Emergent Church and Christian bookstores interview

I wrote a freelance article for Aspiring Retail magazine on how the Emergent Church's use of art and how Christian retailers can reach out to this demographic.
I got some great responses and the article was beautiful.
Here are the questions and repsonses I emailed to Aaron Lindloff, arts pastor at Life on the Vine, a suburban Chicago emerging church.

-How would you describe the role of art in emerging churches?Many evangelicals are suspicious of the emerging church, perhaps because it's a movement and not a denomination that you can pin down. Here we have a Christian movement that wants to embrace all of the arts, not music alone, but poetry, dance, and the visual arts. The emerging church movement elevates art because it respects the imagination, seeing it as a redeemed part of our life in Christ. Surely our imaginations can be used for evil, but also they can help us understand and experience God. Traditional evangelical churches have typically used art to illustrate a point. They USE art. Emerging churches, such as ours, display art and experience it. One might say that we submit ourselves to it, insofar as the art is a window to heaven. True, sometimes our art makes a point, a rebuke of some kind, but the overriding purpose of our art is devotion. Some evangelicals say that we are depreciating the Word of God. Rather, we are complementing the Word of God with the Image of God. We are affirming that God has fashioned humans as both rational and intuitive. Furthermore, our heavy display of Christian images serves to combat the barrage of perverse images we encounter in our culture.

How and what kind of art is used in your services?In our services we rely heavily on digital images. We project images of photos, paintings, sculptures. Some photos we take ourselves; others we find for free online or we subscribe to a stock photo site. Most of the paintings and sculptures that we project are found for free online, because they are public domain, made prior to 1923. Lining the walls of our sanctuary are a series of framed prints which are changed every month or two, depending on our sermon series. These come from art books. The altar is an important and central image. Besides being dressed with a vestment corresponding to the church calendar, we place on it an Orthodox triptych of Christ's resurrection and a cross. We choose different types of crosses depending on the time of year. For example, September is missions month, so we display a Celtic cross with a circle in the middle, representing the world. A green cross is displayed during the rest of green time. A rusty metal cross is displayed on the altar during Lent, along with a crown of thorns or three spikes. Aside from the children parading around the sanctuary in an orderly fashion every Advent and Easter, we do not dance yet. That's a tricky one to do... artfully.

How would you describe good art or how does good art function?Rather than defining good art versus bad, let me describe how some of my emerging generation friends and I define ourselves aesthetically. Post-Kinkadian. Referring to Thomas Kinkaid. Referring to the giant dove with Edwardian scripted Bible verses superimposed. Referring to multi-colored calligraphy on a poster. (Calligraphy can be okay, so long as it is faded and scratched onto some water-stained paper.) Kinkaid is a good example of what happens when a Christian artist hasn't any accountability. Life isn't like that. The Christian life isn't lighthouses and sunbeams breaking through the treetops. This generation wants to be real. That's one of our tenets. Be genuine. That doesn't mean we don't have hope or don't want any happy pictures around. It means we don't decorate our homes or churches solely with the bright side of life. We want crosses, crosses with Jesus ON them, cross with Jesus off of them. The suffering of the Christian life. That's real. Emergents also value community, not just with the like-minded brothers and sisters of our church in our town in our time, but with the multitude of saints who've gone before us, in generations and cultures past. This is why the emerging church throws around the term "ancient/future." This is why we like old stuff. Old stuff has lasted and will continue to last. Old stuff reminds us we're a part of something bigger than our immediate selves.

Although I’m sure Emergent churches are more than young people in their 20s, many Christian retailers see the 20something generation as a large part of this movement. They also know that this demographic is not one that frequents their retail locations. This issue of Aspiring Retail is dedicated to exploring the Emergent church. What could be a first step for retailers to better understand the kind of art that is involved with the Emergent church movement?I suppose the first step for retailers in marketing to the Emergent Church--and here I feel somewhat like a traitor to Emergents--is that we are suspicious of marketing. Most ads on TV are lies inspired by greed, concealed with humor. Another step for Christian retailers is to understand our desire to make things ourselves. If we have an artist in our own little church who can make that, we're not going to buy that. We don't want knick-knacks or clutter. Though we do want a lot of candles. I have to drive 25 miles to a Catholic bookstore in Wisconsin to find a set of candles or an Easter candle.

A better interview with arts pastor David O. Taylor of Hope Chapel in Austin, TX, is posted at Son of a Beach. His repsonses were a little more inspiring.