Ever feel like there’s a message that keeps hitting you over the head, getting more and more obvious?

John Cosper, a Christian playwright and filmmaker, posted a manifesto about “Christian films,” particularly talking about what needs to change. It’s a great read, and I wholeheartedly agree — and if you’ve ever heard me talking about many, many Christian scripts, you’ll have heard the same concepts as they relate to very specific pieces that I’ve worked on.

However, the broad meaning of his manifesto isn’t what struck me most today. Instead, it was the following paragraph:

Seek out the best teacher or mentor you can. Don’t go to a Christian teacher just because they’re a Christian. Go somewhere that you can learn from a true artist, one who is a master of the craft in their own right. In other words don’t seek to be the best Christian writer/actor/director you can be. Seek to be the best writer/actor/director you can be.

A few hours later, a very different entry popped up on my RSS reader. Cole Matson, a theatre artist and C.S. Lewis scholar, is writing a series of posts on his transition from the Protestant church to the Catholic church, and it’s a fascinating and deeply personal story. Today, part of his entry talked about the decision to go to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, rather than Wheaton College, for his undergrad:

I had loved Wheaton, and had been in awe of its existence as an intentional Christian community of scholars “for Christ and His Kingdom,” as Wheaton’s motto goes. However, I also wanted to study to become a professional actor, and Wheaton did not have a theatre major, much less a professional training program. As a matter of fact, there did not seem to exist a Christian college of Wheaton’s faithfulness and academic caliber that also provided professional arts training. (This gap is one I hope the C.S. Lewis Foundation’s C.S. Lewis College can fill.) The other school to which I had been accepted was NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, which has one of the top undergraduate theatre programs in the country. I asked my dad, who I knew was pleased that I had fallen in love with his alma mater, for his advice. He said:

“What do you want to do?”

“Become an actor.”

“Then go where they do that best. In this case, that’s not Wheaton.”

Twice, in very different contexts, the concept of choosing a school or other training for its quality rather than for its theology.

Two things strike me as I think about that.

First, this defines a huge part of the difference between my choices for undergrad and graduate school. When I was 18 and graduating from high school, I wanted to study theatre. I wasn’t sure yet what I wanted to do with it, but I knew that I wanted to do something with it. In choosing a school, though, I limited myself to Christian colleges. I don’t think that there was any particular reason for that, except that I assumed that I’d go into ministry; ergo, I needed to be trained in a ministry setting.

I don’t regret my time at Rocky (which actually does have a professional acting training program — it’s now a 2-year conservatory, but when I was there, it was integrated into a 4-year BAR), and I’m grateful that my core classes included Bible, theology, and spiritual formation, but I certainly limited myself when choosing a school, and in some ways, that was likely unnecessary, and I’ve come to realize that I made that decision based on very limited information and options at the time. I think that professional training from a Christian perspective is an important option to have, but I would never counsel a prospective student to take sub-par training, simply because the theology matches up.

I chose a grad school from the opposite side: I wanted the highest-quality professional training that I could get, so that I would be best equipped to do my job. CalArts is, in some ways, one of the least faith-friendly places that I could have chosen (but in other ways, as I’ve talked about before, it’s actually one of the best places for me to develop my own brand of theatre), but it’s the right place for me.

Neither school is perfect. I’ve often said that no school lives up to the brochure, and there have been expectations that haven’t been met in both places, but there have been valuable training, connections, experiences, and relationships through both.

Second, and more important, the church needs to be a place of support for Christian artists. In some cases, the church can offer training, and there are situations where that’s definitely appropriate. In all cases, though, the church (as the Body of Christ, not only as the local church) needs to be able to foster community and support for artists.

Being an artist who is also a Christian is a tricky thing. There are a lot of little minefields to navigate, and it becomes a lot easier when there are others to discuss the tough questions with. What does it mean to be creators, acting in the image of the Creator? How do we explore the dark places in our art without getting bogged down in them? What does it look like to draw a line for objectionable content? How do we effectively champion work that we disagree with — without condoning the content? What is the theology of art and creativity?

These aren’t “how-to” training questions; these are soul-searching, sometimes gut-wrenching questions, and they transcend genre and discipline. These are the conversations that I’m more and more convinced that the Christian community — inside and outside the church walls — needs to be a safe place for. When we send out our artists to get the best training from the best people in the best institutions, regardless of faith, lifestyle, morals, or theology, we must be able to stand behind them and offer the other side of the equation. The spiritual development of Christian artists is equally as important as the technical and artistic development, but those two things don’t need to come from the same place. In fact, I think that it’s often more effective when they don’t.

There are people and organizations who are doing this. Arts & Entertainment Ministries, based in L.A., does this very thing. I’m sure that there are other organizations and individual churches that prioritize and nurture the spiritual health of artists, but I don’t know of nearly enough. I know my church doesn’t have anything like this; not even a care group that’s geared towards artists. There isn’t a deliberate place, even within the drama ministry at the church (let alone for professional artists who face these issues on a larger scale than most volunteers involved in lay ministry) for these conversations to take place.

The training side of things is well-covered, and that’s not a niche that is particular to the faith community. The other is, though. So? When it comes to the role that we are the only ones capable of filling, how are we doing?

Tags: art, church, Faith, film, recommendations, School, Theatre, training

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