How Artists Cultivate Thankfulness

One day, it hit me. As I checked my inbox on a particular email hosting website, I observed 8 out of the 10 first, non-sponsored, news stories in my newsfeed were either about death or missing people. 

I realized this vile news exposure was the norm. 

War, famine, murder, lies, and all kinds of other explicit content flood every screen we use. And that’s just the external onslaught of information. What about the baggage we carry with us all day? Sin, temptations, damaged relationships with our parents or our children, struggling to pay rent, struggle to find purpose. 

How is it exactly that an artist is supposed to cultivate thankfulness again?

It is so easy to imagine all the bad about our life and this world. 

For all life’s toil, let us take hold of a few things:

“7 Go, eat your bread with pleasure, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart, for God has already accepted your works. 8 Let your clothes be white all the time, and never let oil be lacking on your head. 9 Enjoy life with the wife you love all the days of your fleeting[c] life, which has been given to you under the sun, all your fleeting days. For that is your portion in life and in your struggle under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 9:7-9).

From this, I’d like to point out that artists can rest assured in certain assurances in life. 

Regarding our lives, gifts, and talents, God gave us the following:

• Divine placement of the culture, community, and time period we grow up in (Deuteronomy 32:8; Acts 17:26-27).

• If you are married, rest in that God gave you your spouse (Proverbs 19:14)

• If you have kids, that too (Psalm 129:3-5)

• Your talents, skills, and gifts (Deut 8:17-18; Mt 24-25; Eph 2:10)

Even if the day is toilsome, artists can thank God for their lives and creative inclinations.

Momma Missions

Growing up, it was important to get into college.

This was because, so the logic goes, if one gets into a college, their education and future have some assurance and stability. 

But obviously, that’s not all there is to the story. If schooling were an end to itself, many graduates were left asking on graduation day: what comes next?

A similar dynamic applies to missions.

We must remember the mission is the context for all developed theology in the New Testament. Not the other way around.

As Martin Kähler famously noted, “Missions is the mother of theology.”  

What if we let momma missions have her car back?

If All the Bibles Went Away…

If all the Bible’s went away, who in your life would you follow around to remember what Jesus was like?

Spend your life attached to someone like that and being someone like that.

Something Kept Pulling Him Back

I love the way Eugene Peterson translated Mark 6:20. Reminds me of the metaphorically nature of following Christ. We’re drawn to the beauty of Christlikeness.

“Whenever [Herod] listened to [John]
he was miserable with guilt—
and yet he couldn’t stay away.
Something in John kept pulling him back.”

Mark 6:20b (The Message)

If I Designed A Training Center for Artists

If I were designing a mission training center for artists, here’s what I’d focus on:

• Vision: We’d anchor a worldview for artistic missional engagement.

• Gifts Discovery: We’d examine your personal gifts, talents, skills, purpose, angst, and dreams.

• Church Planting: We’d connect all niche mission ideas into the larger context of expanding and establishing God’s kingdom. 

• Equipping: We’d train how to build relationships through serving and building trust with others.

Love is Custom-Made

We create custom made guitars, vehicles, houses, cities, and sculptures.

All the things which fashion our lives contain the world’s raw materials which are then customized to our benefit and liking. When something is custom made, we find it more valuable. We attribute greater care and finesse to something custom made. 

Ought agape love not be the same?

Which Micro-Community Do You Serve?

Every community contains 3 spheres: The tribes, elites, and masses. 

• The Tribe: a specific, micro-community through shared, relational, and embodied culture.

• The Elite: the taste-makers, academic spaces, or high-budget patron systems.

• The Masses: the wider public market through accessible, widely distributed media.

These three community categories share different values and desire different things. To live your life serving one means to not put forth as much energy into the others. 

Having clarity who you’re serving can stabilize you from aiming at the wrong thing.

How to Flatten the Gospel

“If the local congregation is not perceived in its own neighborhood as the place from which good news overflows in good action, the programs for social and political action launched by the national agencies are apt to lose their integral relation to the good news and come to be seen as part of a moral crusade rather than part of the gospel.”

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.

Here is my understanding of what Newbigin is saying: If good actions/works are not the perception of a local church, then the programs come across as moral policing to the church’s neighbors.

This point comes in Newbigin’s chapter “The Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel.” In this particular section, he’s arguing that one of the characteristics for a church community to be such an agent for the gospel, it must localize the concerns of its own neighborhood.

When the church fails to do so, it becomes perceived as a moral agency rather than good news embodied. The greater we generalize or nationalize the world’s needs, the more flattened the gospel becomes for anyone.