Blogs & Articles
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Practice & Formation
When Art Comes to Town: Reflection on Art as Public Mission
The concept is simple; to employ art to tell the Christmas story. Seek tactile interaction – make a star out of wire, mark your home town on a world map, record the one thing you would take with you on a refugee journey – as a way of inviting people into the Christmas story.The use of containers is a master stroke. A container provides a space in which a unique environment can be created, allowing a different part of a Journey to be created. A container has roofs and floor, allowing a Christmas story to be placed outside. They are lockable, ensuring security for art and electronic gear in public spaces.
In 2005 permission was gained by Side Door Arts Trust, in partnership with Opawa Baptist Church and Creative Communities, to place 8 containers, each container telling part of the Christmas story, in the square at the centre of Christchurch city. The Christmas story was to find a home outside the church and in the marketplace.
Ironically, Council regulations demanded a temporary building permit and required a wire fence. As soon as the Christmas story was taken outside the church, it acquired a fence! However the public response was excellent, with nearly 8,000 people visiting.
Building on the relationship with the Christchurch City Council, permission was sought in 2006 to place the 8 containers, not together, but separately. Each was wrapped in nylon fabric to represent a Christmas present, and placed at strategic tourist sites – the art
gallery, the museum, the information centre – around the city. Each container was also placed adjacent to the tram route, a major Christchurch tourist attraction.
The art for inside each container was prepared at Opawa Baptist Church. A hi-ab container truck transported the containers into town. Picture the scene as suddenly, nine days before Christmas, eight 20 feet long wrapped Christmas presents suddenly appear, scattered, throughout the city centre.
On the door of each container part of the Christmas Bible story was painted (in the style of Colin McCahon, a famous New Zealand artist). Inside each container a different theme is explored.
The results:
- Stories of people emerging from church containers declaring “I am changed.”
- People’s written responses at various containers indicating an honest and deep engagement
- Over 15,000 people visited. (Note that there was no way to record if these visitors had been to other containers. So while unlikely, it is conceivable that a total of 2,400 people visited all 8 containers).
The implications:
- Don’t do this if your goal is increasing church attendance. It takes a lot of energy out of a church and you end up encouraging people to volunteer on containers during church time.
- Ideally each container has someone for purposes of explanation, welcome and security. This requires a large commitment (8 containers for 9 days open for 3 by 4 hours slots = 212 volunteers).
- This volunteer dimension allows people a practical way to “give” during Christmas. This needs to be placed alongside the busyness and rush that people face.
- Another volunteer dimension is that people are exposed to the rhythms of the city. This allows a missional conversation. Equally, it raises issues of safety.
- A project on this scale demands a huge variety of gifts – to create, to stand at a container, to publicise, to negotiate. It feels a lot like 1 Corinthians 12, with all parts of the body important and thus becomes the mission of a church community.
Unresolved tensions
- The tension between whether the Journey should act like an interactive signboard or the foyer of a building. Should each container stand alone, as a signboard? Or should the Journey be like a foyer, that welcomes and points people toward church or Christianity in some way?
The concept of gift is important. Many churches offer subtle switch and bait operations. Should the containers be offered as a gift, with no strings attached? Or should they come with a subtle price tag. (This could include invitation to church services, a Christian tract, a takeway resource). Yet society at Christmas is so dominated by consumerism and when the church offers “switch and bait” have we not bowed down to the gods of consumerism in our culture? Each year this is debated. In 2006 the Journey simply offered a takeaway potential of a memorable moment.
- Should the containers be grouped (as in 2005 in the Square) or separated (as in 2006 around the city centre)? The former allows greater visibility and increases the chances of completing the whole Journey. The latter increases visibility and curiosity and allows walking time for reflection. However it demands a greater effort if people want to then complete the Journey.
The Christmas Journey evolved under the leadership and creative talents of Peter and Joyce Majendie. They have prepared a teaching video “Art in public space as mission.” This is a four hour seminar in which they trace the creative process. This is available for sale from artcomestotown at www.emergentkiwi.org.nz
(This article was previously published in 2007.)
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Theology
The Cutting Edge & the Humour of God
Ever get tired of trite phrases? There are few that get me going. “Cutting edge” is one, “movement” another. In churchland we’ve lots of (in the spirit of Foucault) power words signaling who’s in and who’s out; who’s de guerre (or flavor of the month) and who isn’t.I think the “cutting edge” is shifting around. I think it’s part of God’s humor — that irritating way the Spirit messes with all the people, systems and ideas we’ve declared no longer ‘in’ and breathes fresh life into old bones so they become the new ‘cutting edge’.
Take the old Anglicans for example. I can claim identity here. As a baby I was carried up the short street we lived on (Burleigh Road South — named after Lord Burleigh, aka, William Cecil, who served kings and queen in the 16th century — a definite misnomer for a non-cutting edge neighborhood like Anfield in Liverpool) to St. Cutherbert’s church (long torn down and replaced by the dull flats of urban, post war renewal) where I was baptized and given a God-parent. Cutherbert was of Lindisfarne fame so, perhaps, that is why the Cutherbert thing stuck.
Imagine — Anglicans are moving to the ‘cutting edge’ and creating a ‘movement’. A Google search of “Fresh Expressions” will show that God is up to something in the UK. Then, last week, I was in Toronto. The weather was amazing for November and the dry leaves crunching underfoot brought back memories of the great years I spent there in the ’80s. John Mclaverty and I were meeting some folk at the main offices of the Anglican Diocese. The inside of their building was under renovation. All the staff was crunched into a big room. Desks were pushed up against each other, wide bands of bright red tape stretching across the floor covered telephone lines. Meeting rooms around the sides were crammed with stacks of blue, plastic packing cases. Everything was impermanent. Dave Robinson and Heather Steves comprise the congregation development team. We sat with Dave and Heather for an hour as they shared stories of what was brewing and emerging in churches around the region. We listened with a sense that the “cutting edge” had moved. God was up to something among these creative people. Later we met with Bishop Colin Johnson, a thoughtful, attentive leader who flashes wry smiles in the midst of conversations. He’s a Bishop who has built a team committed to seeing the mission of God flourish in this Diocese. It was a wonderful two hours of conversation and stories.
When we left, the word under-construction ran through my head. That’s what’s happening! The “cutting edge” has shifted. God, with a great sense of humor, keeps turning up in all kinds of places that our labels keep missing.
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Culture
Where do we go from here?
The failure of a dominant narrative & the need for a new social imaginary
I was recently introduced to a magazine called Prospect by an Anglo-Irish friend, Colin Greene. It offers a regular series of cultural and political essays that cover current affairs, the arts, economics and culture. The lead article in the latest edition is by Robert Skidelsky. Entitled “Where do we go from here?“, it addresses some key issues in the current global crisis. (You can also connect with several short pieces Colin Greene and I have written.) Skidelsky argues that the current financial crisis is a failure of the market system: it is a crisis generated by the system itself, not some outside agent or actor. He then outlines three levels of failure.
- First, institutional: banks, regulators etc., succumbed to the ‘efficient market left to itself’ hypothesis.
- Secondly, the crisis was intellectual. Alan Greenspan’s confession to the US Congress earlier this year epitomizes this failure: ‘I never saw it coming!’ Why? Because he wore a set of intellectual lenses that blinded him to alternative explanations.
- Thirdly, the crisis represents a moral failure in a system that worships the absolute priority of growth that has made our moral compass thin and degraded our capacities to imagine an alternative way of life.
Skidelsky explores these issues in more depth through the rest of his article. What struck me are the parallels between this analysis and the challenges that have faced Christian life in North America for several decades. The three sources of crisis, institutional, intellectual and moral, are also at work in the life of the church. The institutional crisis is the failure of church leaders to grasp the ways institutions are socially constructed systems.
The institutions of denominational life framed in the early part of the 20th century are no longer tenable. This has nothing to do with theological traditions or ecclesiology, but how those traditions are socially constructed in a particular time and place. Nor is this crisis reason to enter the silly season of debunking institutions. The very nature of our sociality requires us to form institutions. This crisis is the failure of leaders to grasp the way institutions are socially constructed in and for the social imaginaries of a particular time and place. Inevitably leaders became too comfortable within systems they could manage and control and in which they had security and success.The intellectual crisis is profound. At precisely the time when the church needs local and academic theologians able to re-enter the Tradition to re-imagine Christian narrative in the midst of a radically pluralized culture(s) a significant percentage of denominational and local church leaders are without the training or intellectual frameworks to do this work. As a result much of the current engagement is shaped by platitudes and pragmatisms that prevents the church re-imagining new ways forward in this Heideggarian ‘space’ where it now finds itself. The operative frameworks remain those of modernity — pragmatism (try this it works here) and romantic idealism (I have been to the mountain top and seen the vision (and shape presumably?) of what we need to be). These imaginations remain captive to the forms of modernity from which their authors are claiming to liberate us even while others are seeking to name the new emerging intellectual territory we need to inhabit (see Barry Harvey’s Can These Bones Live? and Greene and Robinson’s Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination as two illustrations). The language of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘missional’ are largely catch-alls and short hand for not having to do the hard work of thinking or entering the Christian tradition or be surprised by the ways the Spirit is at work in the local and the ordinary.
The moral crisis is the most difficult to address because, in Christian circles, moral language is preloaded with notions of guilt and sin. There are many levels to this moral failure and one doesn’t want to make light of its reality. In a culture built on spending, debt and ever expanding pie the notion of ‘growth’ remains at the heart of the North American church. One has to be careful, growth is not wrong; that is not the point. Models of church growth drive too many churches and leaders; not just in terms of seeker driven churches but among missional and emergent leaders whose underlying methods and proposals are new forms of church growth wrapped up in a different language game. The North American church must discover an alternative imagination from growth. It is not that they are so difficult to find; it is that we are so captive to the imagination of success, individuals and need-centered imaginations.
Skidelsky’s article attempts to address the question: Where do we go from here? The next RJ will propose some responses to that question from the perspective of being the church in a ‘metavista’ world of multiple, interacting social imaginaries.
Research Project & Café
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In partnership with M.J. Murdock Trust, ProVision Foundation, Maclellan Foundation, and others, Allelon is sponsoring a multi-year global initiative to address the question of missional engagement in Western culture.
In partnership with SGM Lifewords, the Research Café brings together top intellectuals from around the world to assess a radical cultural engagement with Western Culture.
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