Art In Worship - Part One

Art In Worship – Part One

This is part one of a series of articles about the powerful subject of Art, and specifically, Art in worship. This oil painting is by Lori Macmath and is available at http://www.creationswap.com.   

When we gather for worship, when we engage with the Word of God, with the person and presence of God we soon run out of ways to describe his complete holiness, power, love, wrath, comfort – only a few words, that like all the others, never attain their goal of describing a complete and fully accurate picture of the God we seek to worship. If we begin to think that we the created can ever fully describe our Creator then we need to wrestle with issues of pride before we address issues of art.

Art and artistic expression, the fluid and ambiguous descriptors of the stories, objects, images and sounds that we create. Though we are made in the likeness of The Creator God, we do not create Ex nihilo but rather we create out of our response to our life with and without God. This freedom to create is a depth of boundless opportunity to honor God or to honor ourselves. In this freedom to create art, we travel in areas that at first may seem to be filled with great risk and fear, but as we investigate deeper we find that art can contain and convey both intellect and emotion in powerful and transforming ways. However, with this great freedom, as in many areas of freedom and human will, artistic expression has been lowered to levels of idolatry, kidnapped and abused, often taking what was meant for beauty and purity and fully distorting it into expressions that are offensive and vulgar. We must regain artistic expression in worship to help us describe and adore things of God that are beyond the range of our language and intellect alone. How can the words and language that we create every fully describe the One who created us? There is much that we can know about God and much more that we can only describe with metaphor and artistic expression. We need art to do this.