The best art draws us closer to God, allowing us to see His face a little bit clearer, a little bit nearer than before.

The best art moves us from one place to another.

The best art changes us by giving us a new lens in which we can engage with the world.

Over the past few months I’ve engaged in several different types of art that have moved me in a significant way. Some of the pieces I’ve talked about on this blog or other social media outlets, some I haven’t talked much about it. Certainly there is no universal piece of art that moves each and every one of us, but I hope this short list will encourage you to make time and space for engaging with great art, the kind of art that moves you.

One Thousand Gifts

I read this book as I was finishing my own book manuscript, as a challenge to write with more descriptive and emotive language. I didn’t grow up reading a lot (I played sports and chased after girls) so I’m not the best gauge of this, but with that said I have never read a better word-picture writer than Ann Voskamp. This offering of hers is a beautiful portrait of faith in the midst of a shattered life.

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Of Gods and Men

This is the true story of Trappist monks living in a remote area of Algeria in the 1990s. Serving the neighboring communities of primarily Muslims, the monks choose to stay in the midst of extreme war going on around them for the sake of the people who would die without the help of the monks. It’s a heartbreaking and challenging movie to watch. The conversations they have around the table as they make decisions as a group are profound. The movie shows a different level of neighborly love than I find myself willing to give.

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Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

I have just recently been introduced to Madeleine L’Engle’s writing, but this book was a blessing to me. Here’s a few of many, many quotes I took away from reading this book:

“The unending paradox is that we learn through pain.”

“God must be very great to have created a world which carries so many arguments against his existence.”

“I have a point of view. You have a point of view. But God has a view.”

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All Sons and Daughters

I love the simplicity of their music and yet the tenacity it has in the midst of the simplicity. I love the honesty. I think you will love those things too.

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What art has moved you lately?

Last week I had the opportunity to talk with Scott about his life, his music, and how God has worked in his life despite several insurmountable circumstances.

Here’s a few pieces from my conversation with Scott MacIntyre:

Tyler: In your life you’ve had to overcome several seemingly insurmountable circumstances, what are some of the keys to how you’ve been able to overcome those?

Scott: Choosing the title of the book was one of the hardest things of the whole book writing process because you really want to give people the essence of the book. When we settled on “By Faith Not By Sight” I knew that was what it was supposed to be called because that has literally been the theme of my life. I didn’t know how I was going to learn how to play the piano if I couldn’t even see the sheet music in front of me…I didn’t know how I was going to compete in the very visual music industry without my sight. I didn’t know how I was going to connect with people on the competition of American Idol if I couldn’t even see the television cameras. I certainly didn’t know if I was going to tour again or be able to share my music when I was dealing with kidney failure and strapped to a dialysis chair 3 times a week…In the midst of the darkest times of my life I’ve had to make the choice to have faith or have nothing.

Tyler: Malcolm Gladwell talks about how it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. I’m wondering, when you aren’t touring, how many hours to do you spend songwriting and practicing music?

It can be 14 to 18 hour days. When I was writing the book I was usually doing 14 to 18 hour days sitting at my computer writing, editing, and pouring over the manuscripts everyday, and it can be exhausting at times. Fortunately I love what I do and that’s the one thing that compels to keep moving forward. People forget that it’s fun to make music but there’s a whole business side to it and it can be very cutthroat and very grueling. It’s a constant battle to stay on people’s radar.

Listen to the entire 30 minute conversation with the audio player below where we talk about Scott beating out Lady Gaga, Scott’s encouragement for the upcoming generations of Christians, and the difficulty of being a Christian in the music industry today.

Come here to listen RSS readers.

Show Notes:

Link to Scott’s book By Faith Not By Sight on Amazon.

Link here to a special website for churches, schools, and all of you, with ways to download free mp3s from Scott and also an opportunity to have him visit your town for a private concert.

Short description of the book:

This is Scott’s story of how God used a dedicated family, a selfless acquaintance, hardship, and a host of characters to give him life, faith, determination, and experiences most can only imagine.

Peek behind the scenes to see how he learned to overcome his disability, how he made it in the music industry, how he found the love of his life, and how God taught him that in all things, we can truly achieve our dreams By Faith, Not by Sight.

I think it’s always important to understand the context in which a book is being released into. The context of a book on holiness means that in some ways my book will be grouped with these works. So it was key for me to see where and how I differed from them, while not just regurgitating the same things they already said. If I had nothing unique to say what need is there for another book on the subject to be put out.

Certainly I have not read even close to all the best books on holiness, but I think I’ve covered some of the key ones and hopefully some of you have a few to add to the list.

• The Holiness of God // R.C. Sproul. My professor called this one a classic which seems a bit weird since Sproul is still alive and well. Sproul does a great job of engaging the Biblical texts that have a strong emphasis toward holiness. He never comes across as leaning too far in any particular theological bent which is also important to me.
• Rediscovering Holiness // J.I. Packer. You’re thinking…is there some kind of prerequisite of having two initials in your name to write on holiness? I’m glad there isn’t. Packer is one of my favorite writers. This is not one of his most popular works, but I did appreciate the piece added on Mother Theresa when the book was republished in 2009.
• Knowledge of the Holy // A.W. Tozer. While this isn’t really a book on holiness, Tozer does have one chapter on the holiness of God and it is quite great. The book as a whole is top notch.
• Holiness // John Webster. Easily the best book I read emphasizing Trinitarian theology within this subject of holiness.
• The Pursuit of Holiness // Jerry Bridges. For the average reader I found this one to be the most accessible. While Bridges does cover some of the difficult subjects surrounding holiness he does it in a way that makes it quite understandable.

What are some of the best books on holiness you’ve read?

I can’t start quoting too many pieces of information that I’ve memorized from the books I read the past 3 months or parts of a lecture I’ve memorized. I’ve done well enough to store all that in my short term memory so I don’t fail the final  (I think I did anyway), but it leaves fairly quickly afterward. Our culture teaches that if I can’t remember those important details word for word in a year, then I’ve lost the value of that education.

What we should be valuing in education is not memorization of information, but instead the formation of a person.

Over the past 4 years of reading book after book, writing paper after paper, listening to lecture after lecture, I can hardly pinpoint specific things that have stuck with me over the years, but I do know that I’m a different person now than I was then. The value of the education to me is not found in a pile of books I read, or the load of notebooks I’ve filled with notes from class, it’s the change that has taken place in my life through God’s Spirit and his use of the books, notes, papers, and discussions.

When I set out to get in shape for a half marathon I ran multiple times a week, for over 6 months to prepare. There was never any specific run that helped me get ready to run 13.1 miles, it was the combination of all the runs that prepared my mind and body.

It’s the same thing with education. The best education can’t be wrapped up in a single book or notebook of lectures in class, it’s the slow formation that takes place slowly but surely if we continue to allow God’s presence to work as only he can.

Let us all desire to be formed by Him.

As a church musician I am thrust into this creative process every single day. But I don’t consider myself an artist because my thought process is more management focused. Part of this just comes from personality, and part of it comes from my undergrad studies in business administration. When I’m forced to be creative in the moment, I can’t do it. Creativity seems to come at random for me.

Most people tend to think of the creative process like dreaming; not everyone does it, and even less understand it.

And this is exactly what made Blaine’s book a success to me. He made the creative process accessible and understandable for even people who often shy away from creative things.

Here are some of my favorite lines from the book to whet your appetite:

• “Vision is easy. Ideas are even easier. It’s execution that separates the amateurs from the pros.”
• “If I were the boil down the goal of all my creative work it would be this: Move people.”
• “The best works of art are the ones that don’t set out to prove a point but that set out to tell a story, create a relationship, seek to put into words or pictures an unexplainable feeling.”
• “When you don’t take your failures personally you open them up to becoming experiences that can transform you.”
• “If we are going to create truly meaningful art, if we are going to give our lives over to such a process of creativity, then we must fight tooth and nail to capture what others are missing.”

A truly great book, all for less than a coffee date at Stumptown with a friend. Blaine is someone who completely understands the creative process. I love that he’s a young author going for it in the book publishing arena. I also love that he has something valuable to share to people who engage in the creative process and to people who are too scared to even think about it.

When you think of the creative process, what comes to mind?

(Check out this interview with Blaine and Kyle about the book, and this post from David about the book as well)

I’ve always prided myself in being a person who gets done what he says he will do. It might mean I make less friends because I don’t say “yes I can do that” as often as others, but it also means I rarely let people down.

But this doesn’t mean I do everything with the same level of tenacity and passion.

I started reading a brand new book Do the Work by Steven Pressfield (free for Kindle for now) the author of the highly touted book The War of Art. In the book Steven dives into the subject of doing work all the way to completion while focusing on creative artists.

I’ve been looking forward to reading it because I see myself as someone (probably like many others) who completes a lot of things but not necessarily with my best. On passion Pressfield says:

“You may think that you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.

Fear saps passion.

When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.”

If I’m honest I think my fear is that if I give everything I have at one moment, I will have nothing left to give in the next moment, even though my experience says this isn’t true.

What is your fear which trumps your passion?

Most books on this topic tend to use statistics and analysis of them to show what is “working” in today’s world without giving background for why that is a good way for Christians to interact with culture.

If I could give the whole book a thesis it would be…Christians can bring the hope of God into the world by creating God-inspired culture, rather than condemning the culture around them they dislike. God has called us to be culture makers. Not imitators or condemners.

Here are my highlights from the book:

• “We make sense of the world by making something of the world. The human question for meaning is played out in human making.”
• “Culture is not changed by simply thinking.”
• “It is difficult to think of a single instance where condemnation of a work of art has produced any result other than heightened notoriety for the work and the artist.”
• “The rise of interest in cultural transformation has been accompanied by a rise in cultural transformation of a different sort—the transformation of the church into the culture’s image.”
• Your calling is, “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Any of these resonate with you?

Early in the book Mike says this:

“The church mastered slick marketing campaigns that scratched the itches of the ‘me generation.’ We built buildings that resembled the shopping malls people frequent and pioneered contemporary worship styles that rivaled the bars from everyone’s college days. The megachurch became the idolized model of success, and numbers in the pews, the measure of effectiveness.

But somehow in the cycles of programming, capital campaigns, concerts, and Bible studies we forgot an important truth: curious crowds don’t equal committed disciples.

Many of us in our well-intentioned efforts had done well in attracting crowds who were bringing Jesus into their soft-secular worldviews instead of being transformed by his. We thought it was working, yet all the while the church as a whole continued to decline at escalating rates. And many who had come into the church continued to worship at the altar of self-indulgence, materialism, and indifference to the poor and marginalized.”

Do you agree with what Mike said? Why or why not?

Essentially the book is a reality tv show…in written form. It follows a Brown student who decides he wants to attend Liberty University (yes, the Falwell school) for a semester and then write a book about it // he really was an unlikely disciple. In fact, he did the last print interview with Jerry Falwell before his passing.

I would highly recommend the book, and buy it now because you can get it a lot cheaper right now on Amazon. I thought Kevin did a “fair and balanced” job of portraying the inner workings of conservative Christianity, something he was very unfamiliar with before going to Liberty.

I’m not going to do a big book review (mostly because I find them pretty boring), but did want to point out my favorite quote from the whole book.

“Most college students, myself included, talk about entering the real world with a certain level of wariness. But I suspect Liberty students have more reasons to worry than I do…Liberty students going anywhere outside Lynchburg’s city limits will soon find their whole cosmology shaken. They’ll meet people who believe in evolution, don’t believe in Jesus, people who mock them for going to Jerry Falwell’s college. What’s more they’ll see that those people bear no resemblance to the heathen masses they learned about in their GNED classes. For Liberty students who have spent 4 years hearing from their professors about how unfulfilled, relativistic, flimsy, and hedonistic the real world is, meeting hordes of happy, principled, morally sound non-Christians will come as a shot between the eyes. And to be honest, I’m not sure how they’ll take it” (emphasis mine, 271).

My experience at a Christian college (albiet, not a conservative one) was very much like this quote.

What do you think about that?

I’ll be blogging through a few of the topics that Bell and Golden cover in the book in the next few days. The book is centered around the idea of the Bible and Christianity being a narrative, and in the end it looks at how we fit into that narrative.

One key tenet to postmodernism is that things are known through story or narrative. This is different from modernity, which came to know things through logic or reason. Bell describes his book as one that studies the narrative of the Bible through a theological perspective called the New Exodus perspective (this is the one part of the book I do not like. I do not understand the idea of looking at the Bible through a specific theological perspective. Why not just let the Bible do the talking?).

Topic #1 From Oppressed to Oppressors

Essentially the entire book follows this topic through the narrative of the Bible. So Bell begins in the early Old Testament books. At that time Egypt was the enemy of Israel as it held them captive. Bell says:

“Egypt is an anti-kingdom. Egypt is what happens when sin builds up a head of steam. Egypt is what happens when sin becomes structured and embedded in society. Egypt shows us how easily human nature bends toward using power to preserve privilege at the expense of the weak.”

But as the story of Israel continues we see the tides turn in the opposite way. Instead of Israel being oppressed they become the oppressors. This is shown so clearly through the reign of Solomon. This is what Bell says about Israel and Solomon:

“In a few generations these wandering former slaves who were newly rescued from an oppressive empire have become empire-builders themselves. Solomon isn’t maintaining justice; he’s now perpetuating the very injustice his people once needed redemption from and, in the process, building a kingdom of comfort. He dines in his palace and strolls on terraces constructed by human suffering.”

Bell and Golden have essentially traced the first few books of the Old Testament to this idea of being oppressed to now bringing oppression. And I would agree this is a key part of the story in the early Old Testament books.

Any thoughts on this book?

Tomorrow I’ll look at how God views the oppressed.