Why the Church Needs Art

This is an article I wrote for www.patheos.com on why the church needs art…

A few months ago, my wife’s grandmother, known to the family as Grandma Polly, came to the end of a long and fascinating life. I was asked by the family to preach at the funeral. I struggled with whether or not to accept the invitation, but in the end realized that if I did not accept, the funeral would be organized and the eulogy offered by a funeral home employee who did not know Polly, and I thought I should give it my best shot. Things went reasonably well. I turned down a different request from the family, though—to sing.

It is a little bit ironic that I accepted an invitation to preach while declining an invitation to sing. I have not been to seminary and am not ordained, but I have been a professional singer/songwriter for twenty years, performing well over 2000 concerts on four continents in that time. One might reasonably expect that I would have accepted the invitation I declined, and vice versa.

I loved Polly, though, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to sing. The words of a sermon may well be moving, and I hope they were that day. Singing, though, is inherently moving, at least any singing I would be willing to do in such a context. I knew that my own emotional control would be precarious if I tried to sing that day, so I did not try. Certainly there is art in a well-crafted sermon, but song, for me, falls much farther along the continuum between intellect and emotion, and touches places in my spirit that are inaccessible by any other means.

To many people, art is superfluous or even distracting from what is truly important. It holds entertainment value, keeping people engaged, or perhaps pleasantly distracted, but is not substantive, and is certainly not integral. To others, it is fundamental; it is a door through which they enter into divine relationship. My heart breaks for the former category. I mourn that they do not get to feel what I feel when I am transported by a powerful piece of music (or dance or painting or sculpture or photography, etc., for that matter, though I primarily write of music here, which is my own primary artistic expression). Art is a way to worship and to be in relationship with God that cannot be replicated by other methods. It is an essential way to connect to God, and should not be discounted or minimized. There are several reasons for people of faith to take it seriously.

First is simply the observation that thinking isn’t enough. Theological inquiry and intellectual debate are hugely important. They are not sufficient, though. Intellect is not enough to know God. In order to be called into the presence of God, I believe that most of us need to be moved before we can be logically convinced. Before we engage with the study, we have to want to study. In order to want to think about these questions, we need to feel that there is something holy worth moving toward. Thinking simply isn’t enough, and one major point of the arts is to move us—to make us feel.

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