The role of the artist as disciple-maker
In the New Testament Jesus gives us the command to go and make disciples. 1 Thess 2:8 says that our desire was to share not only the gospel but our lives as well. Discipleship is a foundational relational process and in my opinion is the most time-consuming, inconvenient and messy part of the Christian Life. It requires intimacy, time and accountability and in the end may not always work out as planned. Discipleship is sharing your life and sharing your life is hard work.
As an artist for a church my job is to create and tell stories both fiction and non-fiction that inspire and move people in their faith and part of that being the work of discipleship. “Artists” in the generic being are often times looked at as someone who has something to say and thus uses their medium to say it. Whether writer, singer, film-maker all want to say something using their own creative medium or canvas. The question I have been pondering however is can an artist really truly say something profound about anything they themselves have never experienced. If I were to make a video about evangelism and had never shared my faith I would probably feel that I would not be doing this video justice by trying to say something about a subject in which I had no personal experience. Certainly this is not the case for everything, however the more and more I practice discipleship and the more I practice film-making the more I realize how to tell better stories about discipleship because of my personal experience.
When an artists creates something out of nothing a lot of times they draw from a well. The well figuratively speaking is filled with knowledge and personal experience. Now they can create with knowledge about a subject, however personal experience is part of the well that allows the artist the ability to critique the subject so that in telling the story they are not only telling a story they are saying something about that story.
- Are some exempt from Discipleship?
- The power of transitional statements
- Telling a life-change story in under 2 minutes
- the Hole in our Gospel
- 7 ways to bring camp home
