One of the most intriguing thinkers that I have discovered in the last year is BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis. Curtis makes documentaries that attempts to explore the way that ideas and theories influence our culture at a macro level. Exploring how concepts in our culture which we think are neutral actually carry worldviews. It is hard to pin down Curtis politically with both conservative and liberal thinking questioned in his documentaries.

“Most other current affairs series are as straightforward as a history lesson. Here are the facts. This is when. That is why. Curtis’s approach, by contrast, is deliberately strange and beguiling. His films contain information and analysis, of course, but they have different goals: i) to stop viewers in their tracks; ii) to make them think” - Andrew Pettie

Whilst I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, you cannot but admire his encyclopedic vision, a vision influences not just the information presented but Curtis’ visual style. Curtis buries himself in the basements at the BBC discovering archival footage which lends his documentary footage unique visual style . A visual style matched by his choice of soundtracks which can feature anything from Estonian Christian classical composer Arvo Part to electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott.

His series The Century of Self is a fascinating exploration of how Sigmund Freud and his relatives influenced our concept of self.

In All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace Curtis explores the power themes behind the ideas of networks and organic structures which are influencing many concepts of Church today.

Here is where you can watch All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

http://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis-AllWatchedOverByMachinesOfLovingGrace

No not the ranting of a madman who left his journal on the train, just some of the strange influences that went into my new book The Road Trip That Changed the World. I am absolutely fascinated with the creative process, so it is always a huge buzz once you have finished a book to look back over your note books and mind maps and try and grasp how you get from a mess of ideas to a finished bound book.

Here is my opening slide from my talk this coming friday at Surrender Conference. My session is on at 4pm. Looking forward to sharing some new material. Don’t worry if you have not seen the movie, the session will still make sense. Here are the details for Surrender if you have not already registered. 

Yet are these moves really about creativity? I am not so sure. So much of this movement to make Christians more creative is wrapped up in the quest to make Church more relevant. Which is a kind of short hand way of trying to say that we need to close the cultural gap between the Church and the wider society. That for the Christian faith in the West to remain relevant (note that word) we must be running at the same pace as secular culture when it comes trends and fashion. If we can achieve this, if our music, our images, our worship services look and sound like the wider culture, the doors of the Church will be broken down by the spiritually hungry.

This view assumes that secularism is not the main reason that the Church is marginalised in the West, rather we have gotten our aesthetic wrong. A problem easily remedied by simply mimicking the style and fashions of the wider culture. So our services begin to look like Australian Idol, our Christian indie bands look like secular indie bands, youth ministry websites look like secular websites trying to reach the youth market. In the midst of all of this Christians do get a chance exercise their creativity, through their musical or design based gifting, but is this the kind of creative endeavor that we as believers are really called to? Is this genuine creativity or mimicry?

When we see creativity as simply a tool to aid us in our quest to become relevant, we hungrily seek out those who have crossed over the cultural divide and who straddle the mysterious line between Christian and secular artists. For the last twenty-five years Christians have enquired about the faith status of Bono, now young believes ask similar ‘are they or aren’t they’ questions about The Temper Trap, Mumford and Sons, and Sufjan Stevens. These questions are rooted in the belief that by association with the social currency of celebrity the cultural gap can be further closed.

When we simply mimic the art of wider culture, we become something like gift shops at the art gallery, the real works are inside, and all we offer are mass produced prints and imitations.

I believe that we have to start again. I believe that the mission of the Church to the West will not be achieved by simply becoming cooler, or by mimicking the styles and tastes of the wider culture. Instead the church must understand what it truly means to create rather than to mimic. We only have to look to the past to see that this is possible, there is a whole cavalcade of creatives whose faith inspired them to be at the forefront of cultural creativity. We only have to listen to Handel, to look at a painting by Carrivagio, to walk through a building by Gaudi, or read Dostoyevsky to understand that for these great artists creativity was not about bridging a gap between the wider culture and the Church. Rather faith for these people was the foundation that enabled them to create sublime, incredible works of creativity which speak to us still today.

I believe that we need to return to a biblical understanding of our God given mandate as humans to create. We are created in God’s image, God is the creator of the world, the architect of the Himalayas, the Bird of Paradise and the Andromeda system. God speaks the world into being. We are called to be his ambassadors on earth, to act as he acts; so the ability to create, to imagine things and then to bring them into being is an essential part of our humanity. We are not called to simply mimic, God gives us the ability to create.

When God created humans in the garden he gave us the role of guardians or stewards of creation. When I hear steward I think of someone in a fluorescent vest ensuring that people do not run onto the pitch at sporting events. The Hebrew word used is Shomer, the english translation struggles to capture the true breadth of this word. A Shomer in Jewish thinking is someone who is chosen to look after and guard something of worth, and who is held accountable for their stewardship by a Rabbinical court. The role of the Shomer is not simply to be a passive guard but to cultivate the item in their care.

Thus as stewards we are called to partner with God in his great creative project, the redemption of a broken cosmos. God calls us to be a part of the creative process. Creativity is not a choice it is part of our mandate.

On the Cross we discover a vital element of God’s creative nature. One of the struggles of the artist is to hold together the awe inspiring and the transcendent elements of life, those moments which remind us of God’s glory, with the painful and broken elements of life. Christians tend to do okay at the first part, Christian bookstores are filled with prints of glorious mountain ranges, we love the transcendent apex of the worship song. But we tend to struggle with the broken elements of life, with integrating suffering, lament and loss into our creativity. On the Cross, God intervenes in history with such staggering alacrity and originality we can only marvel at his creativity. In one moment, God’s glory is revealed, Jesus takes sin upon his shoulders and defeats death and evil, yet at the same time, we are confronted with the image of a dying God, a man whose painful screams speak of his isolation from God. The crucifixion is one of those rare moments, where the transcendent and the immanent, the glorious and the earthly, the human and the divine are held together. It is the ultimate template for Christian creatives. Hold those extremes together and you will produce work that no longer is mimicry but which is truly creative.

This article was originally published in Youth Vision Quarterly Magazine

(By the way Barnes and Noble are pre-selling my book at a ludicrously low price. Get in here before the price jumps up at release.)

Interesting how similair my book cover and the movie poster ended up especially considering they were developed in isolation.

Alain De Botton’s Religion For Atheists just could be one of the most important books on mission and church written this decade. De Botton has become something of a radical within the new atheist movement, breaking away from the Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris camp by suggesting religion is a force for good in the world. Whilst holding to his disbelief, De Botton believes that atheists have much to learn from religious people.

De Botton’s argument is that the disconnected post-secular West needs the structures, rhythms, seasons, social capital and even buildings that Churches and organized religion provide. By making such a claim De Botton has unwittingly called into question one of the great missional assumptions of the contemporary Church in the West.

That unchurched people can’t stand Church and therefore will not be reached by structures that look anything like Church.

One can understand how such an assumption has grown up in the evangelical subculture. If you are writing from an American context such as Dallas, Grand Rapids or even Southern California; one filled with mega Churches, large seminaries, and a strong evangelical subculture, you will no doubt be in contact with the large population of disaffected young adults who live on the edges of this culture. Therefore it is easy to confuse what disaffected Christians want from Church with what genuine unchurched people feel about communities of faith.

Swiss born De Botton in contrast is writing from the European context, specifically from a segment of culture which traditionally could not be more opposed to the forms and structures of faith. De Botton has looked across the West, which for over a century has suffered from what Emile Durkheim called anomie, a form of social disconnection and a loss of meaning creating structures, and prescribed a return to the traditional commitments and modes of religion as a cure.

Putting aside the argument that we as believers could have with De Botton on whether it is possible to live in these structures without belief, his thesis provides an interesting new angle on mission to the west. Unchurched people are not a monolith with a singular viewpoint. Yes, there are many unchurched people who struggle with Church as we have known it, this is particularly true in large swathes of the American context. Yet in the rest of the West, and on the fringes of some American cities there is a generation who have grown up with little or no concept of Church. Who have no Christian memory to deconstruct, no childhood faith to rebel against. People who have grown up in a liquid culture, and who are looking for anchors, rhythms, and community creating structures.

Something is changing.

De Botton’s book is important because it signals the beginning of a shift in the West from a secular to a post-secular culture, but it also reminds us that if we truly are to be missionaries, we must not just impose our preconceptions upon the culture, but truly listen to it.

Thanks also to all of you who came. Especially those of you who flew in from around Oz and NZ. A special thanks to those who went on ‘road trips’ driving down to Melbourne.

Since we got back into the office we have had lots of people asking whether The Road is going to go ‘on the road’. At this stage we won’t be taking the whole event on the Road. The good news is that we will be doing some smaller events around the place linked to the release of the book later in the year. Stay tuned.

Also a lot of people have been asking about whether the talks will be available on the net. The answer is yes.  You can subscribe here where the talks will soon be appearing.