Why do we even have an Arts Ministry?

Why do we have an Art's Ministry? We are told that Art is a part of the Hope Chapel DNA, but is that all? Simply because we are told it is so? That in no way helps us to understand where that DNA originated, or why art is important at Hope Chapel and the Body of Christ.  


We have an Arts Ministry because Art is redeeming. Art goes beyond finding some singular or isolated experience of beauty, only to reproduce that beauty for the sake of brightening our walls. Art is about more than appeasing some consumerist urge, or an exercise in merely making some obscure point.


Through Art we do no less than  escape a slavery to what is bounded and bordered by Death. Through Art everything we experience isolatedly in our fallenness and brokenness is exchanged for a righteousness and a beauty universally shared by all in Christ. Through Art all the hurt and loss in our earthly lives is recast in the light of a beauty and a worth which can never be stripped away. Christ has redeemed us from Death, and Art then shows us the beauty and worth and fullness to which He has redeemed us. Christ has given us life, and Life in the fullest, and so through Art do we even come close to celebrating  that full measure of Life.


I would respond to the question with another question: if we believe and value our redemption, if we value the redemptive work of Christ in ours and others lives, and if we hold circumspectly to both the call of the Great Commission and to the Fourth Westminster Catechism (to delight ourselves fully in God, essentially), then I ask: how can we not have an Arts Ministry? How can we have any spiritual discussion or dialectic of any kind and not have Art anchoring our souls, mooring our minds and hearts? If Hope Chapel is a place of healing for the wounded, how can Hope Chapel provide healing without the salve and balm of Art?

                                                                                                                          -- Kevin Daniel