Taking It to the Streets

Nathan Corbitt J., Vivian Nix-Early

Description

A quiet yet powerful revolution is going on. All over this country and across the world creativity-in the form of visual arts, music, dance, drama, and technology-is providing an emotionally expressive vehicle for communicating truth, developing character, and crossing cultural boundaries to build the kingdom of God. J. Nathan Corbitt and Vivian Nix-Early visited numerous artists, faith communities, and arts organizations to discover and document how the arts are being used to transform people and communities, especially in urban settings. The result is this extensive handbook that combines real-life stories with tested methodologies to create a new paradigm for the role of the arts in Christian ministry and mission. Taking It to the Streets provides church and mission leaders, youth ministers, and students with a historical perspective and theology for understanding the transforming power of the arts, a vocabulary for discussing them outside the sanctuary, and creative methods for bringing faith to action in the streets of society.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of religion
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441215352
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

© 2003 by J. Nathan Corbitt and Vivian Nix-Early
Published by Baker Books
A division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakerbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-1535-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ® . NIV ® . Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
Scripture marked KJV is from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture marked NKJV is from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
This book is dedicated to special members of our families:
To Nathan’s mother, Gretchen E. Corbitt, associate pastor in the mountains of North Carolina before there was a debate about women in ministry, church organist and piano teacher, public school music teacher, children’s community theater director, and international traveler, all while raising four children and being a pastor’s wife. An agape and compassionate artist, she has been a spiritual mentor and professional encourager for fifty-two years. As incredible as it may seem, she has never spoken a negative word about anyone.
To Vivian’s dad, Andrew W. Nix Jr., who has stuck it out in the hyperghetto, living and doing business incarnationally, leading his church and his community in fostering economic development and justice before it was popular to do so. He insisted on his children’s involvement in the arts. He has shown her the way.
And to Dr. Verolga Nix, Vivian’s aunt, who, with her genuine and loving heart and her own incredible musical talent, has uncovered and encouraged the musical gifts of so many young people in the public schools of Philadelphia. An agape artist of extraordinary standard, she has given hope, vision, confidence, and a future to those whom she has touched.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword by Tony Campolo
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1 The Arts in Redemptive Transformation
1. Taking the Gospel to the Streets: Current Context for the NU JERUZ
2. The Language of the NU JERUZ
3. The Arts in Redemptive Transformation: A Model for Change
4. The Transforming Power of Art: God at Play in the World
5. The Artists of Redemptive Transformation
Part 2 Proclaiming the NU JERUZ: Creating Critical Awareness
6. Arts as a Voice of Justice
7. Arts as a Call to Redemption
Part 3 Building the NU JERUZ: Working It Out
8. Arts as a Community Builder
9. Arts as Economic Development
10. The Arts in Human Relationships
11. Arts as Education
Part 4 Renewal in the NU JERUZ: Celebration
12. Celebration of Renewal: Dancin’ in the Streets
Postlude
Notes
About the Author
Foreword
When I learned that a group of nuns in Haiti who had received a quarter-million-dollar grant would use the money to sponsor and develop a symphony orchestra in the capital city of Port au Prince, I was somewhat shocked. When I considered the incredible poverty of this poorest of all nations in the Western Hemisphere, and when I thought about the massive malnutrition that plagues the children of the capital, I instantaneously concluded that the money would have been better spent on things other than music. That was before I saw the symphony orchestra perform in an outdoors sports stadium.
The orchestra played before tens of thousands of the city’s poorest of the poor. As I watched the impoverished populace react to the music, saw the ecstasy and pride in their faces, and saw the sense of dignity that the music generated among these people, I realized the nuns had done the right thing. When Jesus said “Man does not live on bread alone,” he was reminding us that spiritual hunger can transcend physical hunger. And on that hot evening in that Caribbean island nation, I saw the poor people of Haiti receive food for their souls. Of course, they would be hungry in the morning, and their cries for economic justice would grow even louder, but the music of the previous evening had given some of them the nurturing they needed to press on in their struggle against the principalities and powers that challenged their right to aesthetic gratification as well as their right to economic well-being.
In his book One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse, the onetime neo-Marxist philosopher from the Frankfurt School and the University of San Diego, powerfully stated that art is revolutionary in its character: “It reminds us of what is not—and thus makes us discontent with what is.” [1] Art lifts us out of the mundane and reminds us of the deeper longings of our hearts and souls that are left unfulfilled in the existential political order. Art stimulates our longing for the world we dream of but have not yet realized. It lifts our eyes and gives us a glimpse of the “heavenly city,” where humanity is no longer alienated and intimate love is realized. In this sense, art helps us to carry out a prophetic ministry.
The best critiques of contemporary culture are to be found in the poetry and plays created by great artists, not in the statistical analysis of sociologists. That is why as a sociology professor I have always urged my students to take courses in drama and poetry. Plays such as Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and poems such as The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot expose the shallowness and emptiness of the lives of consumeristic, secularised Americans in ways that social scientists cannot. A careful study of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica leads us into the subjective side of warfare and exposes the horrors, dislocations, and spiritual chaos of war in a way that historians can’t begin to convey.
Works of art stir us to act and to change the way things are into the way things ought to be. Who can deny that the paintings of Diego Rivera provided major impulses for the Mexican Revolution, and who can question that the music of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Tom Paxton provided the impulse for the powerful social movements of the 1960s?
This is not to say that the social sciences and the arts do not intersect. In reality, social scientists have often turned to the arts to gain insights for their sociological investigations. Perhaps no sociologist in the twentieth century exemplified this more than Pitcairn Sorokin, the onetime Harvard sociologist whose book Social and Cultural Dynamics paved the way for understanding how sociologists could use art to understand societal systems. Sorokin realized that while empirical analysis can provide an understanding of a society’s values and practices, the arts can give us a taste of what is to come. The arts “feel out” the future and give expression to it long before objective analysis can provide any discernment.
Taking It to the Streets explores the prophetic dimension of the arts, especially as artists express themselves in the modern urban setting while fulfilling a special commitment to the poor and socially disinherited. The authors of this book show us how the arts can enable us to hear the cries of the oppressed as God would have us hear them, so that we might respond to these cries with works of justice.
The arts have long been a part of Christian worship. Even the most philistine of Christians recognize that. The sound of choirs, singing the great cantatas that generate awe and wonder in listeners, has been a part of Christendom since the Middle Ages. A sense of joyful transcendence has always found expression in hymns of praise. We all know that the psalmist of old called us to use musical instruments and dance to express our gratitude to God and to praise the holy name of the Creator of the universe. When Romans 8:26 tells us that there are groanings of the heart that we cannot put into words, there is a hint that the arts may be the closest thing to prayer, because the arts give expression to that which cannot be articulated in prosaic terms.
For a long time it was difficult for me to get into dance. But first with ballet and later with modern dance, I came to sense the glory of God being expressed in the rhythmic flows and movements of the human body. Dancing enables a spiritual energy to flow through the human body in movements that speak to the heart and soul of God. In artistic dance a rhythm—like the Tao of ancient China—flows in and through all things, returning to the Divine in beautiful expressions that give us a taste of the aesthetic experiences that await us in a place beyond time and space.
I am prone to write off anything that I don’t understand as not being art, and I ought to know better. For instance, I don’t understand modern praise music. I have sarcastically said that if I get to heaven and I find they have an overhead projector with the words of hymns flashed on a screen, I’m checking out. In sermons I have jokingly contended that the difference between modern praise music and a machine gun is that a machine gun only has a hundred rounds. One of my friends has said that modern praise music has three notes, four words, and two hours. But such anecdotes say more about my own inability to grasp what’s going on than about the value of the music.
At my own school, Eastern University, where the authors of this book serve as faculty members, we have a weekly chapel service at which attendance is voluntary. An overwhelming proportion of the student body shows up nevertheless, not so much to hear the speakers as to participate in singing praise music. Many of the students think I am somewhat of a spiritual