In addition to my full time job, I’ve moonlighted as a freelance writer for a variety of outlets. Most close to my heart is Renew the Arts, a Christian arts patronage nonprofit from Sugar Hill, Georgia. I’ve been connected to Renew the Arts for a few years now under the title of “Chief Storyteller.” In this capacity, I get to do what I love: telling stories of how God is working in the lives of his people to bring about shalom. These stories end up on the Renew the Arts blog, providing readers insight on what hosting a house concert looks like, what patronage means to artists, and how we can be the hands and feet of Christ in supporting artists and their craft.
For the April blog post, I interviewed Trailand Elztroth, a singer-songwriter from Mississippi who plays music full time and tours nationally on the Porchlight network.
There were more than a few great moments in my conversation with Trailand, but my favorite was his recollection of a show hosted by Pastor Garrett Soucy in rural Maine. Soucy and some of the other local pastors invited their congregations to gather together for Trailand’s performance, offering a connection point needed to bring together their communities.
“I think some of them had to have traveled to get there,” Trailand recalled. “The pastors are connected, but the people feel so distant. To see them pull together…the sense of community and fellowship I saw up there…It was such a good experience for me as an artist. They laughed at all my jokes and sang along. Afterward, they stacked like ten picnic tables in a long line and we just ate, drank, and had fun way into the night.”
https://renewthearts.org/behind-the-porchlight-trailand-eltzroth-shared-stories/
In his book Strange New World, Carl Trueman argues that the church's bears its best witness to the world when she is the bonafide church. Rather than expend energy squabbling in the culture wars, a more prophetic course of action sees us retrench in the very things that make the church the bride of Christ: obedience to the authority of Scripture, fervent prayer, the gathering of the saints, and the otherworldly nature of the sacraments.
Trueman states this succinctly in an article for Public Herald Magazine:
“It might sound trite, but a large part of the church’s witness to the world is simply being the church in worship. Paul himself comments that when an unbeliever accidentally turns up at a church service, he should be struck by the otherworldly holiness of what is going on. The most powerful witness to the gospel is the church herself, simply going about the business of worship. Many Christians talk of engaging the culture. In fact, the culture is most dramatically engaged by the church presenting it with another culture, another form of community, rooted in her liturgical worship practices and manifested in the loving community that exists both in and beyond the worship service. Many talk of the culture war between Christians and secularism…but perhaps ‘cultural protest’ is a way of better translating that [biblical] idea into modern idiom.…The church protests the wider culture by offering a true vision of what it means to be a human being made in the image of God.”
The church should be a Christ-adoring beacon, heralding the counter-cultural, upside-down Kingdom of God through means that both repulse and entice the world in their brazen holiness.
It's initiatives like the one these Maine pastors have taken that will, in Steve Taylor's words 'wow the deadness' in our churches and our society at large. Rooted in our liturgical worship and fortified by the Sunday morning gathering of the saints, our Christian witness should spill out in ‘cultural protests’ like hospitality and artistic engagement, demonstrations of a better story lived out through the pursuit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Christians are inundated with theology resources and spiritual formation frameworks; we are weak in orthopraxy. We have abdicated our role as culture-defying agents of hospitality, the very characteristics of the early Church that mystified the surrounding Roman culture. Furthermore, our churches tend to be siloed, almost competitive, and we have lost the art of the potluck as a great unifier of villages and denominations.
The human need for community goes beyond church membership rolls. Opening our homes and churches to each other will not only create a bulwark against the anti-Christ messages of our day, but it will foster new opportunities for exhortation, encouragement, and communion as the body of Christ. Do the Lord's work: pass the mashed potatoes.
Gathering in and of itself is sweet fellowship but uniting to experience art together provides a new level of engagement. With the advent of streaming and digital downloads has come the commodification of music, which, in turn, has morphed its meaning from a shared world into a means of self-curation. I'm thinking, of course, of the playlist (as someone with over a dozen playlists bearing names such as 'songs for the end of the world' and 'late night work vibe,' I recognize I'm one to talk). As such, we are losing certain dimensions of the listener experience, including active listening, exposure to things we might not choose ourselves, and the unpredictability of live performance. Live musical performance itself has, in the same vein, also become commodified. We expect artists to play the hits, not their 'subpar' new stuff (though these will also be favorites of ours in three years), and to perform them just like they sound on the album. No creative license, please!
House shows decentralize the musical performance, demonstrating that audience resonance is a necessary component of the live experience. The chemistry between artist and listener, both in the midst of the performance and in conversations to follow, is life-giving and unrepeatable.
The more I work with Porchlight and trace the ripple effect of simple hospitality, the more I see this movement as a liturgy cultivator. Slowly, as most of God’s work seems to be, Porchlight is catalyzing the reintegration of hospitality as a thriving form of Christian witness. We have kept our doors shut for too long in spirits of fear, snobbery, sloth, and greed. Unity in celebration of the arts helps us turn the door handle again.
For those of us who struggle with evangelism and are concerned with how to best display Christian witness in a world increasingly hostile to it, take heart. Every day, the Lord uses our stories and our witness in ways we’ll never know. Step into community. Open your home. Give yourself away. Christ says you’ll find life more abundant than ever before.
NOTE: My conversation with Trailand included his story as an artist, the philosophy and theology behind his work, and his heart for the house concerts. Do dive into the full piece HERE. Also, new to the Renew the Arts blog this week is a conversation with Porchlight artist and host Steve Chab. In this piece, Steve describes house shows as “Thanksgiving with music” - that’s pretty spot on. Learn more about Steve and his commitment to fostering community in Pittsburgh HERE.
