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39. A Thread x A Thread — Art of Chiyoko Myose

Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

For over a decade now, we’ve been hosting “Art Life Faith” gatherings around Tokyo where we share a meal together and then an artist, a different artist each time, shares a little bit about their work and then we discuss it together. What does their art have to do with our lives? What does it have to do with our faith? The themes are always different, given by artists who are experts in their fields: musicians, dancers, painters, photographers, and the like.

These “Art Life Faith” conversations have been a great space for everyone involved, as we struggle together with what our faith has to do with our art. We teach and encourage each other in ways impossible outside of community, and no one is more rewarded by these relationships than I am. I’m always excited to learn more about God embedded in Japanese culture in ways I never imagined possible.

And there are so many other good things that come from these discussions as well. Let me just share a quick story with you. Just the other day I was visiting a gallery to encourage an artist showing her work here in the city. She was doing an artist talk and interacting with people about her work. I met another artist there who had spoken at a previous event with us. So I introduced myself and said, “I remember you.”

She asked, “Where? Where did we meet?”

“Oh, at that art life event at so-and-so’s house,” I told her.

“That event changed everything for me. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. After I tried to express my faith in words for the first time, connected to my art, everything took off from there. I started to try to make all these different kinds of artwork to express my faith, and I started telling more and more people about it, and I was able to bring in people and talk about the artwork and talk about my faith. And that was just an amazing opportunity for me.”

I thought, “That is exactly why we’re doing events like this.”

But unfortunately, during these discussions, only a small group of people are ever actually able to be there in person. And then during COVID, well as you know, no one was able to be there at all. We had to move the discussions online. Now thankfully, things have opened up a little bit, but during COVID it really was helpful to look into how we could get these discussions out to more people. How can we involve them in these discussions?

Well, one way was by writing books. My book, The Broken Leaf, is a good example of that. It has ten meditations of the gospel through Japanese art and culture. In one sense it’s a work of journalism, a reporting on our “Art Life Faith” discussions in print form so that people can see what we’re talking about and be drawn into the discussions.

More recently, we started this podcast. Thank you so much for your support of it! We’ve had thousands of downloads since we started, and recently I received an email recognizing us as one of the top listened-to Christian podcasts in Japan. Now, I’m not sure if there are any other Christian podcasts in Japan, so it probably doesn’t mean very much. And, of course, this show is only in English, but we’ve always wanted to get a Japanese version going. So that’s something to look forward to in the future too, as we keep trying to get the message out there to more people.

So, anyway, in today’s episode, I want to bring you into conversations we had about the artwork of Chiyoko Myose, a Japanese artist who now lives in Wichita, Kansas. She came to Japan to exhibit at a gallery in Asuka, Nara, a city that’s south of us, but while she was here we also invited her to exhibit in at Minami Terrace, or “Mina Tera” as we like to call it, a gallery/event space run by our very own Mayuko Shono, an intern working with us here in Tokyo. And then the work was moved to the lobby outside where we meet for worship on Sundays, and we had the privilege of the artist sharing her faith through the artwork in the worship service itself.

Chiyoko moved to the U.S. about 25 years ago, which led her to think about themes of being a traveler and a sojourner, with a longing for a place that she could call home. And she invites all of us to think about those themes along with her through her artwork.

Here is a short clip from the opening to our “Art Life Faith” event with our intern, Mayuko, introducing it and my wife, Abi, translating.

[Sound clip from exhibit]

As you can tell from this, it’s a pretty fun and informal event. Chiyoko began by sharing a little bit about her mother, who apparently was really good at talking to people and could become friends with anyone. In the train, in the bus, she would just talk to people. And when she visited Chiyoko in America, even though she didn’t know English very well, she would talk to anyone in her broken English and made friends with so many. She clearly loved meeting people and treasured memories of meeting with each person. Unfortunately, her mother became very sick, and during that time someone gave her a lot of thread and asked if she could make something with it. Chiyoko thought about it and realized that thread really is a very good metaphor for human relationships. She thought of Japanese phrases like 縁を結ぶ (en o musubu), weaving a relationship together, and 縁が切る (en ga kiru), “cutting off a relationship. In fact, the character for “thread” 糸 (ito) is found in many other Japanese characters.

Are you ready for a Japanese lesson? Okay, let’s go. For example, 結ぶ (musubu) “to tie,” 編む (amu) “to knit,” 織る (oru) “to weave,” 縫う(nuu) “to sew,” 紡ぐ (tsumugu) “to spin yarn,” and others. If you look in the show notes, you can see that the left side of each of these characters has a part that looks like the character for “thread.” This is called the ito hen or thread radical.

But, you know, this radical for “thread” is not just found in words that have to do with an actual working with thread. It’s also found throughout the Japanese language in characters having to do with relationships. Besides the two mentioned before, here are two more: 繋ぐ (tsunagu) “to tie together or connect in relationship” and  絆 (kizuna) “bond between people.” In the time leading up to Tokyo Olympics, I saw these two characters everywhere. They were on posters. They were on T-shirts and all kinds of paraphernalia. “絆を繋げよう” (kizuna o tsunageyou). A good translation of that might be something like “Let’s connect in bonds together!” This “thread” radical is in both of those words, “bonds” and “connecting.” And I also saw both of these characters everywhere after the 2011 earthquake where we were coming together as a nation to meet the challenges of that terrible time.

Another word with the thread radical is 組む (kumu) “to organize.” My youngest son is in the second “kumi” of his fourth grade class. There are four groups in the fourth grade, and he is in the second one. So he’s in the “second kumi.” Another could be紹介 (shoukai) “an introduction, the start of a new relationship and perhaps 契約 (keiyaku) “a contract or binding agreement.” When parties tie themselves together in some mutually agreed upon terms, it’s called a keiyaku. And what about 結婚 (kekkon), the marriage between two people.There are so many words like this that have the thread radical in those characters.

And this “thread” radical is also found in verbs for the end of relationships: 終わる (owaru) “to end,” 絶える (taeru) “to break off,” 絡まる (karamaru) and 絡れる (motsureru) “to get tangled up.”

So in all these different ways, the Japanese language itself expresses relationships based on thread. And Chiyoko does a wonderful job of expressing this through her art. Sewing, tying, braiding, and stringing thread together—through all these methods she’s able to give us different perspectives on relationships.

There were two main works Chiyoko exhibited when she was with us. One was called A Thread x A Thread. Each thread is only about 10 inches long, but in the whole work, there’s miles and miles of it. Each thread represents a person. Each knot represents the meeting of people. She started this work in 2013 but ever since, people have been adding to it. And it has grown and will always continue to grow.

First, you have to realize how large this work is. It completely filled the space at Mina Tera and completely changed the atmosphere of the room. That’s one of the gifts of installation art, right? To create a certain atmosphere that people can be drawn into. And we definitely saw that in this case. As we talked to people, we had to shimmy around and through and under the work. But rather than hindering the building of community, it added to the experience. Usually when you walk into a gallery, you’re not allowed to touch the artwork. Your supposed to just look at it. But in this case, it was okay to brush against it and touch it, but you were encouraged to do so. You didn’t have to be afraid of breaking it or hurting it, because you were completely immersed in it. And that was the intent, to envelope the viewers with love as represented by these threads and also with the message of hope and healing. And through the art, different people were connected to each other.

As we added to the work, it became more and more complicated and messy. There were pieces hanging out everywhere. But in the hands of the artist, this was all brought together into one beautiful tapestry. Threads that hung by themselves were tied to others. They were physically brought into the work.

After the gallery showing, the work was transported to the lobby outside our worship space for Grace City Church Tokyo. One couple who came to the gallery had carefully tied their threads together but were disappointed that they couldn’t find their thread again in the new space. It was so clear how their lives, their relationship together, were all connected and part of something bigger, to this bigger community that was around them and with them and encouraging them. And how they too gave back to the community. It was just such a wonderful picture of being church.

I also really appreciated the way it brought in people from the congregation who don’t usually say much and may be a little bit shy. But they were willing to quietly grab a piece of thread and tie it on somewhere. And it gave me a chance to tie on a thread next to them and talk quietly with them. Just through the artwork itself it gave and built a sense of community, exactly what we are trying to be as a church.

Another work that Chiyoko displayed at the gallery and also outside the worship space was a painting series called Iridescence. Iridescence is a phenomenon where surfaces appear to change color depending on what angle you view it from. And it’s meant to be a picture of our lives. By being in community, we’re able to see our life through the different perspectives of different people and how we interact with one another.

In this work, Chiyoko made alternating layers of dry and wet in order to show this. She first would lay down a drawing with pastels, crayons, color pencils, and pens, and also of course thread, she always used thread, and then she would put a wet layer of paint. Sometimes she mixed in gold and silver to give it that iridescent effect. The wet paint would flow up against the thread and along it. Then another layer dry layer is put down. And then again another layer of wet paint. So the finished artwork is a beautiful combination of these three, wet mediums, dry mediums, and thread, interacting and responding to each other. I might even add learning from one another.

Fortunately, we now have two paintings from the Iridescence series hanging in our living room. Our living room is one of the main meeting locations for church gatherings. So many meetings, parties, Bible studies, and training happens here. A lot of community building happens in our living room. So it seemed especially appropriate to have artwork about relationships displayed there, and we look forward to the time when you can see them in person, joining in the church activities and building community with us.

It was really cool to see how Chiyoko brought all this together—her own experiences, her wonderful memories of her mother, and this theme of relationships brought out in the Japanese language as represented with thread. Through her work, we saw a new perspective of the way that God works with us. We’re cut off. We’re separated from one another and lonely. Our threads are fraying and falling apart. We’re unraveling. And yet, through her craft, Chiyoko showed us how the Great Artist takes our tangled and frayed and unraveling lives, and brings us in and ties us to one another and to him. He builds our community and makes unity in him possible through his love. As it says in Colossians 3:14, “love…binds everything together in perfect harmony.” God has fearfully and wonderfully knitted us together in our mother’s womb. He has weaved us together in the depths of the earth, as it says in Psalm 139.

All of this happened for the first Sunday of Advent. What better way to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas? In a profound and mysterious way, God saved the world by coming into the world. He came as a little “thread” to 結ぶ (musubu), “to tie” onto our tangled and fraying lives and communities. Jesus was cut off on the cross that we might be tied to God. He became the isolated and broken strand so that we could be gathered into community with him. In a world quickly unraveling in sin, he binds us together with his love into a big and beautiful tapestry in the peace and harmony of the kingdom of God.

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the “Art Life Faith” podcast. Check out my website, rogerwlowther.com for a transcription of this podcast and links and pictures to Chiyoko’s works. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time.”

The post 39. A Thread x A Thread — Art of Chiyoko Myose appeared first on Roger W. Lowther.

38. Bach and the Navajo – A Conversation with Samuel Metzger

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

In previous podcasts, we’ve talked about the challenges of working as a Western classical musician in a global and missional context. In my first month in Japan, I was helping to lead worship on a pipe organ, which I was asked to do, when an older missionary came up and started to berate me. “You can’t play that kind of music here. It’s completely against everything we’re trying to do for the Japanese church.” In other words, he was not very encouraging!

I was a bit shocked, but I could see his point. As Christians, we want to see the nations of the world worship God in their heart languages…their spoken language, but also their musical language and their cultural language. The music of Messiaen, Vierne, Widor, and all the other Western composers who’ve written for the organ are not part of their heart language…so, doesn’t that mean I shouldn’t play that music while church planting in Japan? I mean, what role do I have, someone trained in distinctly Western styles of music, in bringing the gospel to the people of Japan? How can I justify playing the pipe organ for people in Japan?

Well…this is, of course, one of the key issues we’ve been addressing in many podcasts. The fact that we’ve seen many Japanese become Christians, not by adopting Western cultural forms, but by embracing creative expressions of the gospel in their own culture proves we need to rethink the dilemma. Church planting around the world builds the kingdom of heaven, where all the nations worship God of course through their heart languages. But also, they are led in worship through the heart languages of all other people as well. Just as in Isaiah 6:3 where the angels call, “Holy, holy, holy,” to one another, our worship is enhanced by calling out and sharing the praises of God through our own languages and cultures, our own perspectives and insights and experiences. God is most certainly glorified through it.

When I play the pipe organ in Japan, I build relationships with people that lead to experiencing the gospel. I share myself, and they in turn share themselves with me. And through it, we see Japanese become Christians. Not Western Christians, but Japanese Christians who praise God through their perspectives and lead me in worship through them as well.

So, being an artist and a missionary is not only okay, but it’s helpful. It’s effective. It’s strategic. And we’re going to investigate this a little bit more fully in today’s podcast.

This week I’ll be talking with Samuel Metzger. Samuel and I have a lot of overlapping circles. He is currently the organist at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville, TN, which is a church that has supported me and my family generously as missionaries for many years now. And it’s also where my latest organ album, called COVENANT, was recorded. (You can check out that album and its music in the show notes!) Before that, Samuel was the music director and organist at Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis, TN, another church that supports us very generously. I was also the organist there for a number of years before coming to Japan as a missionary. Before that, he was the organist at Coral Ridge Presbyterian in Florida, a huge TV church with services broadcast around the world. I actually auditioned to be organist at that church but didn’t get the job. When Samuel auditioned, he did get the job! So, obviously, he’s a phenomenal organist. He’s active as a concert artist and was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany. The list goes on. Anyway, I feel privileged to know him and to be able to call him a friend.

The reason I’m bringing Samuel on the show today is because, besides being a stellar musician, he also grew up as a missionary kid working with the Navajo. And so he has something to offer as we seek to understand what does it mean to work as a Western classical musician in a missional context.

Samuel, thank you so much for being here today.

Samuel

Thank you. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Roger

So you are a musician and you’ve been a musician your whole life and you are a missionary kid. We’ve had a number of conversations in the past in this podcast about how the two connect, missions and arts. And so I’d like to talk with you a little bit about that and hear some of your history. So let me go back to the beginning, your growing up. Tell me about what it was like being the son of a missionary family.

Samuel

Well, I think it’s probably the case for all missionary kids, it is a bit of a unique circumstance because you’re in a foreign place. And even though I grew up in the United States, but being on the mission field, being truly a minority, and for a lot of the time, being home-schooled, the family is very important.

My love of music really came through my father. My father, who is a German immigrant, he’s now passed, loved classical music, loved the music of Bach, loved the organ in particular. Had studied organ privately in his late 20s. So when we went to the mission field, he had this wonderful record collection and conversations, and he would reminisce about programs that he’d gone to at the Eastman School of Music when he lived in Rochester. And I would hear about all of these famous organists and of course, we had the recordings.

Roger

So was he a musician himself or just a music lover?

Samuel

Music lover. He had played for a little bit, but when you start playing an instrument at age 27, regardless of how hard you work, you can’t do it. And then he felt called into ministry.

Roger

Right.

Samuel

So I grew up hearing music constantly in the home, even though we were at a place culturally that might have seemed a bit removed from that. But when I was eleven is when I was able to start taking some private lessons at the University in Flagstaff, which was an hour drive from where we were. They had a preparatory school for young kids. So I studied with a student teacher there and actually began on the organ, because we didn’t have a piano, we were given a little electronic organ. And so that was at eleven.

Roger

That’s the way I started as well, on the organ, not on the piano.

Samuel

Yeah. I think it has definite benefits and definite disadvantages technically as keyboard players will know. Give me counterpoint, I can play that all day. Arpeggios, that’s always not quite as comfortable.

Roger

So what was the ministry that your dad was involved in?

Samuel

So my father was a missionary to the Navajo Indians, and the Navajo Indian Reservation is the largest Native American nation in the country. And it’s all around what’s called the Four Corners there of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. And we were in the portion of the mission field, which is near the Grand Canyon. We were about a 40-minutes drive from the Grand Canyon where we lived. So we had a mission church, which actually was in a mobile home right next to the reservation. You could not be on it as a non-Native American. So we lived right next to the reservation. We would go out in my dad’s old World War II jeep out into the sheep camps and would visit people. Some of the ministry was people coming to the mission church. Others were just people that my dad would visit. The Navajos did not speak English. He had an old-fashioned wind-up record player with sermons on it spoken in their native language. It was kind of funny. After listening to them over and over again, you could predict where the pops and the clicks were in the LP.

Yeah, we’d be out there in the sheep camps, and we’d have fried bread cooked there and lard on an open fire and mutton stew and all those things. And then we’d go back to my home and we’d be hearing a Bach Cantata at night.

Roger

Well, yeah, that makes me wonder if he’s carrying this record player to the reservation. Was music a part of this ministry? Was he playing music as well?

Samuel

No, it was not. It was not the kind of record player, I don’t remember why, but it was not the kind that would use the normal magnetic electrical pickup. It was totally acoustical. It was a non-electric system. I don’t know what that particular technology was, but no, it did not play regular LPs.

Roger

Did he then do music as a ministry at his house or off the reservation?

Samuel

Yes. When we were first on the mission field, we actually did meet in our living room and we had the regular mission church. He would refer to classical music and later on, as I was able to play more, for example, I learned all of the Bach Schubler Chorals, and I was able to play them and he would use scripture to talk about the text and he would give a translation. Sometimes my dad would do his own translation that would be more literal, rather than the, what’s it called, versified or has to be rhyming. Right? The Catherine Winkworth translations are beautiful, but they’re not always literal.

Roger

So how did that go? What was the reception? Were there a lot of people there?

Samuel

Yeah, I think it was well received. It was just sort of part of my dad’s ministry. He loved music and referred to it. And then, we would often at Christmas time, we would have a listening time to listen to the Messiah, the Christmas section, and we would print out the lyrics. And so, the congregation would hear this wonderful music, but then also the gospel story. We did that. And then he would, on occasion, this would be for the more adventurous listeners, he would maybe do a Bach Cantata and then give a translation in English or something like that. But that was probably becoming more of a reach. Handel’s Messiah is probably an easier lift.

Roger

Well, I would have enjoyed that.

That’s interesting, though. One of the things that we struggle with in Japan is that whole thing about trying to make sure that Christianity doesn’t look like a Western religion, and so bringing in Bach’s cantatas or Handel’s Messiah or things like that. Do you think there was any of that conflict there? Or how do people…

Samuel

I’m not sure that the Navajo people, at least, certainly 30 years ago, would have thought of it that way. I think in our more modern times, people are more and more sensitive to those thoughts. Now, maybe we were just oblivious to it, but I guess in a way, even for the few white people who came to my dad’s church, that was practically just as foreign to them as well.

Roger

Right. That’s true.

Samuel

The whole thing was a novelty. It was a novelty that people thought was kind of interesting. You present it without trying to make excuses for it. You just present it, “This is wonderful.” You know, you just present it with the assumption that people are going to like it. My dad always would say, “You have to get the hay out of the hayloft down on the floor where the cows can eat it.” I don’t know if that’s an old German saying or what, but his attitude was, I take that even when I do concerts in church settings, if you tell somebody about a piece of music, give them a hook and you present it in such a way that assumes they’re going to like it, they will, of course, like it. And so I think being not so self-conscious about that, but choosing carefully, you know?

Roger

Yeah. And I mean, kind of I asked as a devil’s advocate because obviously I’m an organist as well, and I’m playing Bach all the time in Japan, which seems like this Western thing, but it seems too that it’s a chance to say, this is what I have to offer, this is who I am. It’s a way for relationship building rather than some kind of Western domination of culture thing. Just like a sharing time.

Samuel

Yeah. And I think that it’s being less self-conscious about it. But whatever we present, and particularly those of us as performers, if we do it with passion and excitement, I think that ultimately music is just music and you have to know your congregation. I do remember I come back from Germany having studied all of this high art, and then I end up in a church in South Florida, which was a TV church and really appreciated just the old hymns. So I kind of got a little bit off of my pedestal and realized I could play my Bach and my Vierne and all that. But then if I worked in a nice arrangement of a hymn setting or something that people related to, that bought a lot of buy-in. And in the end, after being there for several years, my solo concerts would get a huge audience. And it wasn’t because they were organ lovers. It’s just they kind of knew that whatever I presented they would like. And so I think it’s presenting things with passion, and I think that’s the key.

Roger

That’s cool. So what about in case of Navajo music? I know they do have a rich heritage, which has really been commercialized when I’ve been out West and seen the dances and various things going on. Were you ever able to sing together in Navajo various songs or hymns that were Christian?

Samuel

Yeah, there were some songs, particularly with…Well, first of all, most of the Navajos, the young, like young parents and children, a lot of them were already starting to lose their native language. They had become very Westernized, as in language-wise. But there were some songs that we were seeing in our Good News Club with the kids that there were some verses in Navajo that we kind of, my dad and us, as a family learned kind of by rote. So we did have a little bit of that. But they would be Christian songs, but Christian songs that had originally been in English and then been translated. So there was a little bit of a tradition of that. In the actual Navajo music itself, it’s not completely tonal in the sense of what we would think. It was more chanting. And a lot of that had to do with the Navajo religion. So some of that didn’t naturally translate over into the mission. But doing a verse or two of a song in Navajo, that did happen.

Roger

And how the Navajo react to that? Did they respond well to it?

Samuel

Yeah, absolutely. And we did a lot of things like, for example, instead of just putting a cross on the wall, we had a Navajo rug made that had a cross. And the offering plate was a Navajo basket. And so we did things to try to incorporate the culture into the services, I think because my father, being an immigrant, understood what it was like to not be a part of the majority culture, he was sensitive to that. He came to this country when he was 16, after World War II, and throughout his whole life never felt truly American, so he was sensitive to other cultures not feeling that way. So I think he related well to it. So he did what he could, I think, to create those bridges.

Roger

So let me jump ahead to modern time and this spread of COVID and this has been hard for a lot of people. I’d love to hear your thoughts about how music had a role to play in healing during this time.

Samuel

Absolutely. Well, for all of us, people in general, but certainly those of us in the arts and those of us who serve in church, it’s been even for us creative people, has taxed us in different ways. We, unfortunately, at the very beginning of the COVID season, we had a pastor catch COVID and die. And so that kind of probably launched us a little bit more quickly into the various measures. We actually went into having to do everything virtual for a couple of weeks while we were waiting to see if any of us had COVID because we’d been in the same room with this pastor. We even recorded things separately in our homes. So I would say it took a lot of flexibility, but the congregation was so appreciative to have some normalcy and we’re blessed, of course, to have had an AV team that could help us make the quality of the audio as good as possible and cameras and all of those things. So we were blessed to have that. But the congregation is really appreciated all that we’ve done and really have reached out. For me as an organist, where I sit normally on Sunday morning, I’m kind of up there doing my thing up there very privately with my back to everybody. But it was interesting that during COVID because of them needing to put something on the screen, they had a camera pointed kind of down at the organ. And so for the first time, a lot of people saw what an organist does and that was interesting. So in a kind of curious way, it raised the people’s appreciation of the organ, which I thought was interesting.

Roger

I remembered during COVID, I sometimes watch NBC News from Japan because it’s one of the few that I’m able to watch what’s happening with American news. And Second Pres., your choir, was on the news.

Samuel

Yes. That was really a wonderful thing that came out of a tragic situation. This pastor who died really loved music, was so supportive of the music. Loved Handel. So he passed away of COVID and the choir, led by our choir director Calvin Ellis, decided to go to his widow’s house and sing a hymn, a cappella. It was a moment when this group of choir members, many who have sung in this choir for 30 years or longer, they’re a group of music lovers, lay musicians, some even have music degrees, but maybe didn’t end up going into music as a full-time career. They took their love of music and then used it to serve the higher purpose of ministering to this widow. And it was posted, I believe, on Instagram or Twitter, and then somehow picked up by NBC News. So that was a really sweet thing that came out of a very sad situation.

Roger

Yeah, I’m sure it was healing for the choir too, just to have a way to do something that brought light in a dark situation.

Samuel

Yeah, absolutely. As we know, arts and music and all of these things that we have are what sustain people through difficult times. You can look throughout history…I think of how in my dad’s home country, Germany, how quickly after the war they rebuilt the concert halls or would put on the radio broadcasts of orchestras performing even in rubble, the importance of the arts and what that means for our culture and for those of us who serve and use our music in the church setting. It relates, in some ways, not only musically but then the whole fellowship, the church family, and the spiritual higher purpose of that. So that came together in a wonderful way.

Roger

That’s a great story to end with. Thank you so much for your time, and God bless your ministry and everything you’re doing here.

Samuel

Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

Roger

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast. Check out my website, rogerwlowther.com, for a transcription of this podcast and various links. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time!”

The post 38. Bach and the Navajo – A Conversation with Samuel Metzger appeared first on Roger W. Lowther.

Bach and the Navajo – A Conversation with Samuel Metzger

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

In previous podcasts, we’ve talked about the challenges of working as a Western classical musician in a global and missional context. In my first month in Japan, I was helping to lead worship on a pipe organ, which I was asked to do, when an older missionary came up and started to berate me. “You can’t play that kind of music here. It’s completely against everything we’re trying to do for the Japanese church.” In other words, he was not very encouraging!

I was a bit shocked, but I could see his point. As Christians, we want to see the nations of the world worship God in their heart languages…their spoken language, but also their musical language and their cultural language. The music of Messiaen, Vierne, Widor, and all the other Western composers who’ve written for the organ are not part of their heart language…so, doesn’t that mean I shouldn’t play that music while church planting in Japan? I mean, what role do I have, someone trained in distinctly Western styles of music, in bringing the gospel to the people of Japan? How can I justify playing the pipe organ for people in Japan?

Well…this is, of course, one of the key issues we’ve been addressing in many podcasts. The fact that we’ve seen many Japanese become Christians, not by adopting Western cultural forms, but by embracing creative expressions of the gospel in their own culture proves we need to rethink the dilemma. Church planting around the world builds the kingdom of heaven, where all the nations worship God of course through their heart languages. But also, they are led in worship through the heart languages of all other people as well. Just as in Isaiah 6:3 where the angels call, “Holy, holy, holy,” to one another, our worship is enhanced by calling out and sharing the praises of God through our own languages and cultures, our own perspectives and insights and experiences. God is most certainly glorified through it.

When I play the pipe organ in Japan, I build relationships with people that lead to experiencing the gospel. I share myself, and they in turn share themselves with me. And through it, we see Japanese become Christians. Not Western Christians, but Japanese Christians who praise God through their perspectives and lead me in worship through them as well.

So, being an artist and a missionary is not only okay, but it’s helpful. It’s effective. It’s strategic. And we’re going to investigate this a little bit more fully in today’s podcast.

This week I’ll be talking with Samuel Metzger. Samuel and I have a lot of overlapping circles. He is currently the organist at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville, TN, which is a church that has supported me and my family generously as missionaries for many years now. And it’s also where my latest organ album, called COVENANT, was recorded. (You can check out that album and its music in the show notes!) Before that, Samuel was the music director and organist at Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis, TN, another church that supports us very generously. I was also the organist there for a number of years before coming to Japan as a missionary. Before that, he was the organist at Coral Ridge Presbyterian in Florida, a huge TV church with services broadcast around the world. I actually auditioned to be organist at that church but didn’t get the job. When Samuel auditioned, he did get the job! So, obviously, he’s a phenomenal organist. He’s active as a concert artist and was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany. The list goes on. Anyway, I feel privileged to know him and to be able to call him a friend.

The reason I’m bringing Samuel on the show today is because, besides being a stellar musician, he also grew up as a missionary kid working with the Navajo. And so he has something to offer as we seek to understand what does it mean to work as a Western classical musician in a missional context.

Samuel, thank you so much for being here today.

Samuel

Thank you. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Roger

So you are a musician and you’ve been a musician your whole life and you are a missionary kid. We’ve had a number of conversations in the past in this podcast about how the two connect, missions and arts. And so I’d like to talk with you a little bit about that and hear some of your history. So let me go back to the beginning, your growing up. Tell me about what it was like being the son of a missionary family.

Samuel

Well, I think it’s probably the case for all missionary kids, it is a bit of a unique circumstance because you’re in a foreign place. And even though I grew up in the United States, but being on the mission field, being truly a minority, and for a lot of the time, being home-schooled, the family is very important.

My love of music really came through my father. My father, who is a German immigrant, he’s now passed, loved classical music, loved the music of Bach, loved the organ in particular. Had studied organ privately in his late 20s. So when we went to the mission field, he had this wonderful record collection and conversations, and he would reminisce about programs that he’d gone to at the Eastman School of Music when he lived in Rochester. And I would hear about all of these famous organists and of course, we had the recordings.

Roger

So was he a musician himself or just a music lover?

Samuel

Music lover. He had played for a little bit, but when you start playing an instrument at age 27, regardless of how hard you work, you can’t do it. And then he felt called into ministry.

Roger

Right.

Samuel

So I grew up hearing music constantly in the home, even though we were at a place culturally that might have seemed a bit removed from that. But when I was eleven is when I was able to start taking some private lessons at the University in Flagstaff, which was an hour drive from where we were. They had a preparatory school for young kids. So I studied with a student teacher there and actually began on the organ, because we didn’t have a piano, we were given a little electronic organ. And so that was at eleven.

Roger

That’s the way I started as well, on the organ, not on the piano.

Samuel

Yeah. I think it has definite benefits and definite disadvantages technically as keyboard players will know. Give me counterpoint, I can play that all day. Arpeggios, that’s always not quite as comfortable.

Roger

So what was the ministry that your dad was involved in?

Samuel

So my father was a missionary to the Navajo Indians, and the Navajo Indian Reservation is the largest Native American nation in the country. And it’s all around what’s called the Four Corners there of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. And we were in the portion of the mission field, which is near the Grand Canyon. We were about a 40-minutes drive from the Grand Canyon where we lived. So we had a mission church, which actually was in a mobile home right next to the reservation. You could not be on it as a non-Native American. So we lived right next to the reservation. We would go out in my dad’s old World War II jeep out into the sheep camps and would visit people. Some of the ministry was people coming to the mission church. Others were just people that my dad would visit. The Navajos did not speak English. He had an old-fashioned wind-up record player with sermons on it spoken in their native language. It was kind of funny. After listening to them over and over again, you could predict where the pops and the clicks were in the LP.

Yeah, we’d be out there in the sheep camps, and we’d have fried bread cooked there and lard on an open fire and mutton stew and all those things. And then we’d go back to my home and we’d be hearing a Bach Cantata at night.

Roger

Well, yeah, that makes me wonder if he’s carrying this record player to the reservation. Was music a part of this ministry? Was he playing music as well?

Samuel

No, it was not. It was not the kind of record player, I don’t remember why, but it was not the kind that would use the normal magnetic electrical pickup. It was totally acoustical. It was a non-electric system. I don’t know what that particular technology was, but no, it did not play regular LPs.

Roger

Did he then do music as a ministry at his house or off the reservation?

Samuel

Yes. When we were first on the mission field, we actually did meet in our living room and we had the regular mission church. He would refer to classical music and later on, as I was able to play more, for example, I learned all of the Bach Schubler Chorals, and I was able to play them and he would use scripture to talk about the text and he would give a translation. Sometimes my dad would do his own translation that would be more literal, rather than the, what’s it called, versified or has to be rhyming. Right? The Catherine Winkworth translations are beautiful, but they’re not always literal.

Roger

So how did that go? What was the reception? Were there a lot of people there?

Samuel

Yeah, I think it was well received. It was just sort of part of my dad’s ministry. He loved music and referred to it. And then, we would often at Christmas time, we would have a listening time to listen to the Messiah, the Christmas section, and we would print out the lyrics. And so, the congregation would hear this wonderful music, but then also the gospel story. We did that. And then he would, on occasion, this would be for the more adventurous listeners, he would maybe do a Bach Cantata and then give a translation in English or something like that. But that was probably becoming more of a reach. Handel’s Messiah is probably an easier lift.

Roger

Well, I would have enjoyed that.

That’s interesting, though. One of the things that we struggle with in Japan is that whole thing about trying to make sure that Christianity doesn’t look like a Western religion, and so bringing in Bach’s cantatas or Handel’s Messiah or things like that. Do you think there was any of that conflict there? Or how do people…

Samuel

I’m not sure that the Navajo people, at least, certainly 30 years ago, would have thought of it that way. I think in our more modern times, people are more and more sensitive to those thoughts. Now, maybe we were just oblivious to it, but I guess in a way, even for the few white people who came to my dad’s church, that was practically just as foreign to them as well.

Roger

Right. That’s true.

Samuel

The whole thing was a novelty. It was a novelty that people thought was kind of interesting. You present it without trying to make excuses for it. You just present it, “This is wonderful.” You know, you just present it with the assumption that people are going to like it. My dad always would say, “You have to get the hay out of the hayloft down on the floor where the cows can eat it.” I don’t know if that’s an old German saying or what, but his attitude was, I take that even when I do concerts in church settings, if you tell somebody about a piece of music, give them a hook and you present it in such a way that assumes they’re going to like it, they will, of course, like it. And so I think being not so self-conscious about that, but choosing carefully, you know?

Roger

Yeah. And I mean, kind of I asked as a devil’s advocate because obviously I’m an organist as well, and I’m playing Bach all the time in Japan, which seems like this Western thing, but it seems too that it’s a chance to say, this is what I have to offer, this is who I am. It’s a way for relationship building rather than some kind of Western domination of culture thing. Just like a sharing time.

Samuel

Yeah. And I think that it’s being less self-conscious about it. But whatever we present, and particularly those of us as performers, if we do it with passion and excitement, I think that ultimately music is just music and you have to know your congregation. I do remember I come back from Germany having studied all of this high art, and then I end up in a church in South Florida, which was a TV church and really appreciated just the old hymns. So I kind of got a little bit off of my pedestal and realized I could play my Bach and my Vierne and all that. But then if I worked in a nice arrangement of a hymn setting or something that people related to, that bought a lot of buy-in. And in the end, after being there for several years, my solo concerts would get a huge audience. And it wasn’t because they were organ lovers. It’s just they kind of knew that whatever I presented they would like. And so I think it’s presenting things with passion, and I think that’s the key.

Roger

That’s cool. So what about in case of Navajo music? I know they do have a rich heritage, which has really been commercialized when I’ve been out West and seen the dances and various things going on. Were you ever able to sing together in Navajo various songs or hymns that were Christian?

Samuel

Yeah, there were some songs, particularly with…Well, first of all, most of the Navajos, the young, like young parents and children, a lot of them were already starting to lose their native language. They had become very Westernized, as in language-wise. But there were some songs that we were seeing in our Good News Club with the kids that there were some verses in Navajo that we kind of, my dad and us, as a family learned kind of by rote. So we did have a little bit of that. But they would be Christian songs, but Christian songs that had originally been in English and then been translated. So there was a little bit of a tradition of that. In the actual Navajo music itself, it’s not completely tonal in the sense of what we would think. It was more chanting. And a lot of that had to do with the Navajo religion. So some of that didn’t naturally translate over into the mission. But doing a verse or two of a song in Navajo, that did happen.

Roger

And how the Navajo react to that? Did they respond well to it?

Samuel

Yeah, absolutely. And we did a lot of things like, for example, instead of just putting a cross on the wall, we had a Navajo rug made that had a cross. And the offering plate was a Navajo basket. And so we did things to try to incorporate the culture into the services, I think because my father, being an immigrant, understood what it was like to not be a part of the majority culture, he was sensitive to that. He came to this country when he was 16, after World War II, and throughout his whole life never felt truly American, so he was sensitive to other cultures not feeling that way. So I think he related well to it. So he did what he could, I think, to create those bridges.

Roger

So let me jump ahead to modern time and this spread of COVID and this has been hard for a lot of people. I’d love to hear your thoughts about how music had a role to play in healing during this time.

Samuel

Absolutely. Well, for all of us, people in general, but certainly those of us in the arts and those of us who serve in church, it’s been even for us creative people, has taxed us in different ways. We, unfortunately, at the very beginning of the COVID season, we had a pastor catch COVID and die. And so that kind of probably launched us a little bit more quickly into the various measures. We actually went into having to do everything virtual for a couple of weeks while we were waiting to see if any of us had COVID because we’d been in the same room with this pastor. We even recorded things separately in our homes. So I would say it took a lot of flexibility, but the congregation was so appreciative to have some normalcy and we’re blessed, of course, to have had an AV team that could help us make the quality of the audio as good as possible and cameras and all of those things. So we were blessed to have that. But the congregation is really appreciated all that we’ve done and really have reached out. For me as an organist, where I sit normally on Sunday morning, I’m kind of up there doing my thing up there very privately with my back to everybody. But it was interesting that during COVID because of them needing to put something on the screen, they had a camera pointed kind of down at the organ. And so for the first time, a lot of people saw what an organist does and that was interesting. So in a kind of curious way, it raised the people’s appreciation of the organ, which I thought was interesting.

Roger

I remembered during COVID, I sometimes watch NBC News from Japan because it’s one of the few that I’m able to watch what’s happening with American news. And Second Pres., your choir, was on the news.

Samuel

Yes. That was really a wonderful thing that came out of a tragic situation. This pastor who died really loved music, was so supportive of the music. Loved Handel. So he passed away of COVID and the choir, led by our choir director Calvin Ellis, decided to go to his widow’s house and sing a hymn, a cappella. It was a moment when this group of choir members, many who have sung in this choir for 30 years or longer, they’re a group of music lovers, lay musicians, some even have music degrees, but maybe didn’t end up going into music as a full-time career. They took their love of music and then used it to serve the higher purpose of ministering to this widow. And it was posted, I believe, on Instagram or Twitter, and then somehow picked up by NBC News. So that was a really sweet thing that came out of a very sad situation.

Roger

Yeah, I’m sure it was healing for the choir too, just to have a way to do something that brought light in a dark situation.

Samuel

Yeah, absolutely. As we know, arts and music and all of these things that we have are what sustain people through difficult times. You can look throughout history…I think of how in my dad’s home country, Germany, how quickly after the war they rebuilt the concert halls or would put on the radio broadcasts of orchestras performing even in rubble, the importance of the arts and what that means for our culture and for those of us who serve and use our music in the church setting. It relates, in some ways, not only musically but then the whole fellowship, the church family, and the spiritual higher purpose of that. So that came together in a wonderful way.

Roger

That’s a great story to end with. Thank you so much for your time, and God bless your ministry and everything you’re doing here.

Samuel

Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

Roger

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast. Check out my website, rogerwlowther.com, for a transcription of this podcast and various links. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time!”

The post Bach and the Navajo – A Conversation with Samuel Metzger appeared first on Roger W. Lowther.

37. Imaginative Expression Specialists — A Conversation with Byron Spradlin

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

In the previous episode, I interviewed author Bruce Young and his wife Susan about his latest book, Living in Full View of the God of Grace. Thank you so much for your support of that book. We hit number one on Amazon in a number of categories, and it’s our hope that this book will be a blessing to many as it helps all of us see more and more clearly the God of grace.

I’m also excited to announce that my latest album, Covenant, has just been released. It’s available wherever you buy music, Apple Music or Amazon. You can also listen to it on Spotify and YouTube, so I encourage you to check it out. It was definitely a labor of love with some pieces I’ve been wanting to record for a really long time. On one of my trips to the US, I started by flying to Nashville, where I stayed on the Japan time zone for a few days so I could record all night long when the building was quiet and sleep all day. At the end of the week, I gave a concert. It was a pretty cool experience, and I’m really happy with how the project turned out.

I’ve been playing music my whole life. It’s not just something I do. It’s part of who I am. And like a lot of artists, the lines are a bit blurred between this “being” and “doing.” When you spend every waking moment focused on one thing, you kind of get rewired that way. But it’s also one more way that COVID hit particularly hard. As an organist, I depend on other spaces to play music and on people to gather to hear it. And here in Japan, things were shut down a lot harder and a lot longer than in the US. But even in the US, it was difficult. I had a terrible time finding places to practice because of COVID concerns, and concerts were basically out of the question during that time. But of course, some of my friends had it a lot worse than me. At least I still received a salary as a missionary. They, on the other hand, still depended on every single gig for a paycheck. And there weren’t many gigs. I know musicians who had to entirely give up their performing careers.

Yet, some of us could turn to other ways to share their creativity, and today I’d like to share one of those stories, about a dance company here in Tokyo, the Minato City Ballet Company. Because of COVID, they were forced to move online. Prices for cameras and livestreaming equipment skyrocketed, and for a really long time, a lot of things are actually sold out, not available anywhere. So they invested in what they could find and managed as best they could. The biggest challenge of all, though, was continuing to teach, which is the bulk of their income. And they didn’t give up. They figured out which platforms to use, how to collect payments, and all the rest.

The assistant director of the company, Natsko Goto, an award-winning ballerina, also took up photography. And then, she started entering those photographs into competitions and won numerous awards, especially for the picture titled How Beautiful are the Feet. It’s based on the scripture verse from Romans 10, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.” It’s a pretty popular verse at foreign missions conferences. The Apostle Paul says that people around the world will not know the gospel unless they’re told, and that they’re being told through all things that are made by God and by man. And this includes the work of dancers and every other artist from every nation and culture.

How Beautiful are the Feet

The message of the gospel is beautiful, but so are the feet of the messengers, the means by which that message is communicated. And so this ballet company, run by Christians, actively seeks to communicate the message of the gospel through their art, through their dance. In the photograph, How Beautiful are the Feet, we see a circle showing only the feet of the dancers. On one foot, they wear a point shoe. On the other, the foot is completely bare. One foot is dressed for being on stage, beautifully presentable. The other, not so much. It shows evidence of the blood, sweat, and tears—the bruises, pain, and injury. Feet are the means by which the Minato City Ballet Company brings the good news of the gospel to people. We pray that God continues to bless their efforts.

If you want to learn more about this company, I wrote a blog post about them on website for The MAKE Collective, a network of missionary artists I lead. If you’d like to hear more stories like this, please subscribe to our newsletter. You can send an email to info [at] communityarts.jp.

This week I sat down with Byron Spradlin, president and CEO of Artist in Christian Testimony International. He heads almost 700 missionary artists serving around the world, what he calls “imaginative expression specialists,” people unusually wise at imaginative design and expression. He also leads the Lausanne Arts Movement, which is all about connecting artists around the world to encourage us in the role of artists and the arts for global missions.

He has been a huge encouragement and influence on me over the years, really a lot more than I can say. I first met Byron during my first few months in Japan when he was a keynote speaker for a conference, and I remember some of the things he talked about that day, even now. That began a friendship which has lasted all these years. Since then, we keep meeting up at different conferences and gatherings all over the world. I’ve been following him all these years as Artists in Christian Testimony has grown tremendously under his leadership, and the various talks he’s given and the things he’s written. So I asked him to sit down for this podcast and share some of these with you.

So, Byron, thank you so much for being here today.

Byron

You’re welcome. And I have been actually following you because I think you are one of the great imaginators and innovators of church planting and church effort on the planet today, particularly as an artistic kingdom servant. So deal with that, my friend.

Roger

Thank you. I mean, it is so exciting what God is doing around the world, and I feel privileged to be part of it.

But yeah, there’s so many things that I want to talk with you about today. And let’s go back to the first time that I heard you speak. You were talking about why is it that missionaries can be artists and why artists can be missionaries, that’s probably a better way to put it. What is the foundation that we find in the Bible for this kind of ministry?

Byron

Well, you know, Roger, that’s a big question, and you got to keep me disciplined to make short answers here. But really the question would be, can we actually do God’s mission without artistically inclined people, without imaginative expression specialists?

Roger

A lot of people would say we can.

Bryon

Well, they’re wrong. And having been a church planter and a senior pastor, a worship pastor, a youth pastor over many years, and been to 50 countries, and then studied it three or four times in seminary on different degrees and such. It is clear when we think about the purpose of the expansion of Christianity, we have to take into consideration the fact that God is the one who’s created the various cultures in the world. And these cultures are not the same. And therefore, we know that we need to have what I call indigenous Christian community formation in every tongue, tribe, and nation. And so the church will not look the same in Japan as it looks like in Fiji and such.

Roger

Yeah, but why do we need missionaries for that? I mean, there are nationals around the world who are artists, and they can be involved in church planting.

Bryon

Every nation, tongue, and tribe is supposed to be sending missionaries. So the Fijians are supposed to be sending them, and the Japanese are supposed to be sending them, and the Israelis are supposed to be sending them and such. So that’s part of our ethnocentrism, our self-focus, as if Europe and the United States are the only ones who actually send missionaries. In 2021, you know that there are more Christians in the global south who are not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. We are the minority, and that’s a good thing, to tell you the truth. And remember, Christianity is not a white European and North American faith. It’s a Middle Eastern Asian faith. So all that said, Christian ministry must reflect God’s image to be fully and truly Christian. And one dynamic of God’s image is creative. He is extremely creative. We fight about denominations, but denominations really are the creativity of God, where different folks are bringing different correctives to the worldwide body of Christ.

Roger

Well, he made the heavens and earth in Genesis 1. But is there more to it than that?

Byron

Absolutely! Frankly, when we take a good look at, for example, the Hebrew expressions related to imaginal creativity and understand that the Hebrew culture was far more holistic than the modern, Western linear kinds of thinking, we realize that imaginal I almost like to call it not artistic expression, but imaginal expression. These kinds of expressions take what is observable and also take the revealed propositional word of God…remember, it was God’s idea to put the Bible into print media. Okay? He told Moses, write it down…

Roger

“Print media.” Interesting.

Byron

Yeah. Why is that? Well, even though the Bible is not primarily prose and intellectual dialogue, it’s mostly narrative and wisdom literature, story, poetry, song, narrative. And there are parts that are instructional, but not the majority we draw from the revelation of God. I mean, we do have the Ten Commandments, but you can’t understand, for example, the Ten Commandments without imagining into the realities that the Ten Commandments explain. It’s not just don’t murder, don’t commit adultery. You have to imagine into the sanctity of life. And that’s not something that you’re making up. That’s a reality of the way God made human beings the sanctity of life and for the whole creation, for that matter. But he’s placed human beings at the pinnacle of that.

Roger

Okay, but some examples of that would be what? Like, what were the prophets? Like, for example, I remember you talking about the most powerful one was Moses and the plagues that hit Egypt. And what is that? Well, that was a multimedia presentation. I’m like, what? And you went through a whole list.

Byron

Sure. Matter of fact, part of that list is, “In the beginning, God created.” We have the creation or creativity as the initial dynamic of God speaking out creation. And at the end, God will create a new heaven and a new earth, Revelation 21. Then we see immediately he sets up a garden. In creation, there was gardening. Adam and Eve didn’t just sit around. They tended the garden. I think they delighted in it. I’m sure they worked hard and all, but there was no negative dynamic to that. In Genesis Chapter 6 with Noah, we see carpentry. People may not have known what a boat was. I don’t think there had been rain exactly before that time. We get symbolic expression in Genesis 17, for example, circumcision. What was that all about? I can make jokes, but I won’t.

Roger

That’s probably best.

Byron

It was a symbol of God’s covenant with his people, right?

Roger

Visual reminders of this covenant.

Byron

Big time. We have culinary ministry in Genesis 18. Abraham entertained his three visitors to Sodom and Gomorrah, and they interacted over a meal. Well, some people would say, that’s just sort of like going out to lunch with each other. Stop. There is something deeply creative that expresses the transcendent reality of community, hospitality, sacrifice, honor, all of these kinds of dynamics that go on in presenting a meal to someone. It’s not just eating food. It is utilitarian. We got to eat food to live, but there’s something aesthetic about that. And there’s something deeply human, which is more than, “Here is hot dog. Eat hot dog. Put ketchup on it.” No, there’s all kinds of creativity that goes into it.

And isn’t it interesting. Dogs have instinct. Mooses have instinct. People have imagination. Whales don’t have imagination from what we can tell. They get from Alaska to Lahaina Maui in some phenomenal dynamic of instinct. It’s really amazing. But when we see it, we paint pictures and sing songs and develop sonar to trace their way and hopefully enter into creation care because we are the stewards of all of creation and need to take care of these beautiful mammals in the deep.

That’s a human phenomenon. Sometimes I’ve said human beings have never been satisfied to make a pot to carry their water. They have made the pot to carry their water, but then they’ve made it beautifully. They’ve painted it. That is a human dynamic, even in a fallen world. How about that? Amazing.

Roger

All right, so you’re talking about imagination. Yes, humans have that. Animals don’t. But how does that help us with the way that God has spoken to us?

Byron

Well, I know you’re being the devil’s advocate here, but you’re being that because you and I have come out of a modernist, Western, Protestant, actually Christian community which has been so focused on rational intelligence and intellectual discourse as the two dynamics or the two things that are that are prime. I submit to you that though there are historical reasons why we have done that, moving to let the pendulum swing to those emphases is incomplete and ineffective, inadequately biblically communicating to human beings. And secondly, seeing created or nurtured human community in intimate involvement with the community of the Trinity. We’re not just setting up a philosophy here with a set of didactic or dogmatic principles. We’re dealing with life, life with God. So we need to understand that there are two other dynamics of intellect. There certainly is rational intellect, but there’s also imaginal intellect and emotional intellect. Right there, I’m sure some of your listeners are going, oh, man, this guy’s really a heretic. Well that’s because all of our life…in my background I’m an ordained Baptist minister. I’ve heard as you think, so you are. Well, I’ve known a lot of biblical Christians who think one way and then are disobedient another way.

It’s really what we love is who we are. Who we love. Matter of fact, James K. A. Smith and younger philosopher now at Calvin College, he’s been pointing out that what we worship really is what we love. So you figure out what you love and I often say what you admire, desire, pursue, and serve, and that will tell you what you really love and what you really worship. Now in that C.S. Lewis even says imagination is the organ of meaning. That is, you can be told something but you don’t know what it means unless you imagine into the realities that it is explaining. I mean we know this from scripture. “As the deer pants after the water so my heart pants after you.” That’s an age-old way of comparing something that is less understood or more difficult to understand with something that’s more familiar to understand. It’s a metaphor, and we have seen that you can’t understand facts without an imaginal dimension. Now, part of the problem is, I know I got to be careful not doing a lecture, but part of the problem that we see is that we think if we say something, if I explain A plus B equals C that we understand it, but we don’t.

Roger

Okay, so let me stop you there. I want to ask you to give more examples of prophets using the arts to convey their message. You just mentioned poetry and song, all these different things, but the things that come to mind is that part in Isaiah where he walked through town with “buttocks bared.” I still can’t imagine. I’m not sure missionaries should do that nowadays…

Byron

But there are cultural ways of doing that same kind of outlandish thing to help people wrestle and be jolted into the realities of what God is speaking into their lives. Remember drama and theater? Jeremiah 13, the linen belt. Jeremiah 19, the clay jar incident. Jeremiah 27, making a yoke and wearing it around. Poor Jeremiah. Yeah, it was Jeremiah. He lay on his side…

Roger

I think that’s Ezekiel.

Byron

Ezekiel, he had to lay on his side for, like, an incredible amount of time.

Roger

Yeah, he was going to use his own excrement to cook his food, and he’s like, no, let me use cow dung instead.

Byron

Yeah, that’s right.

Roger

I’m just imagining missionaries doing this nowadays. It’s hard to imagine, but this is in the Old Testament. This is in the Scriptures of how prophets actually communicated God’s word.

Byron

A lot of the missionaries who have broken into the preliterate societies have done exactly this. Look, we are not talking just about artsy fartsy strategy here. We are talking about the need to encourage nationals to have the validation of or the permission to create indigenous liturgy, indigenous expressions. What is liturgy anyway? It is metaphors and symbols and various kinds of activities, when infused in faith and arranged in a human engageable manner, somehow human beings step into the presence of God and touch his transcendent reality, which is a dynamic of mystery. It’s not just an intellectual exercise.

And we need artistic expressions. Everything in a worship service is an artistic expression, except maybe a dull sermon.

Roger

Yes, I agree with you. But also, why the role of missionaries? Why is it so important to send people over—all the money, support raising from the United States and from every country to every other country as you said before—

Byron

Sure.

Roger

Won’t it just happen naturally? Why…

Byron

Apparently not. Number one, Jesus commanded it as you’re going, wherever you’re going, be making disciples. And then he said, this gospel shall be proclaimed to all of the nations, and then the end will come.

Roger

So that includes artists? We have to make disciples?

Byron

Yes, it does, quite frankly. We see that with Bezalel and Oholiab, first time the Holy Spirit actually filled individuals and gave them the ability to teach or we could put that “disciple.” Any teacher, particularly teachers of kindergarten through sixth grade, know that if you’re going to teach real understanding, you cannot just say it. These kids have to participate in it. You have to capture their imagination.

Roger

Are you saying that that’s what God did with Israel and us?

Byron

I teach worship in the Old Testament and one of the key things that I press in this deal is what in the world has got up to with the sacrificial system, 1500 years of a whole lot of life liturgies that just touch every aspect of life. Well, in that for 1500 years, he was trying to help people understand. Number one, he is in the middle of everything in life, every process of life. The way we use the bathroom, the way we have involvement with our spouse, the way we deal with our family, the way we wash our hands. These were not just religious things. These were how humans ought to live in a fallen system.

Roger

Well, just the way you’re talking about this too. It’s so clear that God is Lord of culture, that he is intimately involved in how we interact with each other. So arts and culture, the way and the why it looks different in every single culture around the world is so exciting that God is intimately involved in that and how we interact with each other.

Byron

Absolutely. And maybe that might help in Japan. I mean, I’ve been going to Japan since 1966. I’ve been there maybe 15 times. And I’ve had the great privilege and honor of actually learning from many Japanese Christian leaders and have had the joy of explaining the role of worship in church growth and how if we can make that more indigenous, we will literally see God touch the hearts of people outside the church. Well, now, if that’s the case, and if worship is more than singing songs, God forbid that that’s your dull definition of what worship is. Worship is reverencing and responding to the person and the work of God 24/7. Worship is always personal. Sometimes it’s public in a gathered setting. And all the time it’s personal. And even when you’re in a gathered worshiping thing, you have come there to together with the body of Christ, reverence him and revere him and acknowledge who he is and rehearse his sovereignty and his supremacy and his primacy and his beauty and his love and slowness to anger and compassion and all of those things. And that’s why we celebrate communion oftentimes.

The Lord told us when we gathered together to rehearse the story of the gospel, not just to remember it in one sense, but to interact with the life-saving, soul-saving work of Jesus. We are not just satisfied because of God’s desire for us to go, oh, that’s nice. No, we need to write music like the Hallelujah Chorus. We need to write the greatest music in the world. We have the greatest paintings in the world, the greatest celebration in the world. Matter of fact, human community when it breaks out in song, whether they’re specialists or not. So part of the reason that we need artistically gifted people, people who are as the Hebrew words for craftsmen and artisans mean, people who are unusually wise at imaginative design or expression is wise.

Roger

“Wise.” That’s an interesting word to use there. Not gifted, but wise.

Byron

That’s right. A matter of fact, you’ll see, whether it’s in the artisan and craftsman—there are 19 craft industries that we see in the scripture, in the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament and such, we see those plus musicians and singers. And if you look, these guys aren’t entertainers. These are part of the fabric of the community. Worshiping God and leading the community into the life of community, which is supposed to be in Israel’s history, centered around the reality of God’s love and faithfulness and compassion and restoration and such. That’s the meta-narrative. I mean, the Exodus and Passover and the Day of Atonement and all of these feasts, they demonstrate that God is in the middle of the community. They demonstrate that sacrifice is important and that sacrifice, where is it culminated? In Messiah. He is the Passover Lamb. He is the Great High Priest. That’s what the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament is all about, trying to explain this and such, but who is best capable? I submit to you that God has given not a special class of people, but he’s given a specialized class of people, imagination specialists who are wise at imaginative design and expression, so that we take metaphors and symbols and human expressions or there are twelve human signal systems that every culture has, but they each have different meaning in that particular culture. So it’s not one size fits all, right? And we rearrange those in ways that provide environments like a celebration or a worship service or a pageant or a circumcision celebration or…

Roger

And before we started this recording, you were telling me about “yatsar,” that Hebrew verb, because you were just talking about imagination quite a few times there, but what that means in the Hebrew scriptures I thought was fascinating.

Byron

Sure, now, the term “to imagine” is “yatsar.” The term, as I understand it’s pronunciation for “imagination” is “yetser.” You see these terms used 79 times in the scriptures, maybe six, seven, eight times…I’ve got to count it again, so I could be wrong…but seven, eight, nine times it’s translated “vain imaginations.” And we think of imagination as this dynamic where we think of something that isn’t true and pretend that it is true. So idolatry, for example. That is a vain imagination. That’s a good example of it. We have thought something up that isn’t true, and we have placed faith in it as if it were true. But most of the usages of imagination or to imagine are in the context of reality, that is, it means to form in your mind before you fashion it in time and place.

Protestant Christians particularly haven’t liked that idea since the 1500s when the Reformation began. And these Protestants wanted the word of God in the vernacular, which is good. It’s essential to say we want that today. And they were sick and tired of religious humanism, religion without Jesus. And so they wanted to expound the word of God and understand it more deeply. And that is very good. We should not back off on that at all. But to understand how human beings actually learn and embrace, inculcate, digest, assimilate, that psychomotor reality of interaction with life and with others. That’s not just a formula, there’s a mystery in there. And part of it is we have to imagine it.

Roger

But what you were saying before, too, is that imagination is not something that’s just unique to humans, but that has come from something. It’s part of the image of God. And you were even referring to a scripture passage that said…

Byron

For example, Isaiah 26:3. In the King James it says, “He is kept in perfect peace whose mind is staid on thee.” It’s not the Hebrew word for mind. It’s the Hebrew word for imagination. But we don’t like that word in English, so we don’t translate it that way. Actually, I checked it in Japanese too…

Anyway, we generally translate imagination in scripture as mind, form, or fashion. But those three words do not catch the fullness of the edgelessness, the bigness of what God has given human beings to enter into interaction with the infinite realities of his nature. As J.I. Packer said, the infinite perfections of who he is, his attributes. We have to have a design feature that allows us to move into the bigness and the greatness, which we will never exhaust. Paul said, “Oh, the depths of the riches, both of the knowledge and the wisdom of God. How unsearchable they are. How unfathomable they are.” And then he goes on, “Who has known his mind? Who’s become his counselor? Who has done anything to obligate him to pay that person back? No, all things are from him and through him, and go back to him, to him be the glory forever.” That doxology, which happens to be a first-century hymn, by the way, that he just lifted out of the culture, he didn’t make that up. It was a hymn that was being sung. It’s a didactic hymn that he plunked in the middle of this letter to the Roman Church and to others. He’s coming off of having explained this phenomenal reality of the atoning work of Christ.

Roger

Let me just go back to the scripture passage you just quoted. It says that God basically had imagination. So it can’t be a bad thing.

Byron

No, it cannot be a bad thing. Isaiah 45:18 is another passage where it says God created the word God, “bara-ed” the earth. Okay? He made it out of nothing. That “bara” generally is assigned to only God because he makes all things from no thing. Humans don’t do that. But then he said, he did not imagine it to be empty. Then you go into the passage, you see he meant it to be full of people. Now, just think for a minute. If imagination is only making up something that isn’t true and pretending like it is true, then God would not have that particular attribute or that particular capacity, right? So God’s imagining people is a big deal. And he imagined people before he created us. And then when he created us, even the psalmist in Psalm 8 says, “What is man that you are mindful of him? The Son of man that you care, and yet, you’ve made him a little less than God.” The human creature, men and women, male and female, are phenomenal. We have imaginality. That’s why I suggest in looking at how the word imagine, the terms—“imagination” and “to imagine”—are used in the Hebrew scripture, along with forming in your mind before you fashion it in time and space, I see there are two other dynamics that I suggest. One is imagination is as we see it in scripture, seeing what could be before it is in terms of reality. God imagined human beings before we were and then in eternity past came to a place where he created. And then the highest of his creation was the human creation. And here we are. And he breathed on us and wanted special relationship with us. That in itself is creative and it’s far beyond a propositional statement or a piece of dogma as an intellectual philosophical statement.

Roger

Right. And that to me, I’m thinking about that’s the whole foundation of missions, church planting in other countries, planting churches where there are no churches. You’re first imagining it. This could be. We could have a church here and then working to make that happen.

Byron

That’s exactly right. As a matter of fact, you say, why should we? You know, I’ve been praying where some of, for example, Japan has different diaspora groups all over the world. And those groups have become bilingual and they have also become bicultural as believers. I am hoping that there will be Japanese believers passionately in love with Jesus. Whether they’re Baptists or anybody else, Presbyterians or Pentecostals, doesn’t matter. They’re in love with Jesus seeking the will of the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit, in line with the word of God, Jesus. That’s pretty trinitarian solid, isn’t it? And in doing that, they reach out to people. As a matter of fact, you can’t just blab about the gospel. The currency of the kingdom is relationships.

Roger

Right. Exactly. Community.

Byron

Alright, and community cannot live without imaginative expression. Every community in the world…

Roger

The clothes we wear, the food we eat, the shelters we gather in…

Byron

Everything. And you cannot deal with the unknown without metaphors, symbols, and expressions within the known that help us by faith connect with the transcendent reality of God. And then you can’t be human and live without beauty. For example, you know, we have truth, beauty, and goodness. Or truth, beauty, and virtue. You can’t have those without God. Matter of fact, Jonathan Edwards points out he believes that the ultimate beauty is God’s moral beauty, that’s primary beauty. And then he sees that secondary beauty is created beauty. Have you ever noticed that when you actually stumbled into something beautiful that strikes you as beautiful? It’s not passive.

Roger

It changes you. It impacts you.

Byron

That’s right. It’s life-giving. It’s energizing. It’s hope-giving.

Roger

Yeah, and we’ve really experienced that in the earthquake, right? There was the brokenness and the mud and the darkness. Electricity was out and it was cold.

Byron

That’s right.

Roger

And I had no idea that in that environment, beauty would be important. But it’s exactly what you’re saying. It was hope-giving in ways that I had not foreseen. Maybe I believed intellectually, but then I was really experiencing it.

Byron

And see, that’s not an intellectual discourse. That’s actually narrative experience or wisdom experience. Now you look back whenever you see words in the Hebrew scriptures—wisdom, knowledge, ability, skill, and understanding. All five of those words are wisdom words. So we’re dealing with capacities of wisdom, and we’re seeing that people with artistic…Do you see how I’m actually even shying away from using artists because most people, their idea of an artist is so incomplete, it doesn’t make any sense in real life. And plus, modern art says that art is useless. It’s only for sort of esoteric objects and activities of contemplation. Well, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. You can’t live the love affair between a husband and a wife is very functional, procreation in most cases, and it’s also very beautiful. And frankly, I mean, Elkanah and Hannah, the father and mother of Samuel before she was able to have children, he said, “Is not my love for you greater than the love of ten sons?” Oh, that’s not sentimental. That’s substantively beautiful and life-giving.

Roger

But going back to this word wisdom, I find fascinating because involved in that is not just intellectual knowledge, but it’s a way of understanding the world around us that we interact with, how we interact with each other, how we interact with God. And so for you to say that the artisans in the Bible that are always referred to as having a certain kind of wisdom is really interesting to me.

Byron

Well, I think we had to take note. I mean, even when Nebuchadnezzar captured Israel in the final captivity in 586, 87, whatever, and the preoccurring, there were two or three other times in that before he finally wiped everybody out…notice who he took from the community. He took the government leadership, the political leadership. He took the military leadership, he took the religious leadership, and he took the craftsman. Now, that says something about the status and understanding in probably a semi-literate community of the importance of the artisans and the musicians and such. And they were doing something way more than just, you know, singing in a bar. They were actually bringing a facilitation of community to bear. Now, there’s always generalists and specialists. My understanding is that specialists are not bad. Their job is not to be focused on themselves, but to facilitate the generalist into touching the transcendent realities of what they’re focusing on. Now, we still do that right now at a football game in our Americanism religion that we have. We’ve got our liturgies that we do and such, and we bring in a musician to sing the national anthem. I think they do that in most every country in their own cultural things.

Roger

Even a more basic example is how do you wish someone a happy birthday without singing Happy Birthday? I mean, that’s the whole experience.

Byron

That’s right. And without something metaphorical, which people say that there’s nothing beyond what we can observe. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. You can’t walk down the street and feel happy. Show me happiness, you know? Come on.

Roger

I can draw a smiley face for you.

Byron

There you go. And that might bring a smile to someone else if it’s your kiddo who’s four years old, and that deepens your bond together. Look, that’s why I often quote C.S. Lewis. Not many people know Barfield, but Barfield was even more, who was a colleague of C. S. Lewis. Everybody is happy about C. S. Lewis’s cognitive ability and his rational intellect, but even he says that without imagination, we don’t know…we don’t understand what we think we know.

And think about this. This is not just a religious and esoteric deal. To get a person to outer space and get them back again in an ordered universe, you have to imagine into those realities. They’re not non-realities, they’re real realities. Math is beautiful if you understand it, and it’s marvel-filled when we send up SpaceX or something else like that. So all that to say, if we do not have artistically inclined people here, we are going to, number one, be absolutely ethnocentric. I don’t care who is going to whom. And it’s not just an American thing or Western European thing. I’ve run into all over Asia, I’ve run into one culture group saying, my way is Yahweh (or your way is Yahweh) and that is not correct. Yahweh’s way is Yahweh. And he manifests himself differently. We need artistically gifted people to go and be a catalyst to the nationals, to the leadership there.

And we are often what I call the imaginable and emotional intellect specialists. Now, we can’t leave rational intellect, but we’ve got to have more than that to make sense, because we are not building a philosophy, we’re building a community. And there again, whether we’re Presbyterian or Pentecostal, we are relying on the supernatural work of God to move through our frail and dull selves and manifest himself, strike other people’s hearts and begin to build that human community, which is a mysterious but marvelous interaction, one with another.

Roger

I think that’s a great place to end. This ethnocentricity…we don’t want that. We want to see God reflected in these different communities. Thank you so much for your time.

Byron

You’re welcome. And I just want to say one more thing, Roger. I’m so happy for you and Abi and the way that you’re giving such phenomenal leadership, servant leadership, in how artistic specialists are absolutely central to church planting. I talk about you around the world.

Roger

Oh my…

Byron

Thank you so much.

Roger

Yes. Thank you, Byron.

Byron

You’re welcome.

Roger

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast. Don’t forget to check out my website, rogerwlowther.com, for a transcription of this podcast and various links. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time!”

The post 37. Imaginative Expression Specialists — A Conversation with Byron Spradlin appeared first on Roger W. Lowther.

36. Living in Full View of the God of Grace

It’s been a while since our last podcast, a lot longer than I thought it would be! Our family was in the US for furlough, and then it was one thing after another. My son Aidan was in a terrible bike accident and had to be hospitalized for a month. And then had to drop out of college for a semester as he continued to meet with doctors and heal. I want to thank all of you who have been following him on the CaringBridge website. Fortunately, he’s doing so much better now. In fact, he was even named athlete of the week for a win on the crew team, but it’s been a really hard road.

Then my mother was dying from ovarian cancer and passed away a number of months later. Then I had trouble getting back to Japan and was separated from my family for a while. And then we finally made it back and found the various ways the pandemic has been wreaking havoc in Japan. It’s taken everything we had to put out the fires and keep going.

I can’t tell you how hard it’s been for missionaries around the world. For example, there was one woman who traveled to another country to participate in a conference, then her host country shut down due to a second wave of COVID. She couldn’t get back and was stuck, for over a year (!), apart from her husband.

Many missionary families struggled in limbo, stuck in the US, as they waited for borders to open back up. This was especially hard on missionary kids. When you’re outside the school too long, without opportunity to hear the host language, you really fall far behind. Your world becomes an English-speaking world.

So, COVID has disrupted marriages. It’s disrupted kids. It’s disrupted families. And parents were tearing their hair out with kids home in very small spaces, usually much smaller than the size of your average American home. One of our Japanese staff was actually sued by the man downstairs over noise complaints. And the judge eventually threw the case out, but it was still really stressful during a time when a lot of other stressful things were going on.

And all this stress has caused so much friction in relationships. Missionary teams are falling apart because of these things. Churches are falling apart because of these things. So many pastors have stepped down because of all the division in their churches. People are unhappy, and they’re taking it out on their leaders. Depression. Discouragement. Disillusionment. Overwork. Burn out. The list goes on.

So even now, two and a half years later, Japan is still under restrictions. We’ve had to limit the number of people who can come to worship each Sunday. I got an email just yesterday from a woman who was so upset that she was turned away from the retreat because of space restrictions. There are huge plastic barriers at tables all over Tokyo, making conversation all but impossible. The waiters want you to sit diagonally across the table, so you can imagine how noisy those rooms are as everyone tries to shout to the person on the other side of the barrier. It’s a mess, just a terrible mess. But God is working, and I’ll be sharing some of those stories in the weeks ahead.

During this time, we did what we could. One of the things we did was start Community Arts Media, a publishing arm to our ministries here in Japan. Creating resources, that’s always been part of the vision, but during COVID we formalized it. Community Arts Media, to publish and distribute books, ebooks, audiobooks, sheet music, music albums, videos, and all the rest.

And I’m excited to announce that our first official book with Community Arts Media is coming out on November 1, 2022, Living in Full View of the God of Grace. It will be in English and Japanese, in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook, on Amazon and wherever else you pick up your books. I encourage you to check it out. It has really encouraged me working on this project during such a difficult time, and I know it’ll encourage you as well!

So, I’d like to kick-off our podcast series once again by sitting down with the author, Bruce Young, and his wife Susan.

[Interview begins]

Roger

Hi, Bruce and Susan, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Bruce

Well, thanks for having us. It’s a privilege.

Susan

We are looking forward to enjoying time with you, Roger.

Roger

So before we get into talking about the book and some other things, I know that you’re finding a disease right now that makes your speech slow. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Bruce

Yeah, it’s called ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease and affects my muscular and nervous system and therefore slows down my speech, making it a little bit slurred and whatnot. It’s what the Lord has given, and I’m very thankful that he’s sustained me to this whole process of writing this book that you helped me with.

Roger

Before we start recording, Susan, you were telling me about how God has a sense of humor. What did you mean by that?

Susan

Well, I married a man who was an amazing athlete, three sports in college, and tennis and golf on the side. Of all things to happen to him, to not be able to have that physical ability anymore, struggling with walking and whatnot. When we looked at what the Lord had given us, we had to make a decision about how we were going to move forward. And we decided that every day is a gift from God and that God is a good God. He can only do good things. And so this was going to be for our good. We were going to see it that way. And that’s been really helpful to know that God is with us in this and he has a purpose in it, and it’s enabled us to move forth with joy.

Roger

Well, let’s talk about the book now, Living in Full View of the God of Grace. When I first heard about this project, I was really excited about it. I’m holding a copy in my hand right now, and what you can see on the cover is Mt. Fuji peeking out with a golden glow on it. But then there’s these trees, a line of dark trees that are blocking our view of the mountain. And in the book, you give us this imagery that what if that mountain is the God of grace? What are the trees in our life that block us from being able to see this God and to see his grace? And the more I thought about the message, the more I craved it in my own life as well. Everyone needs grace. Can you tell us a little bit about why you found the message of this book important enough to write about?

Bruce

Yeah, it was based on a real experience I had driving to a meeting at the foot of Mt. Fuji, and I was really enjoying the view. It was beautiful. But then that row of trees came and I thought, what is it in our lives, especially in Japan for Japanese Christians, that blocks that view of the God of grace. And as I thought about that, I realized that there are a number of things unique to Japanese culture, especially the importance of performance and looking good and evaluating your worth, your contribution to the group that you belong to, your family, your company. And that is elevated to such a high level in Japanese culture. It seeps into the church as well, how you look, how you’re performing, whether you’re doing the right things as a Christian. And so it quickly becomes a performance oriented view of yourself and God. All those things just help me formulate in my mind the importance of trying to help Japanese Christians to see. And sometimes it’s helpful from an outsider’s perspective to see what the struggles are in that particular culture. And so, having grown up there as a kid and then worked there as a missionary for 30 years, I felt that was God’s calling to me. I’m not an author or writer, but I thought, I need to do this.

Roger

What do you think are some of the challenges that missionaries face? What are the trees that block our view of the God of grace?

Bruce

Missionaries live under a similar pressure, I think, like performing well, being successful in your ministry, comparing yourself to what others are doing, giftedness, language, evangelism. All this puts missionaries under the pressure of performing in different ways than the Japanese Christians. But the result is the same. We take our eyes off the God of grace and try to find their worth in value and comfort in what we’re doing, rather than who we are in Christ.

Roger

We’re now two years into COVID. When I was putting together and editing the book, I was going through a really difficult time. My son was in a terrible accident, and so we were trying to recover from that as a family. My mom was struggling with cancer, and the doctor told her this was probably her last spring. And on and on. There were so many things, and I desperately needed to meditate on grace, to be under the waterfall, the spring of grace. To be able to go through this page by page was such a blessing to me. And I was more sure than ever that people needed this message. That this book could really encourage them.

Bruce

Well, it’s in English as well as Japanese. And the reason being, in addition to that, we need to see how the gospel applies to every culture. And every culture is different. But the answer is always the same, that our true identity is not in what we do, but who we are in Christ.

Roger

I’ve heard it said a lot that what we need to do is not think less of ourselves but to look at ourselves less. We need to be looking at God. And just the beauty alone! Again, the imagery of this book is that God is like a beautiful snow-capped Mt. Fuji against the clear blue sky. The mountain is always there. We just need to look at it and stop looking at the trees or the ground or the dirt. Remember that he is there and he’s faithful and he’s waiting for us.

Susan

Our circumstances can be very, very difficult, but if we keep our focus on God, it can totally change the way we see our circumstances. To see God clearly is to love him more. When you are contemplating him, who he is, what he’s done for us, specifically the love he’s extended to us—the forgiveness, the kindness, the faithfulness—and to know that we’re safe because of all that Jesus has done for us, then it’s easier. Much easier. To be secure and to rest and to focus on how we can extend that same knowledge and understanding to others so that they can serve God and serve those around them. It’s such a blessing to be freed up from looking at ourselves.

Roger

Is there anything else about the message of the book that you want to make sure that people listening here know about?

Bruce

I’d love to help people understand that the gospel is not one solution, but the only solution. By that I mean, for example, how do you get rid of a judgmental, critical heart? If your criteria is to build your self esteem on your performance and you’re doing well, you can’t help but look down at others. On the other hand, if you’re not doing well, what’s going to pick you up? If you’re looking to performance in the gospel, we realize that it’s not because we’re performing right, but because Christ has done it for us, and our identity is tied in him. That brings humility and compassion together, and that’s the only way we can get both humility and a compassionate heart toward others, rather than being judgmental. This is an example that applies so well to Japanese culture, where there is a lot of that one up on the other person, or the person who doesn’t do well is a failure, often commits suicide, or has a dark cloud over them all the time. The gospel gets rid of both of those things.

Roger

Thank you. Before we end this podcast, I wanted to talk a little bit about arts in ministry. Both of you have said some really kind things to me and my team over the years about why the arts can play a role in church planting. There’s this image that the best missionaries are the pastors or the ones who are leading the Bible studies.

I came in as a new missionary, trying different things with music and arts and painting, and both of you gave me permission to make mistakes, gave me that grace that you were teaching when I went through the training for Mission to the World, and said that God was going to use this in Japan.

What would you tell artists who are considering being missionaries or who are already missionaries now listening to this?

Susan

Well, human beings are not one-dimensional. When you read Scripture, you see that God loves beauty. When you see all the time he spent giving directions to people, how to build the temple, when you read the poetry in the Psalms, the songs of praise from different people in the Bible like Miriam or Mary, you realize these things all speak to us into different aspects of who we are as human beings. And music is part of that. Visual art is part of that. The more ways that you can find to communicate the beauty of the gospel, the more beautiful it becomes. You’re just filling it out visually, audibly, verbally. It just fills it out. You see more of who God is and the beauty of who God is and his creativity. And he’s given people the gifts to be able to do that. I wouldn’t be one of those, but I certainly enjoy the arts and so appreciate my brothers and sisters who have those gifts to be able to bring the fullness of who God is, the largeness, the wideness of who God is to the church and those who are seeking. Those are great hooks to bring people in.

Bruce

And maybe I’m prejudiced, but there’s probably not a country in the world with a higher level of artistic value than in Japan. It can be food, the way you present it, the music, the gardens, the photography. It’s amazing how gifted Japanese people are. And to as a Christian, “Well, that’s a secular thing. That’s not something that God is involved in,” is a huge mistake. They need to know that the Creator God, who is creative beyond measure, has bestowed to us that creativity, and that when we express it, we express our image of God in us. And to have that understanding frees up Japanese Christians to use what they have.

I’ve seen so much talent and giftedness in these areas, but for Japanese Christians to say, “Well, that’s not something that is part of my Christian life” is a big loss. And so I’m so glad there’s a team like yours who are devoted to help people grow in this understanding and demonstrate it and use it not just within the church, but even as outreach to people saying, “Look, we can do these things and enjoy these things because we have a creative Creator who takes delight in it.”

Roger

It’s certainly a fun experiment, to have a team of artists who are trying to share these things and resource the church playing movement. Susan, you were talking about seeing God clearly and how that comes across in so many different ways. As in the message of the book, the arts can help blow those clouds away from the mountains so we can see the mountain and cut down those trees that are blocking the view.

Susan

Yeah, my son is an arborist. We can do beautiful things with those trees, too. I just think we’re so limited, and we just need to be freed up to enjoy every single aspect of who God is and how he’s made us. Each one is necessary to express just a bit of who he is and his beauty.

Bruce

I think one of the things I look forward to having is to explore creativity without any fear of shame or judgment or self-consciousness and just be able to do it. For me, for example, it’s playing the piano. I’m not very good, and I’m embarrassed to do it in front of others. But to have that lifted and taken away will be a totally new dimension.

Roger

Well, I thought it would be fun to end with playing a little clip from a video of an interview that was done a few years ago. Have a listen and then we’ll comment on it.

[Video transcript]

Jonas

So talk about the relationship between the church and the arts and what that is like in Japan.

Bruce

Well, I think you’re really sitting on a minefield. Gold mine.

Susan

Those are totally different things, Bruce! Gold field. Mine field. Gold mine. When English is your second language, sometimes you get your metaphors mixed up a little bit.

Bruce

I think you’re sitting on gold, because there’s probably no country in the world that’s as artistic as Japan. This is a legitimate means of communicating the gospel on a much deeper level than just opening up a Bible and saying, this is who God is or whatever.

Using art as a form of expression, that’s legitimate. Using art galleries and churches to say this is an expression of God’s creativity in us. We’re made in his image. He’s made us this way. And it’s legitimate to express ourselves that way. I think God’s really going to use that in Japan. It’s not a gimmick. It’s part of who we are as people, as human beings created in his image. So tap into it. Use it in whatever ways you can. And I’m thankful for all of you.

Susan

I think it’s so exciting. Some of us can only cook or teach English. This is so much more fun!

Bruce

Everyone wants to know English, and we’ve used that a lot over the years. But now we’re taking it to a different level, I think.

[Video finished]

Roger

What do you think?

Bruce

Well, I still feel that you all are on a gold mine.

Roger

Gold mine. That’s a good analogy. I like that.

Bruce

Take advantage and enjoy what’s there in Japan in the area of arts. There’s huge potential there.

Roger

The riches, the treasure, what God has put there.

Susan

And mining is hard work. It’s not easy to mine gold, right? But what you get at the end is this beautiful, brilliant reflection of who God is. So keep mining.

Roger

We will. We’ll keep it up.

Well, thank you so much for your encouragement, and I’ll try to pass that on to others as well just as you have through this podcast. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.

Bruce

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

Susan

Always.

Roger

Living in Full View of the God of Grace is available everywhere from November 1, 2022. So I encourage you to pick up a copy and check it out for yourself.

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time!”

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35. I’m So Hungry!

This is the Art, Life, Faith Podcast, and I’m your host Roger Lowther.

Today, I’d like to share a passage with you from Ecclesiastes 11:1–2:

“Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, or even to eight, for you know not what disaster may happen on earth.”

These past few weeks we’ve been talking about the 3/11 disaster here in Japan. Boy is this verse appropriate for that time. You never know what disaster is going to happen on the earth.

More recently, though, the corona virus is another disaster that has struck. Usually, most of my creative energy goes into making music, but this year I haven’t been able to do that. People haven’t been allowed to gather, and the pipe organ just doesn’t work very well over Zoom. So I had to turn my creative energies elsewhere, and so I’ve turned them to writing and to this podcast.

The reason is in verse 1: “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days.” What the writer is telling us is that you don’t know how God is going to use your efforts. So put your bread, the things that you make, in many places and God will bless that. In my case, before the pandemic, the main ways that we were sharing these stories is our artist gatherings, community groups, testimonies, conferences, etc., basically all in Japanese. But now, there was an opportunity to cast our bread upon the waters by adding books and this podcast to be able to tell more people what God is doing here. And so I hope it’s been an encouragement to you.

Since we’re talking about bread, I’m excited to announce that my next book, written during the pandemic, will be released this fall. It’s called A Taste of Grace and explores the diverse, creative, and beautiful foods of Japan that reveal Christ and his loving work in this world. My hope is that through this book more and more people will see the gospel through the food that they eat every day.

God’s grace is everywhere, and I want to find more ways to show people that in any media I can. Today’s podcast is an excerpt from that book, a short story from my time on the Pacific Crest Trail.

It’s especially timely because my son Aidan, my son Eastin, and my brother-in-law and I will be hiking a bit of the Appalachian Trail this summer to celebrate my son Aidan’s graduation from high school and transition to college.

***

“I’m sooo hungry!” I said, “I want to eat something!”

“No,” my wife said. “We have to keep going. If we eat now, there won’t be enough for later.”

We were in one of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet, a remote part of the High Sierras in California, and all I could think about was food. This was hunger like I’d never known it before. We still had over 100 miles to the next road, and another 20 miles beyond that until we’d have access to any food at all.

A few steps later, I asked, “What do you want to eat when we get there?”

“Stop talking about food!” she pleaded. “You’re not making this any easier.”

I ignored her. “Me? I’m going to have . . . pizza. A huge sausage pizza. Three huge sausage pizzas!”

We had already hiked 18 miles that day and had at least another 10 miles before we could stop. Twenty-eight miles, challenging anywhere but especially difficult here. Mountain passes were so high we felt the effects of altitude sickness, and we needed to keep ice axes at the ready to prevent from sliding over cliffs of ice and snow. Later in the day, our feet postholed through with every single step, making the going way too slow. Down in the valleys, the rivers raged with snowmelt and every single one needed to be forded. And it was the danger, more than the cold, that made our bodies shake so violently. Mosquitos swarmed and distracted us with their constant buzzing. This was our life day after day—climbing passes, plummeting into valleys, and fording rivers.

This was the Pacific Crest Trail, a route that runs from Mexico to Canada over the mountains of California, Oregon, and Washington. Of our planned six-month journey, we’d already covered two. And we didn’t carry an abundance of food, because it was too heavy. The weight of it dug into our shoulders and backs, but there was never a moment I did not feel the presence of food, or maybe I should say, the lack there of. Never before have I so keenly felt my dependence on it. The hunger made us feel alone and isolated, like nobody cared.

I thought of the Israelites in the wilderness. Our trip was only 6 months. Theirs was 40 years! In the beginning, they cried out for food and God responded. He gave them mana, and he gave them something more. He gave them a promise. He gave them the Bread of the Presence (Exodus 25:30).

Every Sabbath, Israelites placed this Bread of the Presence in the tabernacle by the golden lampstand, representing the light of God’s presence. It was also near the Ark of the Covenant, another sign of God’s presence, which carried some mana. As the Israelites walked through the wilderness wrestling with anxiety and hunger, they realized their dependence on God but also the presence of God.

Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise to provide for us and to be with us. Jesus is the Bread of Life, eaten to be in communion with God.

“Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” (John 6:56)

We abide in Jesus. Jesus abides in us. Through eating, we experience the presence of God, a presence more certain than the food we carried in our backpacks. He is never far from us. His presence is always with us.

Hiking, I discovered anew the presence of God and my heart was full. But my stomach was still empty . . .

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34. Hope Will Not End In Despair

This is the Art, Life, Faith Podcast, and I’m your host Roger Lowther.

Today I’d like to introduce you to Daisuke Yokoyama, an amazing Christian singer songwriter here in Japan. I had the privilege of meeting him in the relief movement shortly after that terrible earthquake of 2011.

We’re listening to his song “希望は絶望に終わらない” (“Hope Will Not End In Despair”), part of his response to the terrible darkness of that time.

I remember one concert we played together in a high school gymnasium, not far from the broken nuclear power plants in Fukushima. When he finished singing, he walked around the room to talk with people. They were stuck in their designated areas surrounded with cardboard walls. He met with them, gave them one of his CDs, and, if appropriate, prayed for them as well. Daisuke is a master at making people feel loved. People called him DK, because they felt so close to him.

Later, we played together in an outdoor festival much further north in the city of Ishinomaki. I played my digital pipe organ along with a number of musicians I brought from Tokyo, but the “star” of that day was Daisuke.

I’ve watched his career grow these past ten years and was so honored to have him close out our Aroma of Beauty Conference this past March. Since most of you couldn’t be there, I asked Daisuke if he wouldn’t be willing to share his story on this podcast.

[Interview with Daisuke Yokoyama]

Daisuke Yokoyama’s Website
Daisuke Yokoyama’s album which contains “Hope Will Not End In Despair”

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Just Google It? Missionaries in an Internet Age

 Image by Esther Abraham

When I need to know something, the internet is ready to answer all my questions.

What is a good recipe for bread?When does the store close?Where can I get a COVID–19 PCR test?

If I ask someone a question, they will often say “just Google it.”

If everything is so readily available on the internet, if everything anyone would ever want to know about Christ and the church is online, do we still need missionaries?

Videos, blogs, and podcasts abound. You no longer need to step through the doors of a church to hear a sermon. Training and education, even for seminarians, has been almost 100% online for over a year now.

So, I ask again. Is there still a need for global missionaries? Perhaps missionaries are like technical support for God and the church. When people need help, missionaries can step in with live assistance from anywhere in the world using online resources.

Perhaps missionaries are like technical support for God and the church?

A growing trend in the American church toward supporting nationals over missionaries seems to point in that direction. “Locals do it better.” Why? Because they provide “technical support” in their native languages and in cultural-appropriate ways. And just as important, they can do it cheaper. In an internet age, perhaps missionaries no longer need to be physically present to assist church planting in countries around the world.

Back to the question. Why not “just Google it”? Well, when I ask someone for advice, I am not primarily seeking information. I am asking for a relationship. I want interaction with the one offering the advice, and I believe I’m not “lazy” to want and seek that relationship. All human beings are relationship–based, not information–based.

This, of course, goes for the church as well. The church is not something to be peddled and supported. People are the church, as weak and thoroughly broken as they are. If missions is about building relationships, then there is no other way to go about it but to go and meet with people.

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations.” (Matthew 28:19)

Despite all the obvious weaknesses and faults of the church, God works through it to bring his gospel to the nations. Knowledge of God and knowledge of the church is not enough. Interaction is necessary. Community is necessary. Love is necessary.

Just Google It?

If I want information, the internet is helpful. But nothing can replace live person to person interaction. During the spread of the coronavirus, this has become abundantly clear. When it comes to global missions and planting churches, online resources are just a tool for building relationships.

God sent his son to know us and build a relationship with us. If God wanted us to “just Google it,” he would have built a website.

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Just Google It? Role of Missionaries in an Internet Age

When I want to know something, the internet is ready and waiting at my fingertips to give me answers.

What is a good recipe for bread?

What time does that store close?

Where can I get a COVID-19 PCR test?

During this “Age of Corona,” I found YouTube to be especially helpful to learn the technical skills surrounding audio and video production. If I was to email someone for advice, their answer often is “Just Google it.”

What is the role of missionaries in an internet age?

Is the role to simply help people find a googol of data online with everything they have ever wanted to know about Christianity? The world already has unlimited access to the gospel online. Videos, blogs, and podcasts abound. You no longer need to step through the doors of a church to hear the sermon. Even training and education for seminarians have been almost 100% online for the past year.

So, I ask again. Is there still a need for global missionaries? Do missionaries offer expensive technical support to help people with an organization called the “church”? When people need help, missionaries can step in with live assistance to point people to resources online.

Do missionaries offer expensive technical support to help people with an organization called the “church”?

The growing trend in the American church toward supporting nationals over missionaries seems to point in that direction. The “locals do it better.” They can provide “technical support” in their native language and in cultural-appropriate ways. Most importantly, they can do it a lot cheaper. In an internet age, perhaps we no longer need to be physically present to assist church planting in countries around the world.

Personally, I find the answer, “Just Google it” rude. It would be better to just say, “I don’t know,” or “I don’t have time to answer that right now.”

When I ask someone for advice, I am not primarily seeking information. I am asking for a relationship. I want interaction with the one offering the advice. All human beings are relationship–based, not information–based.

This, of course, goes for the church as well. The church is not a product to be peddled and supported. People are the church, the thoroughly broken product God offers to the world. If missionaries are simply technical support, then they are doing a terrible job! It would be best to seek elsewhere for advice and input, and a lot cheaper too. If missionaries are about building relationships, well, then, there is no other way to do it but to go and meet with people.

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations.” (Matthew 28:19)

With all the obvious weaknesses and faults of the church, God works through it to bring his gospel to the nations. Knowledge of God and knowledge of the church is not enough. Interaction is necessary. Community is necessary. Love is necessary.

Just Google it?

For some things, the internet is helpful. For others, nothing can replace person to person interaction. When it comes to global missions and church planting, online resources are just a tool for building relationships.

God sent his son to know us and build relationships with us. If God wanted us to “Just Google it,” he would have built a website.

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33. Global Mission Chapel

Over the past couple of podcasts, I’ve been sharing stories from our March Aroma of Beauty Conference. Today, I would like to share about the master of ceremonies for the conference, Akira Mori, pastor of Global Mission Chapel.

He started the conference by saying, “As a man of Tohoku, I thank all of you!” Tohoku is the northeast region of Japan, and Iwaki where he pastors is the southern-most tip of Tohoku. He thanked all the volunteers in the audience, and those watching online, for their help over the years. And then he shared his story.

June 2010, less than a month before the earthquake, the building next to their church caught fire, burned down, and took their church along with it. This was of course hard on everyone, but Mori-sensei saw it as an opportunity. He found a big old pachinko parlor for sale. Pachinko is like gambling with slot machines. This pachinko parlor was available at a fraction of the cost of rebuilding their building, and it was much bigger. However, there were a number of people in the church who thought they should just rebuild as before, on the same plot of land and with the same size building. Mori-sensei felt so strongly that God was calling them to move to this new location that he pushed for that, but it caused some division in the church. Seven members left over this.

So here they were in this position of weakness. They had an unfinished building. Their numbers were small. They were still rebuilding trust in their congregation, and they were still getting to know their neighbors. And then the earthquake struck in March 2011, and their world literally fell apart.

Now, most cities along the coast lost 7–8% of their population from the tsunami, but it was even worse in Iwaki. Along their 70 km of coastline, they lost a staggering 15% of their population to the wave. It breaks your heart to hear these numbers.

They felt abandoned and forgotten by everybody, especially the news media who were focused on areas further north.

But then, volunteers began to pour in. Day after day more people arrived bringing food, water, and supplies … and music!

Mori-sensei shared about a 15-person team that came from a church in Taiwan. The pastor had formerly been a singer, so he sang and played the guitar in evacuation shelters. He sang a traditional ballad, a form called the enka, at many shelters along the coast. And he sang a song that particularly got people engaged called Springtime in the North. First he sang it in Chinese, his native language, and then in Japanese.

I had not heard of this song so I looked up the lyrics online. The words speak of longing for a hometown in the north, where the seasons are felt so strongly through the flowers, rivers, and snow. It mourns the separation from loved ones—family and friends—which took on a whole new level of meaning after the earthquake.

Mori-sensei realized the power of song to heal the hearts of people. That the arts are not just a hobby, but especially in disaster and destruction, music and art can bring comfort, encouragement, and courage. Everyone in the evacuation centers started to sing along with this pastor. And then, Mori-sensei himself memorized the lyrics to this song so that he could sing along as well and be encouraged by them.

“The arts are not just a hobby, but especially in disaster and destruction, music and art can bring comfort, encouragement, and courage.”

When I first visited Iwaki to give concerts in shelters, the fear of radiation from the nuclear power plants was really strong. One of the places I played was a high school gymnasium less than 25 miles from the broken nuclear power plants. The whole time I was wondering, “Is it even safe to be here?”

When they served us a soup lunch, I found out they were using tap water for the broth because that was all that they had. I have to admit that I was more than a little afraid to eat it. They lived there. They had no choice. And there was no way I could possibly refuse.

Every evening, we gathered back at the church building for prayer, to share stories from that day, and to sing worship songs together. I was SO tired at the end of each day, from longs days of driving, giving 2–3 concerts a day, and talking to people all day long. I’m an introvert, so that really takes a lot out of me. Then there was the added stress of being in the midst of all that destruction and the fear of the radiation. But we sang together long into the night.

It’s really hard to describe what it felt like at that time. It felt like we were in the only lit room in a raging storm of darkness. It felt like we were on a rowboat in a terrible ocean of devastation, brokenness, and pain. We were in a place where joy was still possible, and yet the whole time we remembered the radiation shooting through our bodies. It just made the community all that more stronger.

At night, every inch of floor space was completely covered with people sleeping. Trying to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night was very difficult. One night, I was put at the base of a huge bookcase, and I had to mentally prepare myself to move quickly if an aftershock struck because I would be seriously injured by the falling books and bookcase.

From March to December, Global Mission Chapel received a total of 15,000 volunteers from 40 different countries. Their church building continued to be a base of operations for relief activities throughout that area for a long time to come. Relationships with their neighbors grew strong and deep.

God had been so clearly preparing this church for this time. They never would have had the ability to accept so many volunteers or help so many people if their church building had not burned down and if they had not found that old pachinko parlor. It’s quite a story!

Anyway, it was wonderful to have Mori-sensei there to lead us through the conference, a man who knew so intimately the devastation and pain of the earthquake, but also the power of God to bring hope and healing through the arts.

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