Calling All Artists, Monks and Storytellers!

 http://newwaystheology.blogspot.com/2011/04/future-of-evangelicalism-artists-monks.html

The Future of Evangelicalism:

Artists, Monks, and Storytellers

by Mason Slater, April 2011

"What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music." - Soren Kierkegaard

As I look over my bookshelves I’m struck by the thought that Donald Miller was right.

Yesterday Miller wrote about how the Western church is in essence “a robust school system created around a framework of lectures and discussions and study... Churches are essentially schools. They look like schools with lecture halls, classrooms, cafeterias and each new church program is basically a teaching program.”

It’s a fair point, even if he pushes it a bit further than I would. After all, turn over almost any book on my shelf and what does it inform you of? The author’s academic credentials. If they went to the right schools and got the right degree they have legitimacy, if not, well they get categorized under “inspirational”.

Even the fact that books are the medium of choice in Western Christianity is telling. Why books? And why books which, often, read like textbooks?

Nothing against books or scholars, I have a incredibly deep love for both and think both have a vital role to play. But theirs is not the only role.

If the Evangelicalism of our generation is going to be able to reach the world we find ourselves in, to address pressing issues of justice, or to retain some level of unity, we cannot rely only on scholars.

What we need are more artists, monks, and storytellers.

We act on the assumption that the textbook communicates more truth than the novel, that the lecture conveys more deeply than the painting, that a conference is more meaningful than street theater. That assumption was almost certainly misguided before, but in our present context it’s absolutely deadly to the church.

So we need artists (of every sort, writers included) to share our message in a way people will truly hear it.

We talk about justice, well some of us, but if all we do is talk that is no witness.

So we need communities like the new monasticism to give us a picture of what our faith could look like if we were the hands and feet of the gospel we pontificate about.

And finally, speaking of that gospel, we take the rich and messy story of the Bible and spend so much time debating and dissecting it that in the end we either have a reductionist four point track or a massive list of what constitutes the orthodoxy you must hold to be ‘in’.

So we need storytellers who can share the Story without either flattening it out or missing the forest for the trees. Storytellers who can make a point of doctrine come alive, and who can also present a way of talking about our faith which is harder to turn into team X vs. team Y.

When the story starts “once upon a time” it lends itself less to taking sides.

Do scholars and the academy have a place in the future of Evangelicalism? Yes! Absolutely! We need deep and critical thought, we need people who have devoted themselves to studying the history and theology (at least I hope so, or a lot of what I’m doing with my life is going to be a bit pointless).

But that isn’t all we need.

Maybe one way the future of Evangelicalism could look a little brighter is if we stopped deferring only to the scholars and instead had the scholars sit down at the table as equals with the artists, the monks, and the storytellers.

At least that sounds like a more hopeful starting place to me.

Grace and peace.