nakedpastor

The other day I received an email from someone asking how I would recommend incorporating the arts into the church and what steps could be taken. While I believe the question is one motivated by genuine concern, the only intelligible answer that might satisfy is one that must be given within the programatic and institutional paradigm within which the question was asked. This is the problem. The question exposes the paradigm and presses for an answer that conforms to that paradigm. We must realize that the question rarely reaches beyond itself. The question normally asserts its present paradigm and is usually a dogmatic statement seeking confirmation disguised as intellectual interest. The questioner may be trapped inside a paradigm that the mind hasn’t dreamed must perish.

So the normal way to answer the question would be something like this:

First of all, get permission from the leadership to start encouraging the arts. Then maybe start an art appreciation class. Then maybe an art instruction class. Ask the pastor if creative elements can be added to the church service. This will involve some “creative types”. Request that the leaders allow art to be displayed in the lobby. Set up an editorial committee that determines which art is appropriate for church. Etc., etc..

Just shoot me! Let me show you a better way. The church is generally a censorious community. In this environment art is sanitized, tame and conformist. It is still art, but functions as a reinforcement of the system. Expression is controlled and edited from start to finish. This kills art because it kills creativity because it kills freedom. Instead, allow people to be free without scrutiny. (I even hate the word “allow” because it assumes it needs to be given when it is already ours.) In due time, after people begin to realize that they are loved and accepted unconditionally, the creative spirit will surface and artistic diversity will abound. This is the harder but more genuine way. It means taking care of the roots. If the root is unfettered freedom, then fruitful and artistic living happens. It is the diversity of human expression of personality that makes the artful life. Until this is nurtured art will be repressed.

The fine art photograph titled “Fusion” is the creation of my friend Howard Nowlan.

This is a watercolor piece I did: 20″x30″. It is Illustration Friday’s submission this week for the theme: “electricity”.

I take no credit or praise for my community. Any credit or praise belongs to the community itself. I have built nothing. I have constructed nothing. I have succeeded in doing nothing. I have grown nothing. In fact, I make it my purpose to not build anything with these people. What I have around me is a community of people who willingly and voluntarily desire to be in relationship with each other and to gather together. Ephesians 4: 3 says to “keep the unity of the Spirit“. Unity, or community, is not something we have to build, but keep. I therefore see my primary task as preventing obstacles and barriers from interfering in this reality. I’m a weeder. When I think of it, my activity as a pastor is negative, as non-activity. It is to prevent interference, remove obstacles, clear impediments and reject deterrents to unity and community. It is so popular now to have the excessive baggage of plans, visions, goals, renewal, and programmed growth, that true authenticity and true community is difficult if not impossible. What I try to nurture is an environment free of restrictions to the unity that is already ours. This means free people gathering freely in the reality of freedom. Why complicate it?

I am confident that as the weeds are kept at bay, fruit will grow in individuals and in the community. But this is not my doing. We could go further with the analogy to say that good teaching and life experience is fertilizer, but I wanted to try to communicate what my strategy is for pastoring a healthy community. It is anti-strategy. It is to not include, assimilate or integrate strategies to create, erect, build or grow something. It is free, I hope, of my ambitions, goals, visions or desires for these people and this community. My only desire is for them to be free, and free to experience the unity that is theirs. And in that freedom is their possibility for a fruitful life. This is not radical. It is anti-radical. Perhaps you can see this? It is difficult to articulate.

I’ve been wondering about the Dionysian elements of our religious phenomenological experience. I say Dionysian because ecstatic manifestations of prayer, worship and miracles were elements of this religion. Some biblical scholars and historians claim, in fact, that much of early Christianity was a response or reaction to or a borrowing from the religion of Dionysius. Emotional or ecstatic expressions of prayer, worship, spirituality and intercession are demonstrated across the religious spectrum. We see it not only in some Christian sects, but also in Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish, Voodoo, Shaman and Wican sects, to name a few. Mysticism is not Christian, but religious, and sweeps across all religious lines. Miracles are not the sole claim of Christianity, but of a segment of every religion and anti-religion in the world. Have you not heard about, not just the evangelists, but the shamans, gurus, sufis, rabbis, psychics, witch-doctors and new-age practitioners with healing and miraculous powers? As Barth would solemnly remind us, with the revelation of God came religion. The human involvement in religion and its expression is total, deep, wide, mysterious, archetypal, ancient and complex.

As Jacques Ellul would suggest:

If one would conform to a true prayer before God, one would need firmly to reject (the) seductive temptations which carry a sort of label of authenticity. Unfortunately it is the label of a false authenticity, one which man authenticates for himself when he confuses his own psychic phenomena with the hidden but solemn presence of the Lord of his life (Prayer and Modern Man, p. 24).

Are we even slightly aware of our own “psychic phenomena”? Are we even slightly aware of our unconscious powers? Are we at all cognizant of the enormous spiritual powers that are immediately accessible to us? Are we informed about the Dionysian spirit that courses its way through every faith community that gathers? Sometimes I wonder.

The fine art photo is the creation of my friend Howard Nowlan.