Last night, Tim and I went to Christian City Church to see Philip's end of year presentation by the School of Creative Arts.
It was an absolutely brilliant presentation, including film, drama, music and songs written by the students. It told the story of some pastors in northern Uganda who are working with the people who were abducted as children by the "Lord's Resistance Army" then turned into soldiers and prostitutes.
The presentation left me stunned. It was emotionally overwhelming, generating compassion, anger and thankfulness that christians are there in the refugee camps bringing hope and salvation to brutally damaged people.
Then the pastor stood up (not Senior Pastor Phil Pringle, I hasten to add) and then "explained" to us what we had just seen and why it was important that christians bring hope to that situation- as if we hadn't just seen that ourselves. Then we had the obligatory altar call. Then Chris Pringle (Phil's wife) gave us another long spiel to encourage us to drop some money in the baskets for the ministry in Uganda.
By the time we left the emotional impact of the presentation was long forgotten- all because of the religiousness of the pastors who just can't leave a good thing to stand by itself and trust the Holy Spirit to lead people to make the right decisions.
If I had been in charge I would have set up African-themed stations in the foyer or the courtyard outside where people could collect more information or talk to someone about giving money or becoming a christian. Then I would have told people to go home and think about how they wanted to respond to this very powerful message.
I suspect people would have gone home deeply troubled and challenged to seek God about how they could make a difference.
Of course that would have taken a measure of faith in God rather than faith in the programme.
I believe you are right.
ReplyDeleteI think it is also a sign that churches still don't really believe that creative arts are a valid way to express God's message. Even in a church that is big into the arts they still see a need for a traditional preaching. It doesn't say much either for how they value the work of the students. God is redeeming the arts but churches have to let him
ReplyDeleteI agree absolutely, Rozina.It's partly a cultural thing- Protestantism is a product of the "modern" era which emphasized learning of facts, and verbal or textual communication. We are now, for better or worse, in a "post-modern" era where communication has to be done in richer ways- visually, dramatically and appealing to emotions as much as thoughts.The church really needs to learn these different (I was going to say "new" but actually they are old techniques wearing technological clothes) modes of communication.By "church" I'm including me. I can knock off a good 3 point sermon in a couple of hours. To use visual or story-telling elements takes more work and more inspiration.
ReplyDeleteIt does take work to be creative and some of us are not creative at all- but all the more reason to appreciate when other people do it and not then preach when they have already given a very powerful visual method. Not that there is anything wrong with preaching and we need to value it to but it isn't the only way to give a gospel message and we don't need to do it all the time. We have these wonderfully creative people whom God has gifted and we need to trust them to do what God has set them apart to do as much as we do the preachers.
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