cultural engagement vision

We are devoted to active engagement in mainstream culture instead of fearful isolationism or passive consumerism.  Our desire is to grow as a God-centered people humbly and missionally involved in our cultural context.  Our hope in this arena of the arts ministry is to provide opportunities to reflect and converse on the arts & culture that we are involved in (the movies we're watching, books we're reading, music we're listening to, etc.) and that arts & culture would be a holistic part of our journey in the kingdom of God rather than a bifurcated sphere of autonomous living. 

Likewise, we want to highlight some of the amazing opportunities for you to engage the local arts scene here in Portland, towards buliding meaningful relationships with artists in our city, experiencing different forms of culture which will help you strive towards excellence in your own creative life, and contributing life and beauty into the venues, galleries and theaters of Portland.  In addition, there are many amazing organizations dedicated to building a flourishing creative culture in our city and we want to highlight opportunities to serve with them towards being a church that values participation in the creative cultural life of our city and has a constructive and life-giving presence there.  

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The following are some extended thoughts on why cultural engagement is significant.

Cultural engagement: countering abscence and passivity

            Mainstream culture is there, and there are a couple choices for how the church can exist in relation to it.  It might be helpful here to talk of absence and passivity as two opposing ends of the spectrum.  On the one end is absence: too often out of fear of being tainted by the degrading elements in mainstream culture we in the church have removed ourselves from involvement in its sphere.  Don’t watch rated-R movies, listen to mainstream music, or read the wrong books.  Such a motive is unfortunately often driven by fear rather than a confident union with Christ and his missional involvement in the world.  And in America’s Christian consumer subculture, it is all to easy to never set foot inside mainstream culture.  We have our own music, our own books, our own movies. 

            A danger can be that while there is beautiful worship music, and some really great writing, it is possible to exist only in this sphere and remove ourselves from the broader cultural conversation.  This isolationist mentality has often been characterized by terms like the “Christian ghetto”, “living in the bubble” or “fortress mentality”, all signifying a relation to culture in which the church removes itself and builds its own sub-culture (to which the terms ‘ghetto’, ‘bubble’ and ‘fortress’ refer) which parodies mainstream culture’s forms, filling it with Christian content.  We really miss out in this from partnering with God in his involvement in the sphere of mainstream arts culture.

            A second approach the church can take is passivity.  There are many of us who love music, books, movies, and are immersed in that sphere, but don’t care how our union with Christ bears in that place.  The arts exist for our entertainment, not our discipleship.  So we go through life with the Ipod on and the movie popcorn in hand and never realize that the Spirit of God is sitting a few rows over calling us to intimacy with God in that sphere. 

            For some we have not been taught or given the resources to think through how our faith engages culture.  We love Christ and go to church on Sunday, but watching a movie is about “me” time, listening to music is a neutral endeavor, its more important what I think about the content in a book I’m reading than wrestling with what Christ’s gospel has to say about its ideas and the worldview it elevates.  This passivity can also be reactionary: many who grew up in the isolationist mentality described earlier and got sick of it, reacted and said if God is absent from culture, that’s fine.  He can have Sundays, I love culture so I’ll go it alone.  In America’s mainstream consumer culture it is all too easy to be a passive pawn being shaped and formed by the flood of cultural currents going on all around us, and never be transformed by the light of the gospel in the fullness of who we are in our cultural context.

            We want to promote engagement with popular culture.  Somewhere between isolating ourselves from culture on the one end, and passively immersing ourselves in it on the other, is a place of being able to constructively engage and participate as active agents in culture.  It is the creative tension of being in the world, while not being of it.  Our desire is to help spark conversation on what it looks like to engage culture from within as followers of Christ: it can be a crazy place as someone dedicated to God to journey alone so hopefully here we can find some friends for the ride.  Our goal is that we could be amazed at witnessing the living God at work in mainstream culture, partner with God in valuing and being involved in the cultural dialogue, and partner with our city in helping to build a dynamic and flourishing arts culture.    

 
Some further thoughts on God's relation to mainstream arts culture

            Arts culture finds itself inherently related to God.  Here’s a few starting points in which we see this relationship existing (the “theology of art" blog intends to create a broader ongoing conversation):

·         God’s identity as Creator is the foundation for human creativity and the artistic act itself.  Christ as the Word through whom all creation was created, and in whom creation is redemptively transformed towards new creation, means that to draw close to Christ in discipleship is to draw close to the dynamic, creative center of God’s universe.  God’s Spirit as the breath through whom God creates and re-creates the world means that to be filled with the Spirit of God is to be filled with the dynamic, creative, personal presence of the Creator.  Creativity is part of the imago Dei, the image of God, in humanity.  Thus creative culture, even when distorted, derives its creative impulse and ability from God.

·         God’s identity as Redeemer reveals itself in popular culture as God speaks of Himself and reveals His glory through the images, stories, and symbols of popular culture.  God can speak to us through Picasso’s Guernica of the suffering He has identified with in the cross of Christ, through Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath of the hope of redemption, through the recent movie Half Nelson of the power of community amidst broken people, through Radiohead’s Idioteque of a voice of grace winding through the chaotic frenzy of a world destroying itself.

·         God’s identity as the Righteous Judge critiques the often degrading impulses in pop culture that glorify humanity’s autonomous rebellion from God and narcissistic abuse towards one another.  We need not fear pop culture but can enter into it in the Spirit of Christ and our union with him to discern that which is beautiful, pure and true from that which is degrading, abusive and shameful.  It is from such a posture within culture, rather than outside of it, that the redemptive voice of Christ can be heard.