To say that the relationship between the church and the arts is complicated ... well, that’s putting it mildly.

Hundreds of years ago, the church was where all the best art was made. Many of the great paintings, sculptures and musical masterpieces that have survived across the generations were created for use among God’s people.

All of that goodwill seems to have been spent. Art is something that’s received or rejected on a very personal level, so it can be hard to create art for or in the church. If we don’t like it, we don’t find it valuable.

It can seem like a luxury. We recognize that we have limited resources and investing time, energy or money in the arts seems like putting a stained-glass window on a lifeboat.

And when we do engage the arts, we often do it poorly. We make “cool” and “relevant” our guiding values, rather than “honest” or “nuanced” and end up creating cheap knock-offs of art and music that has already existed in secular culture for years.

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