Service via relationships

For all the depth and complexity of living the Christian life, our
main tasks are remarkably clear and simple: Love God and love your
neighbor. Our model for how to love our neighbor – to love each other
whoever that other happens to be – is the way God loved us through the
two primary acts of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion of Jesus.

The Incarnation tells us that God does not find it adequate to love us
from a distance. God desires to be with us, to know us, to connect
with us. Our Creator is relational and He made us that way as well.
We see this at the beginning of things in the Garden of Eden and at
the end of things at the New Jerusalem.

The Crucifixion graphically illustrates for us that God’s love is self-
giving beyond what we can even imagine. Jesus ‘emptied himself’ in
the greatest act of love imaginable. So we have these two main
actions of love: being with one another and giving of ourselves for
one another, connecting and serving.

Connecting

As simple as it sounds, being together with one another is of central
importance to the Christian life. Our culture’s overvaluation of
freedom and independence has led us to intentionally build a society
based on separateness and alienation, so building intentional
relationships is a rebellious, counter-cultural act. It is also very
difficult to build relationships when everyday incidental interactions
with one another rarely happen. So we have to be deliberate about
getting together and getting to know one another. We have to be
patient in building relationships, it takes lots of time and cannot be
rushed. And we have to make this happen at every scale, from larger
communities to smaller family-sized groups to developing close
friendships.

Serving

‘Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests
of others’ (Phil. 2:4). If there is anything more un-American than
giving up our independence to be with others, it’s giving up our own
needs and desires to serve others. The problem we imagine is that as
we give of ourselves, other people will simply take from us, use us
up, and spit us out. And in this world, this is very likely going to
happen. Remember that our Lord gave his whole life for people that
actively hated him.

But imagine a community where everyone is looking to the interests of
others. How much more would our own needs and desires be met in this
way? This, I think, is what Paul was envisioning for the church at
Philippi, a church that was already pretty good at loving each other.
Most contemporary churches fall far short this vision. How many
people have you heard say that they left a church because ‘it wasn’t
meeting my needs’? The model of a church as a need-meeting machine
for individuals fits in neatly with our service economy, but that
doesn’t make it less wrong. Paul’s vision of a community where
everyone focuses on loving and serving each other provides a beautiful
alternative in which our own needs can be met beyond what we can
imagine by not focusing on them.

Connecting and Serving within HopeArts

So what does all this have to do with HopeArts?

First, this is an affirmation that the things we have found to be
valuable to us are valuable to God as well. At its most basic level,
HopeArts has allowed us to connect with others whose brains are wired
similarly to ours and who also struggle with connecting creative work
with an abiding faith in Christ: we know that we are not alone. At
the same time, we realize how much we are of service to one another
through simple things like feedback, encouragement, and even
deadlines. Hope has provided a safe and supportive community for us
in a way that most if not all of us have never experienced in any
other church.

Second, if we truly accept that our artistic skills are a gift, then
we are called to use them to build up the community, or rather
communities. We live and find our identities within various groups
and many of us share a desire to reach out to broader communities.
HopeArts has created a place for us to serve and connect with each
other that should provide us a good base to expand our connection and
service to the whole Hope Chapel community, to Christian artists
throughout Austin, and to the Austin arts community at large.

And third, service is a tricky word for artists. It is easy to get
caught up in conventional, pragmatic versions of service within the
church or in the world. Most people do not see the pursuit of beauty
and meaning as a service, it’s often considered a questionable
indulgence at best. Jesus forcefully challenged this notion on several
occasions. But that does not mean that our service through our art is
of more value than the more mundane types of service such as taking
out the trash, changing diapers in the nursery, or working the sound
booth at a performance. We should be actively engaged in both types
of service. (There was a very interesting discussion of these issues
between Christine Warner and Barbara Nicolosi at the Transforming
Culture Symposium.)

Connecting to Serve, Serving to Connect

In God’s economy, means and ends get all tangled up into a glorious
knot. Do we connect with each other to serve one another or do we
serve each other in order to connect with one another? Yes,
absolutely.

We must be connected to people to serve them well. If we try to serve
people through our art without getting to know them first it can
easily become simply a service to our own egos forced onto others.
Service that really serves others is built out of listening to and
understanding them, desiring to know what their real needs and
struggles are. We can, of course, help people we don’t know, but long-
term systematic service should be built on long-term real
relationships.

On the flip slide, though, serving others is a great way to connect
with them. It is often difficult to get to know someone by directly
asking who they are or what’s important to him or her, but if you work
side-by-side with someone you will quickly find these things out. As
challenging as collaborating on a project can be, often the
relationships built out of the collaboration are of more lasting value
than the work itself. And if we desire to serve a group through our
art, a great way to get to know the group is through serving them in
more basic ways first. For example, if I want to help bring art into
the elementary school class I may spend some time as an assistant to
the regular Sunday School teacher (serving snacks, taking attendance,
etc.) to get to know the kids and the curriculum first.


All of this is about growing ourselves and especially building God’s
Kingdom. As Richard Foster says, ‘more than any other single way, the
grace of humility is worked into our lives through the Discipline of
service.’ And a community that humbly loves and serves others with
beauty and meaning will truly be a glimpse of God’s Kingdom.

Kelly Foster