Thanks to everyone who had the opportunity to attend our Faith and Arts conference “Created to Create” last week. What an amazing opportunity to wrestle together with what it means to embody the creative expressions that God has create us with. Please feel free to comment on our New Wine Blog of the what the conference meant for you. For those of you not able to attend, we will have the MP3’s of the plenary and workshop sessions available for sale soon. Thanks again for all your support on making this transformative Kingdom event possible.
Thumbs Up: Arts, Faith, and Alberta
(If your not familiar with Alberta Streets Last Thursday Arts Festival check out this short clip: Alberta Arts Video)
Have you ever thought of where the gesture “thumbs up” originated? Your thumb is a unique digit on your hand, so maybe it’s from sign language. We’ll have to Wikipedia it to find our for sure. Wherever it came from, it sure does feel good to get them, especially from people you’ve just met.
On April 25th, I had a chance to reflect on some great “thumbs up” moments as I presented a portion of our New Wine Intern “Created to Create” conference workshop. I spoke of an experience I recently participated in with a diverse group of fifteen others as we gained exposure of Portland’s Alberta Streets Last Thursday Arts festival. I had been struggling with coming up with an idea of how to create exposure to different perspectives on art, faith, and racial reconciliation. It was in my cultural anthropology class at Multnomah Biblical Seminary that I started learning of the gentrification and displacement of the African-American community in the Alberta Arts district. During the 1990’s, the city of Portland along with private investors poured money into an extensive urban renewal “face lift” in Alberta’s crime infused area. As property values in the area skyrocketed, many of Alberta’s long-lived African-Americas were displaced because of unaffordable increases in housing rental costs.
The neighborhoods around Alberta Street look a lot different than they did fifteen years ago. Now, the community is predominantly a mixture of young hipster white middle class Portlanders and what remains of the traditional African community. On the last Thursday of every month, Alberta Street opens its sidewalks to experimental art venders and performers. The hipsters and hippies come out in droves to hang out for this uniquely Portland block party. To create space for exposure for this New Wine Immersion event, I decided to look at the aspects of restoration and beauty as well as observation and participation as it related to arts, faith, and racial reconciliation.
When our group first arrived to Alberta Street I unpacked how the night was going to unfold. Then I began to pass out bright purple latex gloves and black garbage bags to everyone. With looks of confusion on their faces, I explained that, as a matter of our faith, we were going to participate in the beautification of the Alberta neighborhood. Neighborhood clean up, or restoration, is an artistic act of worship. Artistic expression often times puts a greater emphasis on scarcity, or an individual’s creation of a uniquely original work. It seems that God’s involvement in the creative restoration and beautification of what was once damaged in creation, points us to places where our artistic expression can move into areas of collaboration and participation in this process.
We divided our beautification efforts between Alberta Street, where the Arts festival takes place, and the surrounding neighborhood residential streets. Not too long after we began, I noticed the group really getting into the project. We were having a great time interacting with each other, when we began noticing the neighbors paying closer attention to us. Folks on Alberta were giving us “thumbs up” and shouting thank-you’s wherever we walked. As we started moving off Alberta and deeper into the less admired parts of the neighborhood, residents began to come out of their houses and meet us on the street as we were picking up garbage.
One woman came up to me and said, “Thank you so much! No one ever does this sort of thing, especially not around this side of Alberta. Everybody forgets about us down here.” As our trash bags became full we took in a gorgeous sunset and deposited our restoration waste into a nearby dumpster.
We finished off the night with some observation of the art work being displayed by the various venders as we asked ourselves questions like, “What makes good art?” and “What is the artist trying to communicate through their work?” As we entered a time of reflective dialogue in our group, I began to ask myself how the church at large can best integrated the arts into the proclamation of the gospel in both word and deed. I’m still wrestling with this question. I’m starting to realize that I’ll probably be living in this tension for a long time. I’m just glad I have some of those “thumbs up” moments of reflection to soak in while I’m wrestling.
I’m interested in hearing how you are engaging creatively through the arts in the holistic expression of the gospel. In what ways has the church done this well or perhaps not so well? Where do we go from here?
The Art of Advocacy: Powerful Portraits
I once attended an art exhibit displaying several portraits of Holocaust victims during WWII. They had been photographed during their release from the concentration camps. As I stood paralyzed by the overwhelmingly pressing weight of trauma worn on each of the victims’ faces, a thought occurred to me. I wasn’t just staring at the photos, the photos were staring at me. With all that going on, I also thought of the thousands of stories I had heard connected to the Holocaust. As this flood of emotion crashed through me, the eyes of each victim starred through me to the point of penetrating my very soul.
A few weeks ago I began reflecting on how art, story, and advocacy are connected. It started after I had the privilege of attending the Oregon Center for Christian Value’s (OCCV) conference, entitled Vote Out Poverty Advocacy Training. The event, in association with Sojourners, was hosted by Mosiac Church here in Portland. Aaron Graham, the keynote speaker from Sojourners, began the session with a talk entitled “The Power of Stories”. It went something like this.
The LORD says in Exodus 3:7, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.” God’s concerned love initiates His movement down to rescue these oppressed people. He does this through calling Moses to be an advocate for justice.
So, what is justice? In the recently release anti-slavery movie, “Call + Response”, I remember Dr. Cornel West saying that justice is what love looks like in public. Aaron Graham spoke of justice as an act of worship. These concepts spun around in my head over and over again that day. In what ways do we, as proclaimers of God’s kingdom, communicate in word and deed, this deep longing to engage the people of injustices to the world around us?
So, what does communication look like that breaks down the callousness of people’s hearts, penetrating their very souls? Can we see it in a photograph or painting? Does it embrace us in a song? I believe that artistic expression has a way of penetrating one’s soul, without one’s soul giving it permission. Art is never absent from the lives of oppressed people. Aaron went on that day to teach of the importance of the art of story. Throughout scripture we are gripped by God’s character being revealed through the narrative story. God is first introduced in Genesis 1 as the Creator, the artist who’s writing His story. We receive the invitation to participate and write our own story with Him, united in Him in community.
Aaron Graham has experienced a severe disconnect between Church priorities and what he reads in scripture concerning how much God cares for the poor and marginalized. This is why he is passionate about advocacy training for the Christian community. In Matthew 9:37-38 Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” This rhythmic drum beat for justice is the call. Our activity is the response. As we have been created in the image of the Creator Artist God, how are we bearing the imaginative response to his love for us and those suffering at the hands of the oppressors? If you really love people, you don’t want to see them abused. How are we practicing the Art of Advocacy for Jesus? What stories are we telling? What portraits are we painting?
WONDROUS WEBBING
“When God created the Heavens and the earth, He wove it all together like a million silk threads forming a dazzling garment never before seen—each thread passing over, and under and around millions of others to create a perfectly complementary, tightly woven interdependent, amazing whole. This wondrous webbing together of God and man and all of creation is what the Hebrew prophets called shalom.”
The theme for this year’s Christian Community Development (CCDA) Conference, referred to in the quote above, is “Shalom—Seeking The Peace Of The City”. It’s a great idea, right? I mean who doesn’t like peace? But how do we move and act to bring it about in this broken world? Peace is a great idea, as long as brokenness never enters the picture. We often think of peace as the absence of any sort of tension. However, defining shalom apart from its relationship with tension is like defining courage without mentioning the need to face fears. True shalom seeks to lovingly redeem through entering into brokenness. The whole, completed picture after the restoration is where shalom rests.
So often in my personal experience, especially in regards to relationships, I have had this incomplete picture of peace. Rather than addressing and resolving tensions with people in my community, I tend to disregard, downplay, drown, or even desert associations with conflicts. This disengagement of emotional sufferings never results in my attainment of peace. Jesus suffered for the sake of love, bringing victory in the form of entering into and defeating death by his resurrection. As I find Him pursuing my heart here at the conference I am realizing true “Shalom for the City” must begin with the shalom of my heart that can only be found by living in Him. By being united in His Spirit I have courage to engage my emotional sufferings from the past, present, and future.
2 Cor. 5:17-19, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”
Any attempts that we may have to “Seek the Peace of the City” apart from Him are impossible. As God’s community, we are found in the Prince of Peace and called to reconcile the tension in our hearts so that we may go out and bring that message of shalom to our cities and the world. Thread by thread He is weaving us all back together.