Art for worship must evidence not only aesthetic integrity but also fidelity to Christian truths. Specifically, liturgical art should reflect the theology and character of the worship that is enacted in the local congregation. The following article explains these claims and describes two examples of how they have been put into practice.
Cameras were flashing in the cathedral. I was standing next to a stone effigy of some monarch who lay on the lid of his tomb and stared confidently upward beyond a vaulted ceiling to a vaulted heaven that had been there when he died. All around the royal sepulcher tourists were poking their fingers in guidebooks. Several leaned their heads back to survey a deep blue stained glass window whose intricacies of lead patterned cherubim about a haloed Christ. Gazing frozen from the walls were medieval burghers posing as saints. One of them was pointing his finger in his own guidebook and looking as if he had discovered something much more worthy of attention than the birthdate of the duke who gave the altar.
Amidst the click of cameras and the shuffle of feet on stone, a voice broke the air over a perfectly modulated sound system, loud enough to catch everyone’s attention but soft enough to sound conversational in that cavernous space. We were welcomed to the cathedral and reminded that “this is above all a house of prayer,” that living congregations continued to worship here, and that we were invited in Christ’s name to join them. Then the voice announced we would have a brief prayer. We were asked to be still while an intercession was offered to God. We were given a few seconds to bow or kneel or sit, whatever our customary posture for prayer. Several people looked shocked: Prayer?! There followed a simple, powerful plea for the ill, the homeless, the hungry, the mentally disturbed. After the Amen, the click of the cameras began immediately, although when I looked up I noticed several people were still praying. Perhaps they were seeing what the saint had been pointing to in his book for centuries: the force of Spirit in the heart of faith, the depths of reality, the visionary power of belief to take stone and wood and sand and lead and reshape them to the glory of the primal source from which they came, the rhapsodic conviction of unseen mysteries that guided the stonecutter’s hammer, the mason’s chisel, the carpenter’s plane, and the glass maker’s iron.
The First Concern: Seeking an Integrity of Form and Faith
The saint saw what we need to see before beginning any discussion of how to use art in the worship of the church. The issue is not simply: What is aesthetically pleasing? Those photographers in the cathedral impatient for the intercession to end had clear ideas about that question. Yet no matter how perfectly focused their pictures, their perspective was distorted. They failed to capture the depth of faith from which all that splendid art had emerged. They may have caught the play of light and shadow, but they missed this greater truth: those windows, statues, carvings, and vaulted arches were more than objects of art. They were prayers, the yearning and praise of the heart externalized into materiality.
Sometimes our use of art in worship has the same “photographic” quality as the slides of those shutterbugs. I have watched liturgical dances, listened to anthems, looked at slides, and seen chancel dramas that pleased the ear and eye but left the soul empty. They were beautiful but failed to engage the congregation in the praise of God because they were unexpressive of the community’s life and faith. That is why I never think of simply “bringing art into worship in order to enliven it some.” A cathedral, a New England meeting house, a Bach chorale, and a black spiritual all possess the power to inspire because each embodies a blazing conviction about the precise, personal center of reality. Notice that the power is a function of something more than a particular artistic style. The cathedral and chorale share a mysterious complexity, while the meeting house and the spiritual are leaner witnesses to the Holy Breath of life. But all of them are characterized by integrity of form and faith, a theological-aesthetic coherence that makes them effective bearers of the divine. Although earlier ages spilled ink and blood over the different theologies manifest in these outward signs of belief, we can now see that each was an authentic expression of faith for its own time and place. Each developed out of the central convictions of the community and connected to the life and experience of the worshipers.
Moving Beyond the Verbal Word
Therefore, our first task as worship leaders who want to use art in our services is to clarify our central convictions: What is our church trying to express and celebrate as a community of faith? We cannot answer this question simply by reclaiming what John Calvin wrote or by turning to any period or theology of the past as the final arbiter of what art belongs in our worship. If our ancestors who now live in the great cloud of witnesses had done that, we would have no cathedrals, meeting houses, chorales, spirituals, or any of the other treasures that they left us! To use the past as a rigid authority would be to make the same mistake as the photographers in the cathedral who saw it as a museum rather than a house of prayer. Worship is not the atavistic act of an antiquarian society, but the vibrant engagement of living humanity with what is eternally true.
The appropriate use of art in liturgy requires that we first name those fundamental theological principles that shape our identity as Reformed congregations, and then explore how the Spirit of God is expanding those principles to embrace more of that truth which is beyond the grasp of any human formulation. In working with congregations, I often begin by exploring their concept of the Word of God, for it is central to Reformed worship. I find most churches restrict their understanding of the Word to what is verbal, though in fact the biblical concept bursts beyond the boundaries of speech. The logos (Word) of God created what we see and touch as well as what we hear. Furthermore, God saw that what was created was good. But our Reformed propensity to stress the ear as the gate to heaven has detached us from the materiality of the creation. Our worship in effect disincarnates the Word by being too exclusively aural. I am aware of the historic reasons for this in the Reformers’ thrilling reclamation of the Bible as the church’s book. However, to perpetuate their iconoclastic extremism is not to be faithful to the Scriptures they recovered. Until our Reformed congregations come to terms with this weakness in our historic theology, we will feel uncomfortable with the introduction of visual art into our worship or we will do a poor job of it: banners so filled with words the symbols cannot be seen, bulletin covers of pallid piety, naves that are a pastiche of styles unrelated to our animating convictions. Reclaiming the visual and material expression of our faith will make us more faithful to the wholeness of the Word than we currently are. We will not be denying our tradition, but deepening and expanding the truth that gave it birth:
The Word of God was from the start.
The Word drove seas and land apart.
The Word made rocks and living things.
The Word raised up and brought down kings.
The Word became a child of earth.
The Word arrived through human birth.
The Word like us was blood and bone.
The Word knew life as we have known.
The Word of God was human sized,
The Word by most unrecognized.
The Word by some though was received.
The Word gave life when they believed.
The Word had first made flesh from sod.
The Word-made-flesh turned flesh toward God.
The Word is working on flesh still.
The Word is spelling out God’s will.
The Word shall be our life and light.
The Word shall be our power and might.
The Word above all wealth is priced,
The Word by name is Jesus Christ.
Moving Beyond Biblical Citations
Along with an expanded concept of the Word goes a more accurate understanding of the canon of Holy Scripture. The term canon means “measure,” not “boundary.” When we say that the Bible is our canon we are indicating it is the standard by which we judge other experiences and expressions of the Spirit. To be biblical does not require confining ourselves to the Bible, but rather witnessing the reality that the Bible proclaims. Artistic expression that is in touch with the Spirit may be more biblical than a worship service that profusely quotes the Scripture but never embodies the contemporary surgings and rumblings of the renewing, creating, ever-living God. The use of art in worship can be a way of enacting the Pentecostal promptings that echo in the hearts of worshipers satiated by verbosity and hungering for other dimensions of the truth:
Wind who makes all winds that blow—
Gusts which bend the saplings low,
Gales which heave the sea in waves,
Stirrings in the mind’s deep caves—
Aim your breath with steady power
On your church, this day, this hour.
Raise, renew the life we’ve lost,
Spirit God of Pentecost.
These expanded understandings of the Word, of the meaning of “biblical,” and how the Spirit comes to us are crucial prerequisites to the introduction of art into Reformed worship. Space limitations have allowed me only to identify the issues, but a worship committee seeking to enliven its services with art might well precede its efforts with study sessions tracing the meanings of “Word” throughout the Bible, and then share their findings through newsletter and sermon with the entire congregation. All of this may seem a tedious and complex process, but without such background work, most efforts at revitalizing worship will either meet extreme resistance or be little more than passing fads. There may be one or two services where some beautiful work of art provides a temporary flash of excitement, but there will not be the sustained revitalization that brings the deep satisfaction of worshiping God in Spirit and in truth week after week.
Two Examples
Two visiting artists, made possible by a grant from the Luce Fund, have brought this truth home to me on our seminary campus. The first was a professional choreographer and dancer, Garth Fagan. Before Garth did anything with our worship he sat down and talked with the community’s worship leaders and participants. He asked them what they believed, what they were doing in worship, what they hoped would happen in their services. He acknowledged that it would be easy for him simply to come in with some pre-planned program, do it, dazzle us, and leave. But all that would remain would be a memory of when the “dance troupe visited us.” Our own dance of faith, our own movement with the Spirit, would not have been touched or encouraged or deepened. Rather than teach us how to leap through the air or stand on our toes, Garth began at a much more basic level. He asked us to walk to the front of the room with a Bible and then pointed out how many of us walked with slouching shoulders or timid steps—all of which contradicted the things we said we believed about the grace of God, the power of the Spirit, the good news of Jesus Christ. Then he helped us simply to walk and to stand with grace and assurance, to claim with our bodies what we affirmed in thought and word. The effect was astonishing. We began to incarnate our theology in posture and bearing.
From these simple initial exercises, Garth moved to develop a service in which there would be a central liturgical dance related to Psalm 150. But again he did not simply create the dance on his own. He worked with volunteers from the congregation and developed from their gestures a simple pattern of movement that they could perfect and that the entire community would feel comfortable with. Throughout this time he joined with me and my colleague in music, Carol Doran, to blend appropriate prayers and hymns with the simple choreography. The result was a service that engaged both the most traditional and most innovative members of the congregation in a service of stirring praise.
Notice the pattern in all of this: the art form is not imposed from without but is carefully cultivated as an authentic expression of the community’s faith. The success of the process depended on both the artist and the community. The artist supplied his extraordinary gifts of bodily discipline and grace, while the community supplied the theological conviction and eagerness to praise God with all that they were and could become. If either the artist or the community was closed to the other’s world, then the process would fail. The mutual receptivity of each to the other gave the final service that same integrity of form and faith which I observed in the cathedral’s carvings, arches, and windows.
This year we are currently engaged in a similar process with a graphic artist, Willy Malacher, whose specialty is liturgical design. Once again, Willy did nothing until he had visited our community, worshiped with us, and talked about our beliefs and hopes. Then having listened carefully to us, he put together a stunning slide show tracing the development of different worship settings in the history of the church. He helped to train our primitive eyes to the effect of line, space, proportion, and color. He did not make us into great graphic artists—that was not his task—but rather, like Garth, he raised our consciousness of the disparity between our verbalized faith and our visual symbolization of that faith. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the contrast between a series of pictures of splashing, bubbling public fountains, and the meager drops of water used in baptism. Willy pointed out that “If there is one thing Christ is not, it is stingy.” Yet the paucity of our sacramental symbol proclaimed the exact opposite! Our verbal formulations are orthodox, but we practice visual heresy.
Having alerted our sleeping eyes, Willy began to work with us on a wall hanging that would give focus to a flexible worship space we have so far not focused on with much success. He could easily have done the design entirely on his own, but he did not. He was eager to get the community involved. Therefore, he had each of us draw two sets of designs: the first to represent our hope of what we might be as a community; the second to represent our experience of the community as it currently is. Then these were placed in parallel horizontal rows on a wall, and each was interpreted by the creator. Now Willy went into action as an artist. He identified certain motifs that keep recurring—curves and circles in our first set of drawings, broken lines, and isolated geometric shapes in our second set. Then he took all of the drawings and used them to fuel his own artistic imagination and produced a design for a beautiful hanging that was amazingly expressive of who we are as a community and what we want to become. We are currently involved in purchasing the materials and producing the hanging and designing a special service for its dedication.
None of us has the artistic genius to come up with a design as aesthetically pleasing as what Willy did. But on the other hand, Willy needed our contribution to understand the yearning and praise in our hearts. Once again it was the accessibility of the artist and community to one another that made possible the creation of a work that has the right intuitive fit for our worship.
Achieving an Integrity of Form and Faith
Here then, summarized is a process for achieving that integrity of form and faith which makes the use of art in worship more than a gimmick or an awkward intrusion:
- Clarify and amplify the community’s theology to provide a framework for understanding why we are using art in the praise of God.
- Talk with an artist to interpret the community’s life and beliefs and to gain from the artist a perspective on the depths of reality to which our gabby religion may have blinded us.
- Create liturgical art that grows out of the above dialogue, drawing on the community’s faith and the artist’s visionary powers.
There is a special excitement in working with a living artist, but the process doesn’t have to be limited to that. My colleague and I have used the same steps by engaging worship committees in the study of composers, poets, and visual artists through books, records, and slides. Our guiding principle is not to turn each study into an art history course, but rather to ask with the committee: What is God’s living Word to us through this artist’s creation? Again and again, congregations have been surprised and moved by the depths of the Spirit that have been revealed to them through the process. And each time the final result was a service that fit the community, that connected with its life and faith while expanding its vision.
The age of building cathedrals is long past. But the age of the Living Word who comes to us through the creativity of those in touch with depths of Reality is always with us. To work with such artists is to do more than upgrade the aesthetic level of our services. It is to respond to the Spirit who blows in unexpected ways and unpredictable places. Seen from this perspective, art in worship is more than taking pictures in the cathedral, more than dabbling with beauty to give Sunday’s service a lift, more than an intriguing idea for the worship committee to consider. It is, instead, an essential part of the congregation’s journey of faith, carrying them into the presence of the One from whom every good and perfect gift flows, including the riches of the creative artist:
To climb the sacred footworn peak
Where pilgrims long have trod
Alert both eye and heart to seek
The present living God.
In spirit and in truth you’ll find
What words alone can’t frame:
The source of pulse and breath and mind,
The primal wind and flame.