On the way out of church

In 1998, during my second pastoral tenure with a Wesleyan Methodist Church in suburban Brisbane, I attended a series of workshops over two weeks in Melbourne. It was sponsored by Scripture Union, World Vision, and Whitley College. It was held at the Carlton Baptist Church in an old two-story disused shop complex and hosted by New Zealand art lovers and Baptist theologians Mike Riddell* and Mark Pierson. The basic idea of the seminar was to consider how to think about and be active around evangelism and worship ‘using the arts’ in the emerging culture. As a pastor in a fundamentalist evangelical organisation at the time, applications and future options were conceived, while the arts, my true love, were firing mystery and dreams.

Now, the landscape was completely different then – no 9/11, high-octane social media, COVID-19, Trump, Morrison, Putin, Boris or Ukraine/Russian or Palestinian/Israeli atrocities. Almost a generation on and now we are living in an unimagined landscape. However, those of us in that building in 1998 were thinking about ‘new music and art’ in worship settings and conversations with ‘outsiders’ that were not based around ‘selling the gospel’. In 1998, ‘Church Growth’ [sic] had become a disease of franchised McDonald’s proportions, burning out pastors who were not inclined to be into sales, while Hillsong was on the ascendency.

Those two weeks opened new doors onto new rooms of thought and imagination, rooms that would lead me to become immersed in the arts, leave the religion-based pastoral enclave and return to medical imaging. It would also find me grappling with the arts, fundraising, personal art practice, and questioning my theology more deeply as I attempted to unravel and move out from under the iron-clad Christian dualism construct.

My ‘thinking life’ before pastoral appointments and during them included applied science, Baptist and reformed theology morphing to Arminian understandings, and an immersion in various social and theological constructs that had not honoured the arts or open-ended question thought processes. At times, I thought they had, but they had not. My whole world of thought at its deepest levels was that of a passionate insistence on dualistic evangelical conversion and subsequent piety. The bottom line had always been to find ways to ‘get people saved and sanctified’, aka Billy Graham, and use love of ‘the other’ if necessary. The arts were, in that context, only utilitarian; that is, for worship or evangelism. In some ways, from what I can see from a distance is that the agenda of the Christian church seems to have hardly changed, particularly in the narrow evangelical fundamentalism that I shut the door to. I am thankful that in the midst of growing up in a fundamentalist and compassionate household, my Christian parents had oddly enough fostered a love of a wide-ranging arts exploration in their children – except for the ‘devil’s rock and roll music’ – that served us well, and that partly saved us from a more cultic infirmary.

My time post-pastorate since 2003 has been immersed in the arts – including co-founding Jugglers Art Space – medical imaging, family life, and completing an MA in Creative Arts Therapies. I am slowly learning to see, as per John Berger in Ways of Seeing, where he ‘challenges the elitist and mystified status of art that neglected the political, social, and ideological aspects that shaped the ways in which we look at art’.

Conversely, I’ve been exploring what spirituality in art means both within and outside religious iconographic and narrow utilitarian frameworks. Kandinsky’s epiphany affected philosophy helps here: ‘At its outset all art is sacred, and its sole concern is the supernatural. This means that art is concerned with life – not with the visible but the invisible’.

Building on a range of influences as Kandinsky’s, references to the ‘moving of the spirit’ in the scriptures, whirling dervishes in Islamic mysticism, Quaker meetings, aboriginal understandings of country, and so on, I initiated a series of group art events at Jugglers Art Space. My quest was to host a gathering of artists with no known religious background or involvement, construct a sound and design space and for us to respond silently but together with the intent to see if it was possible for something beyond ourselves to form and affect us. An epiphany, perhaps? Over the past 12 years, I have curated and co-curated these events, with the significant impact being the inexplicable silence attending the music and mark-making find their end. I cannot say what happened, but the sense of what happened has not been forgotten by me or all those who came. Mark-making together without speech is the central activity for the artists with a range of musical atmospheres created via, for example, Gavin Bryars’ amazing 75-minute ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’ (a shorter version is shared below), Arvo Pärt, improv live performances, or the beach with lapping seas.

The shift from ‘being saved and sanctified’ and preaching as the only answer to my and others’ search for meaning is significant. Within my evolving art practice, love has grown in response to the call of the spirit and the soul. I have also realised and embraced an embedded desire for inexplicable epiphany, not that created by systems, argument, exegesis, or consumption but that which is there, here and around, present and through. And the artists are the seers.

* Rev Mike Riddell died in his sleep in 2023 in Dunedin, NZ. He was 69.

Some recommended reading/watching:

• Adam Edward Carnehl, The Artist as Divine Symbol (Cascade, 2023)
• Thomas Crow, No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (Power, 2017)
• Jeffrey L. Kosky, Arts of Wonder (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
• Emergence Magazine: Ecology, Culture and Spirituality, editions 1–5
• Bruce Wilson, Reasons of the Heart (Allen & Unwin, 1998)
• John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (Harper/Perennial, 2003)
• Jason Goroncy & Rod Pattenden, eds., Imagination in an Age of Crisis: Soundings from the Arts and Theology (Pickwick, 2022)
• Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)
• George Prochnik, In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (Anchor, 2011)
• In Pursuit of Silence (a film directed by Patrick Shen, 2017)
• Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (Fortress, 2008)
• The New Boy (a film directed by Warwick Thornton, 2023)

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Peter Breen is the co-founder and current chair/director of Jugglers Art Space Inc., in Brisbane. He maintains a website at www.peteskibreen.com.