In mid-October, I will drive to Winnipeg for the day and teach a class at Millar College of the Bible for their “Urban Edge” program. Urban Edge allows students to connect with the city around them through urban ministry and challenges them to use their gifts and passions to serve God in all aspects of life. Guess which gift and passion I’ll be speaking on!
You guessed it! Automotive Philosophy!
Just kidding. Don’t you know me at all? It’s art. ART!
I'm excited to do this once again (I got to teach a class for the Urban Edge program last year, too). My class will be about gaining a better understanding of culture through art, and how to use art to serve their culture/city. To do this, I’ll draw on my history as an artist/missionary and take ideas from a great book called Culture Care, by Makoto Fujimura. My goal is that by the end of the day, my students will be enabled to engage with art and creativity in a curious and open-minded way so that they can build bridges between the people they meet and the invisible truths of God.
Welcome to Class Prep
I thought that it might be beneficial for me to conduct my class prep in my blog. Hopefully, my research on this will challenge and encourage you too! I hope to introduce you to the concepts in Culture Care, which has been a helpful resource as I’ve grown in my art and career.
Culture Care is a book that challenges the reader to think of culture as an ecosystem - an ecosystem that needs healing and restoration, just like our physical ecosystems do. The title is playing off of a perhaps more familiar movement called Creation Care. Creation Care is a movement among environmentally-conscious people to steward the land in a life-giving way. Culture care is likewise a movement to steward our culture towards life.
Crusader? Or Gardener?
“The principles of culture care […] depend on developing skills in listening to the wider culture, and thereby becoming a loving servant toward culture rather than treating it as territory to be won.” Fujimura, Makoto. Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life. Downers Grover, IL: IVP Books, 2017. (pg. 13)
As a Christian and artist, I love this way of looking at my role in culture: not as a crusading conquerer, but as a servant. Don’t get me wrong, words like “crusade” and “conquer” have their place in my faith language (though they are admittedly burdened with a lot of negative connotations!) - but the way that Jesus crusaded and conquered was very different from how men usually conquer.
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil 2:5-11)
Keeping the example of Christ in mind, how should a Christian approach a broken culture?
Let’s use the metaphor of a garden to explore this question. A Christian is born into a cultural garden or enters a foreign garden as a missionary. Before they can plant seeds of life, they ought to learn what they can about the garden’s current condition.
What parts of the garden are thriving?
Is the garden struggling with a mono-culture of weeds?
Does it have a healthy diversity of organisms living in it?
Are there any old fruitful trees that shelter birds and bring shade and peace to the garden?
Is it a barren desert?
Which plants should be nurtured?
Which should be uprooted?
Are there pests in the garden?
What gardening tasks are the Christian’s to bear? Which ones are God’s?
(hint) “…Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” 1 Cor. 3:7
Some answers are obvious at a glance. For example, in my culture’s “garden,” there is a quick-growing, spreading vine of progressivism that overwhelms and chokes ancient trees of tradition. Some would say that’s a good thing, but I see that and worry about what we lose when old-growth trees are killed.
I am reminded of a desperate campaign I undertook one summer: killing the wild cucumbers which were decimating pine trees on the farm. I wielded a whipper-snipper and went hog-wild on those damnable vines, clear-cutting through the undergrowth to try and find each root. In the end, I left a big empty spot, and soon it was once again filled with the things that easily grew there: more wild cucumber, plus some stinging nettle to boot.
So, the answer to the problem of a spreading weed is not simply “get rid of the weed.” Something new has to be planted there, tended to, and protected.
Another obvious thing in Canada’s cultural garden is the many new cultural gardens transplanted from foreign countries. Looking around me, I feel unfamiliar with the culture around me. I can’t even understand what people are saying most of the time. I can't assume everyone's an english speaker. If my other-culture neighbours were plants, I would need to do some research about their style of "plant care." What amount of sun do they need? How much water? What soil type? etc. I can’t intuit the answers to these questions based on my own culture. I can’t treat them like I treat a Mennonite plant. I must humble myself and become a student.
Research is also necessary to answer some of the less-obvious, deeper, hidden questions about culture. For example:
What is the zeitgeist among African Muslims in Winnipeg?
What is the driving motivation of Chinese students?
What about Sikh moms?
What values are preserved when communities relocate to a new country? What values are discarded?
What Canadian values are adopted?
How does Canadian culture change as new cultures deposit their values here? What new culture is created through this amalgamation?
It’s too much for one person to answer every single question. If a person is looking to positively affect culture, step one of that process is to wait on the Lord. Pray to God, offering to serve and love what God calls you to serve and love. Something will spring up in your heart - perhaps a passion to use illustration to tell unreached people the gospel. Or a drive to witness to urban youth with a horsemanship program. Or a desire to shelter vulnerable pregnant women. Once God has shown you your part of the garden, you can begin to learn how to bring life there.
Culture Care: Generative Thinking
“At the most basic level, we call something ‘generative’ if it is fruitful, originating new life or producing offspring (as with plants and animals), or producing new parts (as with stem cells). When we are generative, we draw on creativity to bring into being something fresh and life giving.” Fujimura, Makoto. Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life. Downers Grover, IL: IVP Books, 2017. (pg. 22)
Makoto Fujimura lists “three G’s” that characterize his thoughts on generative thinking:
Genesis moments
Generosity
Generational thinking
Genesis moments
What better example of a generative moment than the moment that started it all? The beginning of the world, and the garden of Eden. Adam and Eve found themselves in a garden that was created out of chaos through the word of God. Their job was to name the things in the garden. Their experience was marked by curiosity and discovery, but also by temptation and disaster.
“Genesis moments often include creativity, growth — and failure. […] Generative thinking often starts out with a failure.” Fujimura, Makoto. Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life. Downers Grover, IL: IVP Books, 2017. (pg. 17)
Consider how the failure of Adam and Eve prompted the first revelation of the future life of Jesus, the first deposit of hope in the human heart. Failure can often be a platform for a much-needed message of hope. What failure in your own life might prompt you to give a message of hope to someone else?
Generosity
To me, the perfect Biblical example of creative generosity is the woman who poured her ointment on Jesus’ feet. (Luke 7:36-50) She spilt out everything she had onto Jesus, which made the others in the room declare, “What a waste!” But Jesus liked her gratuitous gift! He said, “When people talk about my gospel, they will mention this woman’s act.”
Why? She beautifully illustrated Jesus’s own future “pouring out.” She revealed Jesus as the broken alabaster vessel emptied for us, and - like Jesus’s sacrifice would, later - her gift caused offence in the self-righteous, and awe in the humble.
Her act was personal and devotional, but it was also demonstrative and communally impactful. It was a gift to Jesus, but also to herself and to us. It draws us away from preoccupation with survival, economy and utility and inspires us towards celebration and abundance.
“Artists have a deep capacity to develop and share generosity and empathy, to point toward abundance and connections. We learn generosity as we try to communicate with a new audience, or help people express what they cannot otherwise articulate, or say something meaningful into the void.” Fujimura, Makoto. Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life. Downers Grover, IL: IVP Books, 2017. (pg. 19)
Have you been the recipient of gratuitous generosity? How did it impact your life?
Generational Thinking
“Our lives are directed or constrained by the paths paved by the generations before us. Sometimes we can trace the paths […). Often they shape us unawares. What is true of legacies from our parents is true also for our communities and racial and national histories. Cultures are not created overnight. We are affected by layers of experiences, personalities, and works of previous generations. Cultural histories affect us far beyond what we are able to recognize — or, sometimes, admit. Fujimura, Makoto. Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life. Downers Grover, IL: IVP Books, 2017. (pg. 21)
I bet parents feel this truth much more keenly than I do: the weight of responsibility of passing on something of value to the next generation. I have to remember that I, too, by being alive and participating in life, prolong certain ideas and values towards the future, while dead-ending others. Whether I try or not, I will impact future generations. So I’d best try, lest my impact be primarily defined by what I neglected to do.
What values do you think are worth prolonging into the future? What values do you think would be better left in the past?
Final thoughts:
I’ve enjoyed meditating on these three “Gs” since I first read Culture Care several years ago. The idea of generative thinking provides a very helpful paradigm for my art career, especially in regards to my involvement with missions. I am so grateful to be in a creative community that actively seeks to bring the life of Jesus into contemporary culture. Using our gifts and passions purposefully, we strive to learn from our mistakes, give as much of ourselves as we can, and deposit “seeds” into the soil of our cultures that will hopefully grow and produce fruit long after we’re gone. In the end, our goal is to use our art to create spiritual connections between the hearts of people and the heart of God. Our art will inevitably pass away - such is the course of history. But if through my temporary art - my words and images that are there one moment and gone the next - if through these fleeting things I can facilitate an eternal life-connection between a person and my God, then I have not wasted my time here on this earth.
“Now if anyone builds on the foundation [Jesus Christ] with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” (1 Cor 3:10-15)
So, bringing it all back around to my purpose - inspiring the Millar students to use their own gifts and talents to care for the culture around them - I will leave them (and you) with a challenge. We live in an ever-changing world. The gardens we grow up in are like in the parable of the sower of the seeds (Mat 13:1-8): sometimes hard, sometimes overrun by weeds, sometimes accosted by pests, sometimes fertile and soft. You can learn about the condition of the cultural by studying its history, art, politics, economics, etc. The challenge is this: How can we create new life where we see death in our culture? What idea can you plant - what truth would you dedicate your time to nurture and grow and protect, trusting that it will bring nourishment and abundance to the other residents of the garden? How can you do that? Through your art? Music? By creating a business? Growing a family?
What generative act has God given you? What Genesis moment sparked its origin? How can you implement generosity along the way? Who will be the recipients of this generative act, and how might future generations be impacted by what you start?
I’d love to hear your answers to these questions! Feel free to comment below, or on Facebook. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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