I read, today, an excerpt from a book called Nurturing Artists in your Local Church by a guy named Joshua Banner.
This line stuck out to me:
We simply need to be curious and demonstrate that we believe what artists are doing is important—to call their creative risks “good” just as the Creator blessed his own handiwork in the first seven days—and to bless that work by giving it our attention and sharing in it. (emphasis mine)
This idea that the church needs to call more of our artists’ creative risk ‘good’ is really interesting (and I think, true).
Most Good Poems Start Out As Really Bad Poems
To be honest, I think this is why we don’t see much art right now in the typical church–because to make really great art, you’ve got to be willing to take some creative risks. That’s not to say that every piece of great art is particularly risky, but rather that if you don’t feel like you have the freedom to take any risk, you will feel boxed in creatively. And whether or not those risks are successful isn’t particularly important–the important thing is that you’ve got to try a lot of different things to find the RIGHT thing.
Or to put it another way: you’ve got to write some really bad songs before you can write some good ones.
Or maybe even another way: most good poems start out as really bad poems.
Normalizing Creative Risk
Unfortunately, we don’t see much of that approval of risk from the church, and in particular, the pastors of churches. In some cases, this is because the pastors just aren’t artists. Most aren’t. They may be preachers (preaching may be valuable, but it isn’t art anymore than medicine is) or teachers, singers, administrators or even, well, pastors, but very few are the kind of people who are taking these creative risks themselves. And because of that, they don’t understand those risks, they don’t get what’s going on there. That’s not an excuse for them not to be reaching out to artists, but unfortunately that’s how it often works.
Moreover, I think too many pastors are afraid of those risks, are afraid of taking those risks because they can be misinterpreted. Above, I described these risks as a way to get the bad notes out so that when it really matters you’re only left with the good ones, but that’s not entirely true–sometimes these risks involve things like writing a book title The Weakness of God or a song with profanity in it, writing a poem questioning God’s very existence. Sometimes the best art’s connection to the Gospel is not immediately apparent.
For a pastor to put his blessing on something like that, to call it “good” can be troubling, troubling for the pastor (I speak from experience here) and troubling for their congregation (and thus for the pastor’s career). Such a “good” risk may not be just risky for artist–the pastor puts his reputation on the line for the sake of the artist by endorsing their work.
That’s a sacrifice, I think, more of our pastors need to make, to endanger their own well-being for the sake of the people struggling to reveal the face of God. For that’s what I think all art struggles to do, to lift the veil of the immediately apparent and reveal the really true (True?) thing underneath. Pastors have a call to draw all people into their communities–normalizing those creative risks as part of our congregations is an vital part of what the people who get paid to be pastors, and those of that don’t, have a responsibility to do.
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