As a local church how do you engage and inspire artists? Last week, we started a two part interview aimed at answering that question with the directors of four different art centers that were started by, based out of, or sponsored by local churches in four different cities:
Michael Winters with The 930 Art Center in Louisville
James McAnally with The Luminary Center for the Arts in St. Louis
Grace Hwang with Salt Art Space in New York
Joanna Taft with Harrison Center for the Arts in Indianapolis
Rethink Mission: What would you say to a local church that had a desire to engage artists in their city or cultivate the arts in their church? Where should they start?
Michael Winters, The 930
If a church wants to engage artists in their city, put 2% of the annual budget into visual arts commissions. This might turn into artwork for your sanctuary or the kid’s area, or it might turn into a photography class that focuses on trying to see things as Christ sees them, or it might turn into creating a classroom space with lots of art supplies for the public to come and use one night a week to explore creativity.
Or without spending a penny, just start an informal group that goes around to all of the major art events in your town and meets the artists and learns why they do what they do. Contemporary artists create great case studies that challenge our understanding of the world. Then, go grab lunch together afterward and try to figure out what God thinks of the exhibit you just saw. Pray for the individuals you meet.
By no means do I think every church needs to run an art gallery, but I do think every church needs to acknowledge the creativity that is in all of us and equip the church to encourage creativity toward Christlikeness in their friends, family, and neighbors.
James McAnally, The Luminary
Before you attempt to start a ministry for artists, spend time at other (non-church) artist groups and get to know artists on a personal level. You have to know the artistic culture of your city before you try to engage with it. Learn the language. Find out the galleries that affect your city’s culture. Understand the art world before attempting to transform it.
Also, plan for the long-term. By this I mean to go about things with the sense that you will be working with these artists, galleries and communities for decades, so you need to lay the groundwork for long-lasting relationships. It is difficult for a church to gain the trust of the art community-they see through falsity very quickly (as do most groups of people churches minister to). Maybe the best thing you can do is financially support another institution or to engage in areas already in place and working. Think outside the (newly created) box. If your church is called to serve artists, it will arise out of love and understanding and a desire to see people succeed and grow, which can lead to all kinds of unexpected opportunities and partnerships you could have never created on your own. If you can serve someone/something with no strings attached and no expectations placed, how much more powerful a statement of concern and sacrifice could you make than you would if you simply open a gallery in your church or host monthly networking meetings? Working from that paradigm, then perhaps you can take the next steps and actually create a stand-alone organization.
Grace Hwang, SALT
I would first express my enthusiasm for their desire to foster within their communities what makes us fully human! Then I’d encourage them to look at precedents that already exist in their communities and articulate a vision that enlarges the capacities of each of their missions. And I’d strongly advise committing to a budget and staffed positions to oversee it.
Back in the 1950s, the Judson Memorial Church allowed artists free reign of their basement space to put up exhibitions in their gallery space – and championed uncensorship. Because of the risks they were willing to take they have built a reputation as an authentic place for modern art.
A local church with this desire should pursue a ministry because it rises from within the local church body, like The Light Church in Baltimore that serves the MICA neighborhood and puts on great shows or the Church of the Messiah in Brooklyn which hosts an alternative arts funding event called FEAST in Brooklyn.
I also think that engaging artists in the city and cultivating arts in the church are two separate things – both equally large tasks that require taking risks, giving freedom and setting aside money and means to accomplish.
Engaging artists in the city means listening to their needs and giving them space and a platform to pursue their visions and dreams.
Whereas cultivating arts in the church is providing a safe space for artists to work out their beliefs and doubts in ways that are beyond a well-designed brochure or singing a song. The community of The Haven, hosted by Calvary St. George’s is a parachurch ministry of Priority Associates that curates evenings of community, fellowship and artistic interpretations of worship that might not fit within the confines of a church service.
Joanna Taft, The Harrison Center
The HCA uses a community based approach. We ask what our community needs and respond to those needs by leveraging our resources with those of our partners. Here are 3 examples of how we have met artists needs: First, emerging artists told us that they couldn’t afford market rate studio rents, so we created very low cost studio options (our average artist pays $125 a month). Second, when we first opened, both gallery owners and artists across the city didn’t seem to be working together or even know each other. We helped found and now house the office of the Indianapolis Downtown Artists and Dealer’s Association to bring better communication and collaboration between the gallery owners and artist cooperatives in Indianapolis. This bringing together of the arts community resulted in the creation of city wide First Friday events and many other successful initiatives. Third, our artists told us they felt like they needed to move to a major city to make a living as an artist. They needed art patrons. To begin growing patrons for our artists, we developed a successful monthly exhibit series that averages 800 in opening night attendance and attracts many first time buyers.
Thinking longer term, we created a public charter high school to grow a new generation of art patrons. Many of the 450 students who attend are naturally artistic, but the school is designed to grow patrons–well educated, well rounded citizens that will serve our community in many ways. The school offers a classical liberal arts curriculum which follows an art history timeline. Students begin 9th grade with the study of Africa and Asia, 10th grade is ancient Greece and Rome, 11th grade is the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and 12th grade the age of exploration to modern times. The school is academically rigorous and racially/socioeconomically diverse (about 50/50 white and minority populations). These student will become art patrons for the city of Indianapolis, but will be much more—our voters, philanthropists, artists, teachers, moms, lawyers, and citizens. These are just several examples to demonstrate our approach in engaging artists and cultivating the arts, but the key point is that our model starts with identifying the community need and then creatively addressing it.
Rethink Mission: What pitfalls that you would warn a local church to avoid in creating a ministry for artists?
Michael: I’ve seen a lot of churches get into doing things with art, but not really understanding why they’re doing it. Somebody just told them art is a good thing. I think it’s valuable to experiment with incorporating art into the life of the church, but don’t do it for the art. Do it for the mission of Christ. Think about the mission of your church and then see how artists might be able to serve that mission. You’ve got to have gospel-centered reasons for incorporating art into church. To develop this, I’d recommend Art for God’s Sake by Philip Graham Ryken and Unceasing Worship by Harold Best.
I’d also say that you shouldn’t let an arts ministry just be something that happens in the church basement without strong leadership. Elders (pastors) need to be on board. Elders (pastors) need to oversee it.
We’ve got to remember that for the most part the protestant church has completely un-learned how to think about art. We’ve never had an agreed understanding on what role visual art should play in church life, and the state of contemporary art just makes the intersection of church and art just that much muddier, so there’s some brain-power work that needs to be done. I say all this only because I want people to know that it makes a mess when you try to bring artists into the church. But, it’s worth it and it needs to happen. Just don’t expect it to be easy or ‘pretty’, though by God’s grace your hard gospel-motivated work with artists will be beautiful.
James: It has become a bit of a trend to engage with artists in new church plants. I advise anyone I talk with to really search themselves and their gifts and callings as a body to discern whether or not working with artists is the right path for them. It is an area in which you have to be “all in ” so to speak and know that it is what you are passionate about giving yourself to. Not every community is called to serve artists in particular. We should all seek to develop a sound theology of art and be sensitive to it in our midst–that, I feel, is a general calling to the churches in our culture. However, the undertaking of a ministry uniquely created to engage with artists is a specific calling that should be weighed in each context according to the people and resources already present in your body.
Last word of advice–expect to forever be in the tension between serving Christ and serving the art world. No one has a simple answer on how to best manage questions of content and appropriateness, transforming the culture vs. being transformed, when to speak boldly and when to listen, and the pure antagonisms present to what you will do. Not even Harold Best, and that is saying quite a bit.
Grace: I think each organization/ministry has to answer the question, “Why arts in a church?” Especially in a city like New York where there are hundreds of museums and galleries, it’s important to identify and reclaim church as a public space to explore qualities of art, justice and beauty.
The arts and faith have this in common that they are both approaching the same large task of expressing the unseen.
When we started as a small group last year, we started by identifying shared values and understandings about art:
1) Art making is a pleasure that is the pursuit of knowing ourselves and what makes us uniquely human. 2) Art is about pursuing questions that seek Truth, not a right answer. 3) The arts have a transformative power to move someone from a state of complacency to a spirit of compassion. 4) That an examination of one’s creative process reveals insight to what we believe and fear.
Joanna: I think there is a temptation among churches to associate with the arts for the purpose of being seen as hip and to attract a young congregation. I think that is a dishonest use of the arts. Instead, the best thing a church can do to engage artists in their city is to love artists. In our community, I have two favorite examples: one is a family who provided an attic apartment to one of our artists for $100 a month for five years, making it possible for the artist to put his resources into the pursuit of his craft. The other is a family who stopped spending their friday nights at the shopping mall and began taking their teenage daughters to art openings. They built relationships with the artists and began to love their artwork. They became regular, monthly buyers until there was no more wall space left in their house. Today they continue to buy regularly, but do so in the form of purchasing art gift certificates for weddings and birthdays. There are many other examples of people donating cars, inviting artists into their homes for meals, visiting their studios/taking a genuine interest in their craft, and buying art. These families are caring for the artists of our community without an agenda and with appreciation for the beauty they bring.
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See: Part 1 of the interview
Two weeks ago, we started a 
Last week we started a 
Recently a lot of attention has been given specifically to urban church planting, with conferences, speakers and writers focusing on taking the gospel to the city, for the sake of the city.
