Page 9 - Empowering Missional Artists - Jim Mills.pdf

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disconnect. There are streams of evangelicalism interfacing with the broader culture, however

a multitude of mainstream evangelicals simply do not encourage, nor empower their

congregations to be involved for Jesus sake in society. The motivation for our absence is often

fear. We are afraid of being influenced by the world and subsequently, we abdicate our cultural

salt and light mandate.

We have withdrawn from interfacing with society and though we talk about hope in our

gatherings, we fail to demonstrate that hope. Andrew Purves asserts that “a ministry of hope that

does not take the risk of concrete engagement ultimately fails to be a ministry of hope and is

instead faithless, sitting on the sidelines for fear of contamination” (Purves 2004, 228). Are we

not called to make a difference? Therefore, he went on to say that to “refuse to risk

contaminations by being involved in the often murky process of the political, social, and

economic engagements amounts to a denial of the Gospel’s eschatological claim that all life in

every respect is under the one reign of God through Jesus Christ” (Purves 2004, 229). Through

our disengagement, we have not shown “how the person of Christ is relevant to all of life.”

(Briner 1993, 37) There is really no greater example of our absence in culture than in the arena

of the arts and media. William Dyness points out one of our horrific failures that we must face

and hopefully learn from:

In the early 1900s, “we disengaged in the first half of the last century and withdrew from
arts schools and the arts and then wondered why the arts were so secular. Twentieth
Century Fox wrote Christian colleges in the 1930's and said, ‘Please send us writers! We
want writers!’” (Dryness 2001) One “letter that went back said, ‘We would no more send
people to you than we would send people to hell. That is what happened. Is it any wonder
the movies have become so bad? Whose fault is that? It's partly ours.” (Ibid)

Yet, in this postmodern era, due to the popular philosophical and literary tool called,

deconstruction, Christian communicators are often intimidated to the point that they convey

nothing assertively. The word deconstruction simply means whatever the communicator intended

is inconsequential, as all authority has been passed to the audience to derive the meaning from