You’ve been there. Perhaps at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, Pike Place Market in Seattle, the streets of Boston. There are places all over the world that seem to be breeding grounds for artists, creativity and exploration with the arts. You can walk through any major downtown area of big cities in the US and see large groups of people surrounding 2 homeless men playing guitars and singing country songs, a group of Gospel-singers, artists drawing caricatures of passing tourists, or the occasional spray-paint artist who is drawing those space-age landscapes.
And what is common about all of them?
There is always a crowd. People are hungry for creativity. People are thirsty for exploration, for the experiential and for a chance to be communally involved in creation.
And if it’s new, or outside-the-box, or a bit pushing the edges, the bigger the crowd, because someone is laying aside perceived thoughts of what is necessarily the “right” way to do something, and seeking a different path.
Basically my question is, if our culture is so wired this way – so interested in the creative exploration of arts and music and theatre and…why all of a sudden does that stop with theology in the church? Where is the creative theological exploration in the church today? Are we so bound to the “Reformed” thinkers’ way of doing theology? Are we listening to Ecclesiastes’ “there is no new thing under the sun” so much that we’re afraid that there really will NEVER be any new theological ideas and dreams that may speak to our culture in new, exciting and faithful ways? Let us open the door for the creativity and exploration to enter the church…
Or are we afraid of what might come? Are we afraid that some “untrained” theologians may come up with un-orthodox belief, some possibly “heretical” thoughts…?
I think it’s time to put aside our fears, to trust the work of the Spirit in the lives of those who are seeking (whether they know it or not) after God, and trust the Spirit to lead us into all Truth…Truth on the edges, on the borders; Truth found in the creative exploration of theological reflection…