Lausanne World Pulse – LAUSANNE REPORTS – Redeeming the Arts
By Colin Harbinson
Discipleship
In Act II we look at the artist in spiritual community. Our focus is the discipleship of the artist shaped by a kingdom view. It encompasses the calling, mentoring, training, empowering and supporting of artists as uniquely gifted and vital parts of the body of Christ.
To understand discipleship for artists as participants in the Church’s mission in the world, we need to understand with more empathy and perspective some of the key issues that affect their involvement. Among the issues considered are:
• Attitudes of the Church toward the arts and of artists toward the Church
• The struggles of the artist with authority, freedom and accountability
• The nature of artistic language (the way art “speaks”)
• The inspiration or empowerment of artists by the Holy Spirit
• How we understand the nature of the creative process itself
• The impact of “non-contextual” attempts at mission on indigenous art.
The Church today faces a different kind of world—one that has undergone profound changes in the past fifty years and continues to change at a rapid pace. Few people can avoid the realities of the information and artistic media that shape our everyday environment. At a time when communication has abandoned the age of the orator, we now find ourselves, culturally speaking, in the age of the artist.
Transformation
With spiritual and cultural transformation as desired outcomes, Act III examines
- the place of the arts within culture
- the importance of indigenous and contextualized artistic expression, the role of the arts in evangelism and missions
- the need for Christians to practice their art in the marketplace
- significant contribution the arts can make to the process of personal healing and social change.
Art, in and of itself, cannot transform; only Christ can transform the human condition.
With that clarification as context, we show that the arts allow for diversity as they “witness” in verbal and nonverbal ways to the truth about the human condition and incarnationally “show” God’s redemptive purposes. They can also draw people to Christ when linked to acts of compassion and service. The arts enable cross-cultural and cross-generational communication and contextualization. Social and economic barriers can be overcome through collaborative art making, and arts used in therapies can invigorate health and healing.
Jesus consistently invited people to use their imaginations, to allow the images he presented to come alive and to find meaning within those imaginings. He recognized that words or commands were insufficient. In order for people to make changes, they must first be able to imagine what is possible. Human transformative activity depends upon a transformed imagination. We illustrate that this is especially true in at-risk and impoverished communities or groups of displaced and broken people, where the arts can reinvigorate a sense of personal and social responsibility.
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Colin Harbinson has been involved in the arts and missions in over sixty nations. He is international director of StoneWorks, a global arts partnership for cultural reformation and the recovery of the imagination in the life and mission of the Church. Harbinson is founder and president of the International Festival of the Arts and the Lausanne Senior Associate for the Arts. |