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

I wish I could have listened to Jesus tell his own parables. What a storyteller he was. He was awake to the world, he paid attention to the moments he was living and found things to feed his imagination…an imagination wrestling with how to communicate so much with the people he so loved. Wheat and fig trees, sheep and vineyards, oxen and estranged sons became the paint with which he colored the canvas of his days, bringing life to concepts no propositional presentation could. How brave, and trusting, to allow his audience to filter his stories through their own experience of the world, and through the exercise of their own wills, arrive at their own conclusions.

I love spending time with people whose heritage is still infused with the value of oral tradition–or who just know how to tell a good story. Whether around a campfire, from a podium or on the written page, a well-told story grips me. It slips past my mental defenses and grips the core of who I am, leaving me to consider the world and what is real in ways I may not have otherwise.

What are the stories I respond to most? Why? What does it look like for me to be more awake to the world around me? What are the stories which are uniquely in me, that I have been given to tell?

posted by Amy Wevodau

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.