Constantine R. Campbell - Outreach and the Artist: Sharing the Gospel with the Arts

T he arts are a precious gift of God. Music, painting, dance, sculpture, theater, and so many other art forms enrich our lives and give expression to the human condition. They challenge and comfort us. They inspire and humble us. They feed us and demand our energies. I cant imagine life without the arts. What a miserable and shallow existence that would be!

I listen to music whenever I can: working at my desk, driving the car, or walking down the street. Im listening to Pat Metheny and Chris Potter right now as I write this introduction. If I dont get a decent shot of jazz each day, it affects my mood and mental health. And Im confident that many reading this book will relate to that to some extent, if not quite as obsessively.

As a Christian I am thankful to God for many things, not just the arts. Even more significant than the life-enriching arts is the life-resurrecting work of Jesus Christ. Nothing is more precious than the gift of forgiveness, relationship with God, eternal life, membership in the body of Christ, and the privilege to serve the true and living God. Part of our ser vice to God involves our outreach to those who do not yet know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. If youre reading this book, I assume that you too are interested in perhaps deeply committed to reaching out to friends, family, and wider communities with the good news of Jesus.

The arts and outreach. In this book, I want to bring those two things together. Many Christian artists have employed their gifts and abilities for the task of outreach, but there has been comparatively little written about it. By writing this book, I hope to encourage artists to make use of their gifts for evangelism and help them to think through the issues involved in doing that. I also want to encourage pastors and ordinary church folk to engage with the arts and the artistic people in their midst for the sake of outreach.

There are three main concerns in the book: evangelism with, through, and to the arts.

Chapters 2 and 3 relate to evangelism with the arts. Christian artists are often untapped resources for evangelistic endeavor. While their abilities may be utilized in ser vice of the church in various ways (e.g., congregational worship), it is not always obvious to churches that artists have enormous potential for outreach. First, artists can use their abilities for the proclamation of the gospel to music lovers and art aficionados, or to the general public who are happy to attend a church-sponsored cultural event, such as a jazz night or gallery opening. Second, artists have access to otherwise closed artistic subcultures. They can become missionaries to their own people in a way that nonartists cannot.

Chapter 4 relates to evangelism through the arts. Artistic ability can be a powerful tool for the proclamation of the gospel, and artistic mediums have enormous potential for fresh approaches to outreach. Because the arts tap into the human condition in profound ways, they represent a unique avenue through which to address the big questions of life. Furthermore, peoples natural love for the arts provides a connection point to the unbeliever that is nonthreatening, engaging of heart and mind, and sometimes deeply personal.

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 relate to evangelism to the arts. Artistic networks form tightly knit subcultures in our society that are sometimes impenetrable to outsiders. As such, they can resemble unreached people-groups in that these subcultures often have no Christian witness or presence and tend to be shut off from conventional methods of outreach. Evangelism to the arts is for the purpose of reaching these unreached subcultures.

To understand further what this book is about, it is worth explaining how I have come to the point of writing it. More than anything else Ive dared to put in print to date, this book is quite autobiographical. In some places it just sounds like me talking about me (to which my friends will say, Whats new?). And I want to apologize about that up front.

But at the same time, this book exists only because of the fairly odd set of circumstances that God has put me in during the course of my life and the experiences he has used to teach me about evangelism, artists, and bringing the two together. Im really no expert on evangelism, and Im not particularly an expert on the arts either. But on the relationship between the two, I think I have something to say that hasnt yet been said since so little has been said on the topic.

My experience with the arts and evangelism over the years gives me license to pontificate on the subject for the rest of this book. The book consists of a collection of principles that I believe are generally true about the arts and outreach, illustrated mostly by personal anecdotes. While there are obvious limitations involved in using ones own anecdotes, these are the stories, incidents, and experiences that have caused me to reflect on the issue at hand. They are the reason Im able to write this at all, so theyre worth sharing. One of the limitations of my own experience is that it is related to music, and jazz in particular. But that ought not diminish the value of the insights gained about the arts in general. Please translate my jazz experiences to reflect on other forms of artistic endeavor, whatever you happen to be interested in. This is not a book about jazz, though you might get that impression as you read on.

My limitations and personal anecdotes are offset by a collection of artist profiles. A wonderfully diverse and gifted group of Christian artists have contributed their thoughts to this project in a personal and reflective manner. The profiles are interviews, based around a set of questions. Each artist has responded to these questions in their own way, using their own words. They offer reflections derived from a wide variety of artistic endeavors, and they share some of the experience, wisdom, and inspiration that have marked their lives as Christians in the arts.

The final thing to add here is that the discussion of outreach and the arts is grounded in an understanding of the Bible. While I dont intend to present a theological treatise in what follows, there is a lot of theology at work in the background. In fact, there are two specific spheres of theological thought that impact this topic.

The first is the doctrine of creation. I believe that the arts are part of Gods good creation. They are to be respected, appreciated, cherished, and used for the good of humanity to the glory of God. There will be no arts bashing in this book, because a theological understanding of the arts wont allow it. Having said that, there is a dark side to the arts because we live in a fallen world. In the hands of rebellious people, whose hearts are set against God, even his good and wonderful gifts can become powerful instruments for evil. This is sadly true of the arts in many ways, but we must not therefore condemn the arts themselves. They remain a good, ordered part of creation; if they are abused and distorted for imperfect purposes, this is due to maltreatment that is not intrinsic to their nature.