transgressed laws – and other religions recognize these realities in similar ways. So what is the essence of Christianity that differentiates it from all other religions? What is the Good News? Is it not that God desires relationship with His creatures, and that He cares so passionately for them that He was willing to allow His Son to die a cruel, unjust and completely undeserved death, just so He could regain that relationship? That is, He took the first step, realizing we can in fact do nothing of ourselves.

What does this say about the passages where it says He pities His children, because they are as frail as dust? Is there no analogy between that and the pity we feel for our own children? Ought we not ask Him to give us the same heart for our fellow creatures that He has towards them – and towards us?
If we face facts, we cannot separate our bodies from who we are any more than we can separate ourselves from time or growing old. And the consequence of all this is that our physical wellbeing is intimately tied into our psychological and spiritual wellbeing, and vice versa. So we are called to accept this, just as God does, and to deal with others in a way that recognizes this reality, treats them as a whole, and strives to help bring them back to the whole-ness God originally intended for them.

Well, if that is the good news, now perhaps we can ask, what is evangelism? Isn’t it showing people who God is – in His entirety? Isn’t that what Jesus’ life was about? After all, he said, how many times, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” What did people see? Why focus on just one aspect of God’s nature, or just one way of communicating it? Weren’t the Israelites put on earth to show the nations who God is, and to be God’s means of blessing everyone else? Aren’t we now grafted in to that same tree?

So how do we live out that heritage? Is the good news only to be communicated verbally? Or is it only to be communicated through living out God’s love? No. It has to be both, and then some, for we are creatures who incorporate all those means of understanding within ourselves. And yet, there would appear to be a primacy in all of us which would want to emphasize the seeing and touching. Or, at least, the conjoining of the two, with the living out coming first to indicate that the verbiage is true. For isn’t it always much easier to say something, but far more difficult to live it out in the face of reality?

That ability to actually live out one’s espoused values is also something that differentiates Christianity from other religions. I’ve met a few extremely devout adherents of other religions who put most any Christian I’ve known to shame, including myself. (Sometimes I think we take the Bill Gothard statement as a cop-out.) But it’s obviously themselves who have done it, and it doesn’t lead to peace, for it’s actually based on fear, or shame or legalism. On the other hand, with the truly devout Christians I’ve known, it’s always clear that it can only be the Holy Spirit who does it through them.
As Cardinal Suhard wrote,

“To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”

But even that’s not all. What makes genuine Christianity attractive is that there’s also a peace and joy the others don’t have.

So, what am I trying to say in all of this? Basically that people have value because we are made in God’s image – every bit of us. And it’s not just our brains, or our spirits, but all of us that God pronounced “very good.” And that this is sufficient to warrant a lifestyle that ought to mirror God’s concern about whether we have enough to eat or wear, as well as whether we know His Son.

So there must also be passion involved in our dealings with God’s creation, for from all indications in Scripture God is very passionate about us. But it needs to be His passion. For then there can be only one explanation for our lives, which is that He really does exist, and that people truly can change. Across my own life, the only way I’ve found this truth effectively communicated to me, or have found it effectively communicated to others, has been through a little talking (planting seeds) and a lot of living. In this way, evangelism, discipleship and development are simply different aspects of the same thing.

I hope this might engender some dialogue from fellow travelers.

Philip Sawyer
April, 1999

(This was posted for a while on the website of World Christians.)

The good news is full of beauty, goodness, and truth. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit also exhibit these and many other attributes. Romans Chapter 1 also says men can find God through creation (beauty), conscience (goodness), and truth.

For some time the emphasis in America has been to focus on truth-telling. Reaching people with the truth by first being good or beautiful has not been considered an effective way to reach the lost. The social gospel may have scared some away from using goodness to attract people to Christ, and the arts themselves have for many decades been a scary place for people of faith.

We know that Paul shared as of first importance that Christ died, was buried, and resurrected victorious in defeat of our separation from God, and that without this truth, people would not enjoy a personal relationship with Him. But somewhere along the line we lost the first importance part of this and decided it was of only importance. The result has been a good news that has largely been the bare truth; in your face, black and white, us and them; dividing the saved from the lost.

This worked for hundreds of years in U.S. history because the government, the culture, and the religion were all in synch with the message of the truth - you either know Jesus or you don’t - make a decision. But in the last 30+ years the culture, the government, and the religion are no longer in agreement about what is true. And in that environment, truth by itself can become divisive.

Jesus met people where they were, not where he wanted them to be (the woman at the well, Zaccheus in the tree, the many people who needed physical healing as well as spiritual). We would like all people to be at the point where the only thing left for them to do is to decide to embrace Christ’s resurrection, but as our culture drifts farther and farther from this never-changing truth, more and more people won’t respond to this message as our first attempt to draw them in. In fact, this direct truth-telling, or didactic approach to reaching people can have the opposite effect. If my understanding of “truth” is a long way from the actual truth, my only reaction might be to be offended by your truth.

While the good news is true, the good news is also beautiful and good, and these are values that all men seem to still find attractive, even if we disagree on the truth itself. People who would not first respond to a discussion of the truth might still be attracted to a discussion of goodness or beauty, or better yet, actual ACTS of beauty and goodness.

Via Affirmativa (The Way of Affirmation) affirms the need to be involved in acts of beauty as well as goodness, and that these acts can be used to invite people in, to create community that can create conversation, which can lead to people wanting to know Christ.

All Beauty was created by God and is owned by Him. Rather than abandoning the arts, the convinced community should be deeply involved in the arts to infuse it with beauty that is also good and true. And this Beauty should be attractional, inviting people into a conversation that will eventually or very quickly lead them to a relationship with Christ.

We don’t need to infuse our art with obvious overt symbols and/or words of religion (although some do this successfully). What we really need is to love our God with all our heart, soul and mind, love our neighbor as ourselves, produce art that is beautiful, good, and true, and become fully engaged with the culture of the artist as an artist. (We don’t ask welders to stop building cars and only weld crosses after they come to Christ. Although a welder here and there might want to do that.)

Via Affirmativa affirms the need for artists to be in the mainstream arts just as business people are in the mainstream of business. We affirm that God wants to redeem artists in their “place” not out of their place, because an artist in the mainstream of the arts who loves God can be salt and light in a place where others who love Christ may never have an influence.

Chuck Blakeman

Redemptive living–The next generation:

“We need to be encouraging our children to be in creative fields. We need to be sending them out as Churches, we need to be blessing them to go to New York or LA, to be an actor, to be a director, to be the next Spielberg, or Picasso. Christians need to be seen as this creative force that the world sees and concludes: “hey if I want to be an artist I need to go to Church because that is where creativity thrives!” “My prayer is that the Church be a place where creative ones adjourn to.”

“We are called to be supernatural communities of grace….we need to be a community and culture that is influencing the outer zones of cultures. We can do it boldly and confidently, but we need to learn how, with respect, and the confidence comes from understanding that we are broken people and do not have all the answers.

It’s important to teach our children to be good stewards of their creativity, and use it to glorify God as they go into the world…we could influence culture that way.”

In Mark 15, Jesus said - “…believe in the gospel.” and in 1:17 he said “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

I’ve believed a lot of things in my life that didn’t result in living much differently. Beethoven was a great composer, puppies are cute, and ice cream tastes good. But these and countless other beliefs don’t give me a reason to get up in the morning.

Other deeper beliefs have given me the motivation to complete a goal. Playing clarinet would be satisfying, serving and contributing to society has a positive impact on the world around me. These have had direct impact on the way I live and have given me reasons during this life to get out of bed each morning.

Other beliefs have changed my life for eternity; that God made me to love Him and to love people (Matthew 22:36-40); that believing in Him would result in following Him. I believe that he wants to use my relationship with Him and with people as salt and light in redeeming His kingdom for Himself.

My first two kinds of belief are destinational. If I believe ice cream tastes good, I try arrive at eating it. If contributing to society or to an organization is good, I try to arrive at making a measurable/identifiable contribution.

But if I believe God wants me to love Him and people, arrival is not part of the equation. This core belief asks me to live directionally, to always ask the question right now, “Am I walking with God or away from Him?” And there are no destinational markers that can tell me that, no matter what contribution I’ve made. “From faith, to faith…the righteous shall live by faith.” (Rom 1:17).

It’s easier to measure myself by destinations, contributions, and arrivals - “I am now a believer, a member, contributor, etc.” But He just wants to know if I love Him right now, if I’m not just believing, but following.

I am a believer in Christ, but there is something much more powerful, personal, and transformational about identifying myself as a follower of Christ. I’m trying to live directionally in a world that asks me to identify my worth by the destinations to which I have arrived. I think it’s part of the worthy struggle. I’d love your thoughts as well.