The Arts as Witness in Multifaith Contexts

Roberta R. King, William A. Dyrness, Roberta R. King, William A. Dyrness

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830857968
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

In search of holistic Christian witness, missionaries have increasingly sought to take into account all the dimensions of people's cultural and religious lives—including their songs, dances, dramatic performances, storytelling, and visual arts. Missiologists, educators, and practitioners are cultivating new approaches for integrating the arts into mission praxis and celebrating creativity within local communities. And in an increasingly globalized and divided world, peacemaking must incorporate the use of artistic expressions to create understanding among peoples of diverse faiths. As Christians in all nations encounter members of other religions, how do they witness among these neighbors while respecting their distinct traditions?Building on sessions at the 2018 Missiology Lectures at Fuller Seminary, this book explores the crucial role of the arts in helping people from different cultures and faiths get caught up in the gospel story. Scholars and practitioners from throughout the world present historical and contemporary case studies and analyses. Their subjects include the use of Christian songs during the Liberian civil war and Ebola crisis, social critiques in contemporary Chinese art, interreligious dialogue through choir music in Germany, aesthetic practices of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and how hip-hop music empowers urban young people in globalizing Mozambique.These essays foster a conversation about the work that missiologists, art critics, ethnodoxologists, and theologians can do together to help guide church leaders in promoting interfaith and intercultural relationships. While honestly identifying weaknesses in the church's practice, the contributors call all Christians to understand the power of art for expressing cultural and religious identity, opening spaces for transformative encounters, bridging divides, and resisting injustice.Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

PART I

Setting the Stage

1

Arts and Mission

A Complex Story of Cultural Encounter

James R. Krabill

DESCRIBING THE ENCOUNTER

In 1951, John Huston released his film drama, The African Queen, based on a 1935 novel of the same name by C. S. Forester. The backdrop for this Oscar-winning saga of adventure, humor, and romance is the missionary efforts of a stuffy and out-of-place British couple, Samuel and Rose Sayer, a brother and sister duo played masterfully by Robert Morley and Katharine Hepburn. The geographical setting of the story is East Africa’s Ruiki River in the then-Belgian Congo and the British protectorate of Uganda.

The stage is set already in the opening scene as the film credits come into view on a bright blue and billowy, clouded sky seen through palm branches of a tropical rain forest. The camera follows the treetops of the jungle before gradually descending upon a village cluster of thatch-roofed huts. On one of the buildings, there is a cross perched atop a steeple as a title in bolded letters appears on the screen: “German East Africa, September 1914.” Focusing in more closely from the cross and slowly through the narrow doorway of the building, one catches a glimpse of a stone-carved plaque identifying the location: First Methodist Church, Kung Du.

We hear faint sounds of music as we enter the church building and find Rev. Sayer struggling valiantly, but with little success, to lead the congregation in a rousing rendition of the eighteenth-century hymn, “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.” This faltering effort, we later learn, is not the only endeavor in Sayer’s life that has turned out badly. His very decision, in fact, to volunteer as a missionary early in life came as a result of demonstrating low-level language facility by failing his Greek and Hebrew exams.

Utterly devoted to her brother and adorned in a prim and proper, high-collared, Victorian Sunday-go-to-meetin’ dress, sister Rose works up a sweaty lather in the tropical heat as she fervently pounds and pedals a pump organ, almost as if to drown out the cacophony of atonal noises coming from the uncomprehending members of the village congregation. “Songs of praises, songs of praises, I will ever sing to thee,” she bellows forth determinedly in a scene that leaves the movie viewer emotionally stranded somewhere between pain, pity, and pure hilarity.

We never find out what might have happened in the Sayers’ unwavering effort to pass along to their East African congregants the “heart music” they had learned to love in their home country. For soon after this worship scene, German-led troops raid and destroy the missionaries’ village, capturing and hauling off the indigenous population to become forced soldiers or slave laborers. Samuel protests the troops’ violent and destructive actions and is dealt a blow to the head from a rifle butt. He subsequently becomes delirious with fever and soon dies, leaving behind a distraught and discouraged Rosa, looking on helplessly as her world crumbles around her.

On the other side of the African continent in precisely the same month and year of September 1914, William Wadé Harris—a fifty-four-year-old Liberian prophet-evangelist—was reaching the peak of his ministry popularity in southern Ivory Coast. The evangelist’s preaching, fetish-burning, and baptizing ministry lasted a mere eighteen months, from mid-July 1913 until his expulsion from the newly formed French colony in January 1915. But the impact he created in this short time was one of the most remarkable in the history of the church in Africa with an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people from a dozen different ethnic groups turning from traditional religious beliefs and practices to faith in the “the one, true God.”1

In general, Prophet Harris was a man on the move, never lingering long in any one location. In some instances, villagers would travel long distances to meet him, receive baptism from his hand, then return home all in the same day, never to see him again.

One of the questions asked of Harris by new converts during those brief encounters concerned the type of music they should sing once they had arrived back home to their villages. “Teach us the songs of heaven,” they pleaded, “so that we can truly bring glory to God.”

It is important to understand Harris’s background in order to appreciate his response to the thousands of new believers who crowded around him, clinging desperately to every word of counsel he could give them. Born to a Methodist mother sometime around 1860, Harris had spent nearly four decades attending and actively serving the so-called civilized Methodist and Episcopal churches of eastern Liberia. Quite understandably, the Western hymn traditions of these churches became the sacred music that Harris himself dearly loved and cherished. When asked in 1978 whether Harris had any favorite hymns, his grandchildren immediately recalled, “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending” (his favorite hymn, which he sang repeatedly), “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “How Firm a Foundation, Ye Saints of the Lord,” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” and—most interestingly, given the scene recounted above from the film The African Queen—“Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.”

Yet confronted with new converts seeking his advice about the music to be sung in the faith communities taking shape in the wake of his ministry, Harris wisely counseled, “I cannot tell you what kind of music is sung in heaven. I have never been to God’s royal village. But be assured of this: God has no personal favorite songs. It is sufficient for us to compose hymns of praise to him in our own language and with our own music for him to understand.”

When asked further how exactly they were to proceed in composing these new “songs of God,” the prophet told the people to begin by using the music and dance forms with which they were already acquainted. For the Dida people—one of the first and largest ethnic groups to feel the impact of the prophet’s ministry—this represented a remarkable repertoire of at least thirty distinct classifications of traditional musical genres, ranging from love ballads and funeral dirges to songs composed for hunting, rice planting, and rendering homage to wealthy community leaders.2

There are fascinating stories of how Harris engaged people in a discernment process for choosing appropriate songs. In one instance among the Dida, Harris rejected a song offered to him in the zlanje genre of love songs with suggestive lyrics designed to seduce sexual partners. “That song does not honor God!” Harris said. “Sing something else!”

So, another singer came forward proposing a dogbro tune, a type of “praise song” that literally “hurls forth” or “shouts out the name” of a nature spirit, a wealthy family head, or clan leader deserving special attention or recognition. “That’s it!” exclaimed Harris. “That is the music you must work with! Though now you must refrain from using these songs for earthly rulers and lesser spirits and begin transforming the words bit by bit to bring glory to God!”3

Empowered by these words from the prophet, people returned to their villages and busily went to work composing praise hymns to God.

It was the Lord who first gave birth to us and placed us here.

How were we to know

That the Lord would give birth to us a second time?

Thanks to Him, we can live in peace on this earth!4

In the years following Harris’s phenomenal ministry in Ivory Coast—and continuing right up to the present day—composers with the Harrist movement have written thousands of hymns, exploring fresh themes and developing new musical styles. As composers learned to read the Bible and grew in spiritual insight, they recounted Scripture-based stories and related events of God’s work among them. Some hymn texts function as mini-sermons, as prayers, or as faith confessions—all set to music for the church, by members of the church, and in a style and language that the church well understands. One composer adapted the opening lines of the Apostles’ Creed in this way:

My God, our Father, Almighty, Almighty,

Creator of the heavens and the earth,

It is He who is Truth, our Father alone.

And it is Jesus who is our Defender.

As for the Holy Spirit sent by Jesus,

He is Life and Healing for us all.5

DEFINING AND LIMITING THE SCOPE

The two brief stories related here are hardly sufficient to address the many complex issues of this book. We do nonetheless encounter in these narratives central themes of key importance that point us in helpful directions and invite us to pursue their interconnectivity.

There are first of all the arts—singing, instruments, solo and corporate performance, song genres, dance, memorization, composition and transmission, church architecture, painted signage and decor, stone-carved plaques, benches, pulpits and altars, the cross and other Christian symbols, religious vestments, persuasive preaching, effective teaching, locally crafted objects of worship, language, oral imagery, and musical forms of prayer, sermons, and confessions of faith. All of these artistic expressions and many more are part of the larger conversation under consideration when we explore what happens when the arts and gospel communication meet.6

There is also much about mission in these stories—diverse understandings and styles of mission, such as “etic” mission (where art forms are imported from outside the culture) and “emic” mission (where a discernment process seeks to find appropriate artistic expressions from within the culture). Depending on the missional approach gospel communicators adopt, everything will change—their starting points, their aesthetic and cultural sensitivities, their search for and application of “usable” artistic expressions, and the final results that emerge from the choices they have made along the way.

Ecclesio-denominational traditions and preferences are equally a part of the picture. In our stories, we encounter Methodist and Anglican-Episcopal patterns against a backdrop of Roman Catholic mission initiatives in both the Congo and Ivory Coast. How do these realities shape the intercultural dynamics at work? Michael J. Bauer has noted that the Roman Catholic church has a long-standing tradition of embracing the fine arts while at the same time encouraging private devotional art.7 By contrast, the Orthodox tradition is “centered on the icon, church architecture, and sung choral liturgy.” Protestants, according to Bauer, “tend to be influenced by the surrounding culture and its art forms . . . both popular culture and the classical fine arts, depending on the dominant cultural milieu at any particular place and time.”8 None of these assessments directly address the more evangelically inclined Protestants and charismatic-Pentecostals who, nonetheless, constitute a significant portion of the global missionary community today.

There is also the important historico-political context in which mission transpires. Both of our narratives take place in sub-Saharan Africa in late 1914, at the outset of the First World War, just as the colonial fervor for Americo-Liberians, British, French, Belgians, and Germans was gaining momentum. These are very specific times and realities. How do they shape the story? In Ivory Coast, virtually all of the Catholic priests were called back to France during the war to serve as chaplains in the army, leaving no spiritual experts on the ground to consult with when the charismatic, non-Catholic, English-speaking prophet-evangelist William Wadé Harris burst upon the scene and sent French colonial administrators into a panic. To be serious students of history, careful attention must be given to the conditions in which the arts and mission meet, be that in the Greco-Roman world of the church’s early years, the eighth-century Germanic tribal villages of the Frankish Empire, the Hindu kingdom of Nepal in the mid-twentieth century, or hip-hop Algerian immigrant communities in the banlieues of Paris, France, today.

Finally, there are the vitally important socio-religious realities to consider in times and places where the arts and mission meet. The two stories from Africa included in this chapter depict situations where the Christian faith and local, ethnic religions represent the primary encounter taking place. But as one moves to other world locations, new questions and challenges arise. In a collection of essays edited by Lawrence E. Sullivan titled Enchanting Powers: Music in the World’s Religions, one is plunged into the deep and dense musical universes of Jewish mysticism, sacred teaching of the Javanese gamelan, Choctaw Indian social dance, the Confucian sacrificial ceremony, the controversial musical recitation of the message of Islam, and the ecst...