Getting weird for the sake of art

People say many things about artistic ministry in the church. But they don’t often mention the fact that it involves being kind of weird in everyday life. Makes you contemplate doing strange and awkward things.

Experiments with furniture for inside/out artwork

It’s a Saturday morning and I’m wheeling an unbalanced trolley laden with ten metres of Astro Turf down one overstuffed Bunnings aisle. As I wrestle the awkwardly heavy roll of black and green into a checkout there are stares, smiles, small chuckles. “ Well well, that’s a lot of synthetic grass, what are you going to do with it?” I pause for a second, there’s no conversation stopper like when you answer back “it’s for church”. No more questions asked. I often wonder if this should be phrased differently to create a conversation opportunity instead of an awkward pause… 

But the weirdness of buying ten metres of turf is mild compared to many of the everyday strange things that pursuit of art for church can bring….

Standing on the barely-stable wire fence of a vineyard in Camden at 6.45am on a Friday morning wondering if anyone (or that police car that keeps going back and forth) might see if you trespassed (just a little bit) to get closer to that grapevine for a better video shot…. 

or talking someone into running along a mangrove bank in the rain for half an hour, back and forth with little wings leukoplasted to their feet….

stopping to “borrow” some  tall grass from the side of the road because it looks just like it could be from a beautiful field…

carrying the contents of your house outside and arranging it in a tree just for a photograph….

or driving around in a car laden with a tool shop, a haberdashery, an art store and the leftovers of that roadside grass packed in so tightly it falls out every time you try to add in a grocery bag or two.

The pursuit of art-making for church makes every day an opportunity for weird and random acts of creativity. And sometimes it creates a conversation worth having too.

These past few weeks the creative team have been, among other weird and wonderful things, diving into the book of James to prepare for MenaiAnglican Church’s new series- Inside/ Out.

But what does astro-turf, boxes, lampstands and couches have to do with living inside out, being people of integrity, living as the new creation where our new heart and renewed mind and the spirit at work in our lives produce the fruit of our faith expressed in good works? 

Well first, the box. 

The brown box, filled and closed, has no integrity, no markers on the outside of what lies beneath. It could be a fruit bowl or a chimpanzee inside, we really can’t know for sure. A bit like us, at times we have the ability to present ourselves to the world as something other than we are, we can pay lip-service to our beliefs and live lives that fail to step out the changed person God is working out inside of us.

Over the course of the series we will be revealing items of living room furniture (the stuff that’s inside) being brought outside these boxes. House furnishings (like our faith) are significant contents that you can't see are in a house when you are standing outside it.  

Bringing them outside seems dangerous, risky even. Things might get ruined, broken or damaged, plus it looks pretty weird (maybe even weirder than a shop assistant finding those leftover eagle feathers stuck to the bottom of your green bags at the coles checkout), people might say something!

Living on the outside the stuff that is being transformed on the inside looks kind of weird too, it’s risky, it puts our contents on display, it demands consistency, integrity, resolve and so much more.

It is also something weirdly attractive to other people though- a couch on a lawn- don't you want to sit on it? doesn't the strangeness of it seem kind of wonderful?…so it is, we thought, with living inside/out, it is a strange kind of wonderful thing that shines a light on who Jesus really is, the crazy changes he has really made in us and is making in us, day by day, that set us apart. 

And that completes the story of why astroturf, boxes and living room furniture will be gracing our stage for the next 8 weeks. 

We hope you enjoy!

Behind the scenes: with the creative arts team

It’s 10.54pm on a Sunday night and somewhere in between dragging around an in-design layout for the next church magazine and thumbing through my rather tatty bible looking for a theme for this issue, inspiration has struck. Deepest waters, rivers, oceans, the sea, cast sins into the sea( Mic 7: 19), peace like a river (Is.48:18), even if I settle on the far side of the sea, there your hand will guide me (Ps 139),.…I am on a thematic quest, diving between verses, chapters, books and squashed up pages, unfolding metaphors large and small( and aquatic apparently).

It is perhaps one of my favourite aspects of this ministry, coordinating a creative arts team that serves our church, the challenge to navigate the gap between the written word and the visual, the idea and the metaphor, symbol, gesture, poem, all colour and light and flavour that is woven through or can be used to express it. The challenge to ever hope to precipitate even just a moment that expresses a millimetre of the abundantly creative God we serve. 

But I am sure for many, what we do is probably a bit of a mystery. 

Like lots of ministries.

In the interest of peaking your interest I thought I would take you though, for a little dip behind the scenes( oh no you didn’t -yes I promise more water-y puns to come), to uncover it’s much more paper, pens, ridiculous ideas and email chains than berets, easels and philosophy.

We meet as a team every 2 weeks, often around a messy table of snacks and art supplies, where we share an agenda that stretches from the next sermon series topic- ideas for artwork, performance, video, working with Stella- our amazing communications manager, planning projects in collaboration with other teams to promote their events and ministry, to tangentially discussing how much we would totally rock an artists studio caravan in the church parking lot, with an astroturf garden and a coffee cart window at the back.  We think out loud, we thumb through scriptures, we have thinking music and lots of scrawly paper that translates a myriad of wonderful ideas into a smaller number of actual tasks and a growing list of one-day-when projects. We pray a lot because mostly we are doing things we have never done before and have no clue if they will work out. And then we have workshops and project sessions - excursions for footage into the city, making objects into typography and photographing them, storyboarding videos, mass producing installation objects, trying to engineer structures that will actually hang them in record time, excursions to bunnings, lots of drilling, painting or on occasion just strolling around a stage posturing over the perfect intonation for a line.

Not many of us are professional artists, a few most certainly, but for the most part we learn along the way whatever it is we need to make happen the thing which we have imagined doing.

We are often more ambitious than we should probably be, but that keeps us praying harder and relying on God in his mercy and providence to make this pathetic human gesture into something that can be used for his purposes. It’s a pretty great place to be.  We believe greatly in the power of creative arts to facilitate learning, outreach, community building, and just to bring joy and beauty. What can I say, it is the best! We would love for new people to join who feel passionately about the potential of this area. And even more so we would be blessed to have you on board as a contractor, full time member or occasional volunteer if you have any experience in the arts.*  

But back to that magazine, Micah 7: 19 has won out for space on the first page, and the lyrics of a song playing in the background seem like they offer what we are looking for on the front cover, “grace abounds in deepest waters”. Yes. There are still many hours left to navigate on this  project but it seems to be sailing smoothly.  And all going well you get to see it in print next weekend! 

*You can find out about joining the creative arts team at http://snccreativearts.blogspot.com