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Embracing Our Identity As The Church In The New Sojourn Gallery

August 1, 2012 in Sojourn with 0 Comments

Michael Winters has overseen The 930 Art Center at our Midtown Campus since 2006, and is Sojourn’s Visual Arts Director. Michael is my guest blogger this week at DanielSojourn.com:

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Yesterday, the post here was about looking back at The 930 Art Center.  Today’s post is about looking forward to the new Sojourn Gallery at St. Vincent’s, which will open on Saturday, August 25 (God willing and construction continues smoothly) with a big open house, and then with first church services on Sunday, August 26.

The gallery nearing the end of construction

How are we going to choose what to show?

The new space is a new opportunity to rethink vision for our arts ministry and slightly shift the gallery’s emphasis.

We don’t ask “What will we not show?” and then make a list of do-not’s for artists – do not show nudity, do not show violence, etc.

Instead we ask, “What art is best for us to share in this time and in this place?”

I now believe that finding the best work for our context requires a full embrace of our identity as the church.  The church is something very different from any other institution or group.  The church is not a museum, business, government, social service agency or a school.  Why do we then so often adopt the methods of these other institutions?  When working with art in the church, we don’t need to borrow the rules and regulations of the fine art world.  We need to more fully understand who we are as the church and allow relationships and practices to be formed from that identity.

In Sojourn we describe our identity as the church through these aspects: Worshipers, Family, Servants, Learners, and Missionaries.

So when thinking about mixing visual art in the life of the church, is there art out there that affirms, challenges, or otherwise encourages us to embrace those identities?  If we can’t get our hands on art like that, can we make it?

I think our tentative schedule for first exhibits at The Sojourn Gallery will encourage us to embrace these identities.

Gene Schmidt walking I Corinthians 13 through the streets of Philadelphia. Photo by Alicia Hansen.

Lovetown, PA by Gene Schmidt and photography by Alicia Hansen

Over the past few years Gene Schmidt’s work has moved out of the studio and onto the streets in a series of projects he calls urban pilgrimages. Combining elements of performance, pilgrimage, and sculpture, the projects are often inspired by, or are meditations on, biblical texts in the context of an urban environment. While these projects are done in public for anyone to see and respond to as they wish, for the artist they are spiritual journeys and lengthy prayers with physical weight and dimension.

I think this project is a fascinating example of an artist embodying the missionary identity.
Who is Shelby Park?

This exhibit will use photography as an entry point into learning our new neighborhood.  Though it’s only a couple blocks from our previous location, this is a new place to explore with new people to meet.  Photography can help us sharpen our understanding of who we are by deepening our understanding of where we are.

We made this for you
This exhibit will invite artists to embody our identity as servants by giving the gift of art to designated individuals and organizations.

Picturing Genesis
As we recently studied the book of Genesis over the course of a year, Sojourn artists illustrated an image for each section of sermon text.  These illustrations were made for the purpose of coming alongside the worship life of the church.  Bringing them all together as nice, big prints in the gallery will be an act of worship too.

Juried: Art by Christians in Higher Education
This exhibit will invite Christians in colleges and universities to submit their best work.  This will hopefully reveal a survey of the kinds of artwork Christians around the country are making.  This will help us get to know one sector of the larger body of Christ family from across the country.

So, my prayer for this new venture is that our church members, artists we work with, and visitors of all kinds will be transformed by the gospel as we embrace our identity as the church and share the best artwork we can get our hands on (or make with our own hands).

You can keep up with Sojourn Visual Arts through sojournvisualarts.com and facebook.com/sojournvisualarts.

After Six Years Of The 930 Art Center — Was It Worth It?

July 31, 2012 in Louisville, Sojourn with 3 Comments

Michael Winters has overseen The 930 Art Center at our Midtown Campus since 2006, and is Sojourn’s Visual Arts Director. Michael is my guest blogger this week at DanielSojourn.com:

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Over the past six years our church has facilitated hundreds of art exhibits and concerts through The 930 Art Center, but now as we prepare to change worship spaces we’ve thrown our final 930 events, and in just a couple weeks we’re taking down the last exhibit.  The signage will come down, the Facebook page will go stagnant and I’ll be left asking what’s left to show for all the work and money and love we’ve put into this venue.

Stirring Exhibit installation view. Art by Matt Dobson and Denise Burge.

Stirring Exhibit installation view. Art by Matt Dobson and Denise Burge.

When we moved into the building at 930 Mary Street we were a church of five hundred and accustomed to renting Sunday worship space.  60,000 square feet looked like infinite possibility to us.

We had a lot of dreams and ambitions at the beginning.  Were they fulfilled?

We wanted to break down the sacred/secular divide.  We wanted to create natural connections between our church and our neighbors.  We wanted to inspire curiosity about God’s world and celebrate whatever was worth celebrating.  We wanted to serve artists at various stages in their pursuits and meet their needs.  Our mission statement described all this as “a shared space where people of various backgrounds and beliefs could come together for a shared vision of a more beautiful world.”

Sometimes, these good desires found fulfillment.

Our Neighborhood event photos

Our Neighborhood event photos

One of my favorite evenings involved a gallery exhibit called “Our Neighborhood” and a concert by Psalters, a musical tribe of punk/hippie Christians.  We fired up the grill and mixed up 20 gallons of lemonade and invited the neighborhood.  It was like a circus.  It was beautiful because people of diverse backgrounds really did come together and share a vision for a more beautiful world.

I can imagine what could have happened instead on that evening.  The church building could have been empty.  The air condition could have been humming to itself.  Moonlight could have drifted in the window, but no one would have seen it.  We could have all been at home watching sitcoms.  By God’s grace, we cultivated something better, something vibrant, a little like the way God makes things – full and complex.

Margot and the Nuclear So & So’s concert photo

Margot and the Nuclear So & So’s

Most of the time though, our successes were preceded by confusion.  People were constantly trying to figure us out.  “So, does the church have a problem with what you’re doing here?” they’d say.  “I am the church” I’d reply.

Another time, someone applied for an internship not researching enough in advance to know that The 930 was owned and operated by the church.  I told him we only used interns connected through our church and invited him to attend Sunday, thinking that was the end of the conversation.  He ended up doing a yearlong internship.  At the end he wrote “I began to see this internship opportunity as more of a spiritual renewal than work experience for school credit and I’m extremely grateful to God for pointing me here.”

Installation view of Starcross’d by Dayton Castleman

Installation view of Starcross’d by Dayton Castleman

I’d like to think that occasionally, as people tried to make sense of why a church would host something like a giant cardboard fighter jet kissing a goose, or a concert by rough-around-the-edges bands like Shellac, their curiosity turned into a little bit of awe.  One time, I remember watching a guy across the room in the glow of concert lights.  He had gone through addiction and a divorce and had gone through a dissatisfied relationship with another church.  That previous church was strict and serious and ungracious.  Now, he was new to our church.  His eyes lit up in the glory of live rock n roll, wonderfully confused at how this could be happening in a church, a church he would soon call ‘his’ church.  I doubt he’d credit that show as the reason he committed to our church community, but I’m sure it played a part.  It made a qualitative difference.  On some nights, the mixture of song and light and laughter was really beautiful.

I hope God was honored by the work here, and I hope someone whose name I don’t know keeps a treasured memory of when they first believed the possibility of a church community marked by love and beauty, creativity and joy.

Yes, it was worth it.

 

 

 

Being Single In A Church …

July 25, 2012 in Sojourn with 6 Comments

Amanda Edmondson is my Executive Assistant at Sojourn Community Church, and Midtown Campus Coordinator for our Women’s Ministry. Amanda is my guest blogger this week at DanielSojourn.com:

When I first started attending Sojourn there were a few things that drew me in. First, the teaching is from the Bible and always gospel centered. It is intentionally reaching out to those with spiritual and physical needs.   The less spiritual reason … mainly because there isn’t a “singles ministry”. I wanted to be a part of a church where it wasn’t compartmentalized. One of the most beautiful ways community is played out at large is in the diversity of age, marital status, and ethnicity.

Being single at times can be hard but being single in the church is even harder. Here’s a post I wrote for Sojourn Women over a year ago on contentment and singleness.

This past year I turned 30 and it seemed that everyone at that moment had opinions on what I should do with my life and my singleness. Many people suggested I consider going over seas and serving on the mission field, “because that’s what you do when you are a 30 year old single female”, for some women that’s apparently what they do, but not me — not because I’m not willing but because that’s not where the Lord has called me.

Others suggested I go back to school — another great suggestion but again not where the Lord has called me. Online dating comes up often; someone even took the liberty of signing me up last year –I still don’t know who did that but no thank you.  There’s nothing wrong with any of these suggestions. But dear friends whom I respect and are daily doing life with me helped me realize none of these are for me right now.

Being single in a church makes me no different than my friends who are married or who are parents. We each have the same need for a savior. Our lives do look very different in the sense of responsibilities. Just like we second-guess people who are young we do the same with people who are single. At the root being single in a church makes me no less or more qualified to serve.

When Daniel first suggested I blog on this topic I cringed. As I thought it over I realized how thankful I am to be a part of a church (community group) where I am pushed to look more like Christ than I am pushed into a marriage. Not everyone’s experience of being single in a large church is the same. To be honest in the past at other churches it looked very different for me.  It was helpful in those times and even now for me to be reminded that people won’t always love us perfectly. Only the Lord does.

I hope that in five years whether I’m single or married my desire and delight in the Lord would only be greater. That I would still long to behold Christ and live a life worthy of my calling to know God. I hope to live life in light of an eternal perspective and to find my joy, my hope, and my identity only in Christ because He is all I will ever need.

 

How Sojourn Does Women’s Ministry

July 24, 2012 in Leadership, Sojourn with 1 Comment

Amanda Edmondson is my Executive Assistant at Sojourn Community Church, and Midtown Campus Coordinator for our Women’s Ministry. Amanda is my guest blogger this week at DanielSojourn.com:

At Sojourn, we acknowledge that both men and women are created in the image of God yet created differently; for this reason we have Sojourn Women. Over the past two years I have had the honor to co-labor with Nora Allison, with the guidance of our elders, and to think how to best help and serve our women.

Doing women’s ministry is challenging.  Add in a large multisite church and well, it’s still challenging!  We desire for our women not to be separate from Sojourn at large but to be very much a part of it. We pray that our women would be about God and what he created us for—to know him and to make him known.  This must work itself out in different ways, by each of our different women.

Regardless if she loves the color pink and wears pearls or prefers neutrals and flip flops, we desire for the women at Sojourn Community Church to be strong women whose knowledge and love of God constrains them to serve in their homes, places of work, where they play, and in their community.

How We Do This…

We pray, not only for the women at Sojourn, but for the church as a whole.  We ask the Lord to show us what the needs are. We are constantly meeting with women, hearing their hearts and doing life with them. It’s the only way for us to be able to assess how we need to grow spiritually as women.

Two years ago, we realized that too many Sojourn women didn’t know how to study their bibles apart from following a prepared study guide.  Convinced that, in order to know God deeply and personally, we must be learning about him directly from him, we started teaching women, both individually and corporately, how to sit down and study the Bible for themselves.  Now we regularly offer a class called Methods, teaching women how to ask questions of the text in order to rightly understand it and apply it.  Part of being a strong woman is being able to feed yourself on God’s word.

Multisite…

We are one church with four campuses.  Each campus has different strengths and different needs. In order to best utilize our gifts and help women at each campus grow, we plan Sojourn-wide (global) events, as well as specific  campus events/training.  Our global events are for all Sojourn women regardless of which campus they attend.  These events include our Fall One-day Retreat, our Spring Week-end Retreat and Women’s School (more info on Women’s School here).

Campus specific events/training would include our Methods classes, Christmas Gift Exchange, SEED projects, and Doctrines classes. We are gifted with many women who are capable and willing to teach and lead other women, which makes planning and implementing at a multisite much easier.

Sojourn Women is for all women in all walks of life.  As we continue to grow as a church we desire for the women of Sojourn in each season of life to be about God and His fame.

In all our planning, evaluating of events and teaching, we want to keep Christ central, making much of the Lord and less of ourselves, and maintaining our unique identity as women created in the image of God.

Visit the Sojourn Women blog here

Pastoral Residency: The Good, The Bad & The Life Changing

July 19, 2012 in Leadership, Sojourn with 1 Comment

Jonah Sage is Connect Director at Sojourn Community Church, and guest blogger this week at DanielSojourn.com:

From March 2011 through May 2012, I served as the Pastoral Resident of Sojourn’s Midtown campus. Below are my thoughts on the good, the bad, and the life changing lessons I learned during that time.

The Good

The purpose of a Sojourn residency is to set aside time for specialized training in the field of pastoring and/or church planting. Training, as opposed to teaching, focuses on the man’s character and his ability to successfully and efficiently perform his duties. The pastors wanted to know how competent I was and whether or not my character corresponded to the biblical requirements of a pastor. Coming into my residency, I had a head filled with knowledge from books and seminary classes. I had been taught well but had yet to put that knowledge into action.

For most of my life, I got by without trying very hard. It took pastor Daniel about five minutes to see that in me and then another thirty seconds for him to confront my sin. He learned how to bring out the best in me and that often involved critiquing my lackluster work. My pastors helped me learn how big my plate really was, where I am gifted, and their affirmation gave me confidence in God’s call on my life.

They showed me places where my life and my beliefs were in conflict. I believed God was in control, for instance, yet lived like everything was up to me. How could I say God was in control and yet be filled with so much anxiety? How could I say Jesus’ perfect life and death in my place forever secured my worth as a son of God yet constantly fight to prove myself to others? The pastors lovingly (yet firmly) helped me get truths like these down from head and into my heart, hands, and feet.

The Bad

I was both intentionally and unintentionally pushed past my limits so I could learn how to fail. Managing my residency alongside a new marriage, full-time seminary classes, and ministry responsibilities frequently tempted me to enter the fetal position. I went for months averaging four hours of sleep.

My role was, at best, ambiguous within the organization. Outside of my direct report, no one really knew what I was doing. When word would get out that I did something well, other ministry leaders would come and ask me if I could help them on a project. Wanting to impress everyone, I always said yes.

Between my sin and Sojourn’s poor staff communication, a perfect storm of anxiety and fatigue swelled in my life. The long nights turned into long weeks. Early mornings reviewing Hebrew, off to class, a lunch meeting, a class, an afternoon meeting, a walk with my wife, a counseling session, homework, kiss my wife goodnight, a quick snack, homework, sleep, repeat. Needless to say, this pattern eventually began affecting the health of my soul.

The Life Changing

Several pastors saw what was going on. They saw the way my eyes would well up when I was asked, “So how are you doing?” During a lunch with pastor Mike Cosper I was certain I was going to be fired. I was certain I had underperformed for the last time. Instead, he confessed ways Sojourn had failed and asked for my forgiveness. He spoke into the lies I was believing, he confronted my sin, and he described a healthier way to live. He affirmed my gifts and calling. And then he gave me a week off.

I got in my car and wept. I was stunned by the humility of my pastors. I was thankful for the example they were setting for me. Most of all, I was grateful for the reality that Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection freed me from needing to prove myself. Pastor Mike reminded me that I was safe and approved as a gift of God’s grace, not as a result of working myself into the ground.

I learned more in one year as Sojourn’s pastoral resident than I did in three years as a theology student. As a result of intense testing, great successes and heart breaking failures, I have a clearer picture of pastoral ministry and a greater desire to shepherd God’s people than ever before. I love God more than ever. I desire to know and be like Jesus more than ever. My residency program changed me forever and I count it as one of the greatest gifts God has ever given me.

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