This week’s article is from our friend Steve Frost. Steve is part of the creative team behind The Work of the People, a community of artists committed to creating high quality visual media for church liturgies and worship services. Their films consist of interviews with and reflections from many of today’s most imaginative and challenging Christian thinkers and doers.
We are honored to include Steve’s article on our site. Be sure and visit The Work of the People’s website for more information about their work.
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Hollywood, it would seem, is fresh out of ideas. At least that’s what I’m lead to believe given the number of sequels and remakes on offer, not to mention the movies based on comic books and TV shows. The blockbuster phenomenon, and its attendant “marketing synergy,” has snickity-snacked our shrubbery of cultural stories down to a sparse most profitable few.
The truth is, with about 6 billion people on the planet, there are about 6 billion stories that run the full gamut of human experience. Unfortunately, there seems to be a definite shortage of attention directed toward most of those stories.
I’ve noticed a heartening trend in visual media–and in the church of all places! Hallelujah! Increasingly, videographers and film makers are serving their communities by turning attention to the stories of people in their communities. This is an exciting and hopeful creative enterprise which opens us up to deep and rich stories. It is a healthy antidote to blockbuster-itis which tends to atrophy our imagination. And for a people who reside within the hope of God’s imagined future, an atrophied imagination is a dangerous thing.
But is visual media the best antidote to an atrophied imagination? That’s what got us there in the first place. Well, visual media is the lingua franca of our culture. We’re incredibly good at decoding moving images. For many of us we were literate in the language of moving images well before we were literate in the written word. It is our first language and so it speaks deeply to us. But still, at its core, visual media is projected light on a flat screen. How could telling simple community stories on a flat screen be deep, or rich?
One word – vulnerability. If the story told pushes toward vulnerability it will foster honesty, and honesty is always relevant.
If the story aims to be marketable, which within the church would mean “acceptable,” it’ll be safe, and thus, flat and bland. The stories in your community, if they’re part of God’s story, are anything but flat and bland. If the story you tell is part of God’s story, it’s part of the most amazing and alive story that moves and breathes at the very centre of the universe.
At its worst, visual media acts as emotional inoculation. When we begin to believe that a purely emotional response to a constructed reality which requires virtually nothing of us is “just as good as” engagement with another human being, we have been inoculated against true human connection. True human connection is never one directional and makes considerable requirements of us. In fact, according to Jesus, true human connection requires kenosis, a pouring out of our very selves.
At its best, visual media gives us access to human stories which connect us to our shared humanity. At it’s best visual media breaks open an opportunity, in the real world, among real people, for “I” to be drawn into a more intimate circle of “Us.”
So, how would one go about telling vulnerable stories which break open opportunities for “Us” here and now? I would suggest the surest way is by validating the full spectrum of human experience. A quick perusal of the Psalms reveals remarkably vulnerable, almost painfully honest, and, after a few thousands years, amazingly relevant stories.
Everything is in there, from the highest highs to the lowest lows. We, in the Western church, tend to limit our expressions. We focus on, if not the highest highs then at least the higher end of the emotional spectrum. We also tend to focus on fairly rational and static proclamations regarding the attributes or characteristics of God. We’ve come to call this “worship.”
Okay, how might we foster a deep and vulnerable Psalm-like telling of God’s story as it is happening here and now? Not in Australia, not in 1880, but right here and now, among us?
One of the church’s primary tasks is that of remembering, and as a starting point, I’d like to suggest three theological seed beds from which meaningful story telling might grow:
Seed bed one: Remembering things are broken
This is a chance to engage the realities of our lives without shying away from the earthiness of our longings nor the bitterness of our pain. Such a context is a chance to give expression to grief, lament, pain and suffering. It is a chance to tell stories of oppression and domination, to name names and shed light on the way things really are.
Seed bed two: Remembering God is moving
This is a chance to bask in the amazing truth that God hasn’t left us in our brokeness. God is active love and with grace he moves toward us. Such a context is a chance to give expression to thanksgiving, gratitude and worship. It is a chance to tell stories of grace beauty and redemption.
Seed bed three: Remembering our future hope
This is a chance to imagine and articulate what God, in his love, is moving us toward; restored relationship with ourselves, with each other, with creation and with him. Such a context is a chance to give expression to celebration, joy and worship. It is a chance to tell stories of the kingdom breaking through “here and now,” past, present and future.
When we gather together, we remember God’s amazing story at the centre of the universe as THE story. No matter how things appear, all stories fit into, are animated by and catalysed by the grand arc of God’s story. Fertile soil for story telling comes from the local church’s collective remembering of past, present and future from here and now. Out of this communal and theological soil deep Psalm-like story telling might grow.