More Churches Incorporating Arts Into Worship

When Bill Dyrness, a professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, reflects on his worship experience, his mind takes him back half a century to his childhood in Wheaton, Ill.

There, in a home where the expression “Jesus Never Fails” was prominently displayed on the wall, he sang hymns and knelt to pray during family devotionals.

The beauty of the imagery from those days was an important “aesthetic experience,” said the Rev. Dyrness, an ordained Presbyterian minister and an expert on visual arts in worship.

Similarly, he believes, most people have emotional memories that are connected with an “aesthetic dimension.”

It could be about a song, a painting, an often-told story or a religious symbol such as a crucifix that a family brought from the old country. Sometimes the memory can trigger the return to a church after years of being away.

That, in part, is why the theologian believes it’s important for 21st century churches to incorporate the arts into worship, adding visual and emotional impact for congregants who have grown up with television, films and, more recently, the Internet.

“Give them something beautiful to hear and look at that correlates with what they’re hearing when Scripture is read,” said Dyrness, the author of “Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards,” a new book published by Baker Press.

He is organizing a Feb. 4 seminar at Fuller that will bring together researchers on how visual arts are used in Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox congregations.

In fact, a reformation of sorts has been taking place in Protestant denominations which, unlike Catholic and Orthodox churches, historically have shunned images and other art forms lest they detract from the preaching of God’s word. Icons, for example are central to the worship experience in the Orthodox church and are considered “windows to heaven,” Dyrness said.

Many Protestant churches are adding dance, drama, music, film clips, banners and artwork. Some worship services are eclectic, blending the traditional, modern and the contemplative.

At Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena during one recent Christmas, two artists painted on giant canvases as the Rev. Gordon Kirk, the senior pastor, preached. Another time, a soloist sang in the middle of his sermon.

St. Luke’s of the Mountains Episcopal Church in La Crescenta, is another that uses video, graphics and music -- both classical and contemporary.

“A lot of it has to do with a lot of gifted people in our congregation,” said the Rev. Ronald Jackson, rector at St. Luke’s. “We want to give our gifts to God in worship.”

Mosaic, a multiethnic congregation that has its main Sunday services in a nightclub in downtown Los Angeles, includes live bands, drama, dance and artists working at easels during worship. Many of its members are artists and like to perform for fellow congregants.

Sociologist Robert Wuthnow, director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, said he sensed “a kind of reformation happening in religious traditions that were skeptical of the arts.”

Many Protestant churches have added icons, artist-in-residence programs, and religious music and art, said Wuthnow, author of “All In Sync: How Music and Arts Are Revitalizing American Religion. (University of California Press, 2003).

In a national survey, he found that people with greater exposure to the arts were more interested in spiritual growth, devoted more effort to it and more regularly engaged in such spiritual activities as prayer and meditation.

“This relationship held when I controlled for other factors such as age, gender and level of education,” he said.

Wuthnow’s conclusion is that arts groups and religious organizations are “allies,” not adversaries. “Both encourage reflection and both orient people toward mystery and transcendence,” he said.

Mime is another art form increasingly used in worship and ministry.

“The art of mime has no language barrier,” said Todd Farley, a Christian mime who recently made the story of the sheep and goats from the Gospel of Matthew come alive with silent movements at a concert commemorating Martin Luther King Day at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood.

“The human body will cry, will laugh, and mime takes the body’s natural God-given tendency to communicate and stylize,” said Farley, who studied with Marcel Marceau in Paris.

Since 1989, he has been directing with his wife, Marilyn, also a mime, Mimeistry International, an arts and educational Christian ministry headquartered in Pasadena.

“Just as Jesus used the parables to teach the spiritual truths, mime, dance and drama can be part of the sermon to teach the truth of God,” Farley said.

A doctoral candidate in theology and culture at Fuller, Farley also is an artist in residence there and director of its Institute for the Dramatic Arts. He has performed in 38 countries. When Dyrness was teaching creation in his theology class, Farley and his protege, Theo Williams, performed the creation story from Genesis in mime for the class.

Experts say the arts must be well-grounded in theology to be used in church services and should not overwhelm the worship. Dyrness said that for many, the arts have become a substitute religion. But he warned that beauty should not become “an alternative worship experience. That’s the danger.”

J. Frederick Davison, executive director of the Brehm Center for Worship Theology and the Arts at Fuller and conductor of the seminary choir, said the arts “are not just window dressing on a service.”

Many today may not be able to relate to passages from the King James version of the Bible. But they might relate to them if the story is reset in a hip-hop setting, for example, he said.

“That’s what it’s all about,” Davison said. “The arts give us many ways.”