Wandering But Not Lost

Friday, May 27, 2005

A Picture is Worth...

I love it when things cross my desk and it signals to me that I should take notice and see what God has for me to learn. The June issue of Christianity Today just came in the mail and there is a column by Andy Crouch about Visualcy. The point of the article is that we have become a more visual culture, transitioning again from oral to written cultures, now to an era where 80% of cell phones have cameras, sharing pictures has become easy and commonplace. I quote from the article:

"But if Plato was right when he described the three transcendent realities as truth, goodness, and beauty, then people who care about truth and goodness must eventually care about beauty as well. And people who value beauty might eventually look for truth."

That reminded me of a post on pomomusings about an emergent convention seminar that talked about developing and fostering the creative impulse in self and community. From the post...
Initial thesis: We live in a culture today, that the missional context of our world has changed. To engage missionally in our culture requires a form and posture of leadership which our systems are not ready to engage or release. Intuition, artistic, prophetic, poetic → these are what are needed, and these are what seminaries, institutions are woefully unprepared to release and/or even name these.

I have added the book The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida to my wishlist. I wonder how we as people of the Word can take our love for scripture and creatively engage, present, study, question, debate the lessons of scripture. We in the church can do a much better job of creating multi-sensory experiences within our worship and within the preaching of God's word.

Finally, I got an invitation to participate in a workshop on Digital Storytelling. One of the departments on campus is buying copies of the book
Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community by Joe Lambert
(http://www.storycenter.org/book.html). We'll be discussing the impact of Digital Storytelling on academia, where I spend most of my waking hours and I'll be trying to assess the impact for the church with my extra brain cells.

All of this converged on my brain in about three days time. I get all excited when I see patterns like this emerge and I know that God has something for me to learn and to think about through this. I have felt for a long time that we are losing the founding generation of our church and that we need to capture the faith stories of people who were my age or younger when the church was being founded. In some ways, approaching our culture from a missional perspective is nothing new...our church was founded with that thought. I know of few mainline, institutional churches that appreciate the contextualization of the gospel as much as Central. It gives me hope that we may make the transition from deep scholars of the word to creative artists of the word, ready to engage the visual, creative culture that we live in.

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