The church I currently attend regularly hosts and encourages participation in the arts.
Sometimes this looks like offering up the space for events or engagements: a local high school improv crew, a string quartet, a community theatre group. Sometimes it looks like integrating arts into the life of the church itself: hosting art exhibits by and for congregants, sharing poetry and literature, holding book clubs. Most recently, the church came together over months to paint a vast, beautiful mural for the Easter service.
I find this wonderful—and refreshing. The truth is, the humanities and the arts are a significant part of how we might engage our faith, but their cultural devaluing in the US has had implications that stretch even into congregations. This is a great sorrow to me, because it’s in the arts and the humanities we might find much to inspire, encourage, and move us to develop and strengthen our walk with God.
This can look like different things to different people.
Ask me to name a list of the work that has inspired me in my faith and an entire library of books will fall out: Tolkien and Lewis’ works, anything by Stephen Lawhead, Le Morte D’Arthur,Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Wordsworth, for a start. Ask me about art and I’ll invoke the works of Makoto Fujimura and the Pre-Raphaelites. Music? Taize, Loreena McKennitt, Anuna, Japanese composers. But others’ lists will be different, unique as a fingerprint.
What’s particularly special, to me, is that the art and music and books allow room for individual encounters with God that meet us where we live and where our hearts are most open. We can encounter Christ quite literally in the arts, of course, by engaging art that is about Him: music that praises His attributes, art that depicts His life, books that discuss how to live like Him. But we can also encounter Him in other ways through art that at first glance appears not to be about Him or to be “Christian” at all.
The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion take place in Tolkien’s created fantasy world, for example, but themes of justice, mercy, grace, pity, and pride that resonate strongly in those texts have proven over the years to resonate deeply with Christian readers. Fujimura’s Walking on Water may move viewers to reflect on their faith though the painting itself does not depict a literal Biblical scene. The Rabbit Room (founded by songwriter Andrew Peterson) is an initiative that strives to create Christian community through art of various types that may or may not be explicitly Christian in nature.
The arts can translate concepts we have trouble understanding in practice. Scripture teaches me mercy; when I read about Frodo’s decision to spare Gollum’s life, I understand in a deeper way the cost of mercy, the significance of it, and how it might be woven into cosmic redemption. Scripture teaches me that nature testifies to the glory of God; Wordsworth walks me above Tintern Abbey to experience what that means. Scripture tells me to praise God in all circumstances; a violin solo in a Loreena McKennitt song can help lead me into dancing.
Yet we live in a culture and a society that has largely devalued art. Art is not “useful” in the most economic sense: it is not a job, it is not something that always makes a ton of money, it takes time, it takes energy. And AI, advocates say, can produce art in the fragment of time a human might: albeit with little of the depth, none of the heart, and divorced from the context of creation altogether. In the current political climate, arts and humanities project, initiatives, and budgets are being gutted wholesale—deemed valueless, insignificant.
And yet as humans we have been making art as long as we have been here, and sometimes it is all of remains of those who came before: handprints on cave walls, markings, carvings, statues. We have stories to tell. We have questions to ask. We have things we want to understand. Faith invites us into these things; art does, too.
A few weeks ago, at my church, our preschool held an art exhibit. The children had worked on pieces for several weeks that were now presented in all seriousness—matted and framed—and auctioned off to eager onlookers. The funds of course went to the preschool, which was great, but I was touched by the forum itself: the emphasis, to these kids, that art matters and art as a way of encountering Jesus matters.
David danced, after all. And Scripture itself manifests as poetry, song, and story.
Exodus tells us that God filled some of the Israelites with the Spirit of God to weave and craft and build—to make art in the service of God. Philippians tell us to think on anything lovely, commendable, excellent, praiseworthy. God has given us the ability to sing and paint, to dance and write: shall we not then identify Him in, and encounter Him through, those things?
God gave us many channels through which to meet Him and enjoy Him. Let’s not neglect them, regardless of the tendencies of culture, economy, and habit. The arts matter: not just in the concert hall, or the museum, or in the library, but within the church too.
Samaritan's Song 