Page 7 - Empowering Missional Artists - Jim Mills.pdf

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discipled our artists. In part, this is a result of faulty theology and a narrow worldview which is

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inconsistent with the Bible. We, the church, tend to create and stay in our own safe cultural
corners and consequentially have lost our place of influence. Theoretically, we hold to the idea

that the church is the Gospel agent to administer the antidote for brokenness in our world, but we

are not there to administer that antidote. The arts understood and applied from a mature

Christian worldview and character can play a significant role in accomplishment of that objective.

One Christian voice, CS Lewis, understood the times, the state of western culture, and the

Biblical mandate for active cultural engagement with society perceptively announced, “That the

arts would play an essential role in a future awakening in Europe.” (Hoehn 2003, 1) This is not

only for Lewis’s post-Christian Europe but for the entire western world.

A CULTURAL COUNTER MOVEMENT FOR CHRIST

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream,
but it takes a live one to swim upstream.
W. C. Fields

Culturally, we live in an unprecedented dark era across the globe. I am not referring only

to the ethnic-cleansing atrocities in the continent of Africa or the violent terrorist attacks around the

world, which are horrific enough, but rather to the moral bankruptcy of aberrant western civilization.

Renowned historian Sir Arnold Toynbee foresaw this dark hour and described it this way: