Let the Light Shine Through: Being Co-Creators with Christ
The following is an excerpt from an interview with pastor Makoto Fujimura on City to City’s How to Reach the West Again podcast. In the discussion, Fujimura talks about a more redemptive and creative way of engaging culture through art, learning through trauma, and taking light to dark places.
BRANDON J O’BRIEN: After the past few decades of culture wars, where does our Christian engagement with the broader culture stand?
MAKOTO FUJIMURA: We are immersed in war language, and we often use that as a way to engage. Even the way we frame questions is tinged by this power struggle of fighting with limited resources to protect your turf. I think about this as an artist. Of course, art—and especially contemporary art—can be about protecting your own turf, defending your ideologies, and creating dark, destructive ways of describing the world. To a lot of people, this is the only honest way to create art at all.
Very early on, though, as I began to understand my role as a follower of Christ in the contemporary art world, I felt I had to really challenge the assumption of scarcity—that life is about competing over finite resources, like cultural influence. Of course, if you think about it in a Darwinian sense, it’s a law. But when you read the gospels, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is almost creating an alternative paradigm, an antidote to those assumptions. He's invoking creation to assume abundance instead. It's a clear contrast to how the gospel presents itself to the world.
When I wrote Culture Care and lectured on it over the years, I became very aware that even the word “cultural engagement” is tinged with this notion of resources being restricted and scarce, and fighting for every inch. Where I think we should be in terms of generative culture is that we need to assume that God's abundance is already present in the context of culture. We are to do the hard work of digging, preparing the soil, and then planting things that will grow in the abundance of that soil.
BJO: Tell us about “culture care” as an alternative to “cultural engagement” or “culture war.” What is the task or the vision in front of us?
MF: Culture care is a non-violent resistance against culture wars. I'm not saying that we can just be passive. There are issues that we have to fight over and issues that require our directly addressing them. Yet I find myself thinking about the very premise of culture wars. The assumption is that this is the only way because we are faced with scarcity, and if we lose, they will win. Or if they win, we lose. And that's a huge assumption, first of all.
I have worked inside the world of the arts and many people, especially Christians, find that world to be dark and transgressive and tainted in so many ways. But my experience has been that even artists who are alienated from God or religion or the church have an understanding of transcendence. Oftentimes, I find myself listening to them, and I hear the Holy Spirit's voice through them, even though they would claim to be an atheist or anti-God in some sense. I think when you are involved in a business of making, you can't help but invite the Spirit to co-create and dance. So I am listening to my brothers and sisters talk about culture wars, and the culture of the church has become the culture war. So, when I enter any church, I find myself sitting in a corner because I don't think that the church as a whole has been able to communicate the fruit of the Spirit to the world.
When you are involved in a business of making, you can't help but to invite the Spirit to co-create and dance.
When you read the list in Galatians 5, through the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. You ask the outside world, my friends in rehearsals or in the theater district or inside studios, "What do you see in churches today?" The words that they describe the church with are the opposite of the fruit of the Spirit. In fact, you can backtrack in Paul's writing, and you can see the fruit of the flesh. That's really convicting, right? So I began to see that fruit of the flesh as the fruit of the culture wars.
So what's the alternative? How do you get the fruit of the Spirit in the culture, in your community, in your family, in your own studio? And that's when I began to think about the thesis of Culture Care. You start out by changing the metaphor. Rather than seeing the territory of culture as a battleground to be fought over, you change the metaphor. What if it is a garden to till? An ecosystem to steward, to take care of? What if you look at it in the same way that an environmentalist looks at an asteroid and studies it?
Nature is not kind. It's a highly competitive, diverse ecosystem, but at the same time, it still creates beauty. So I began to read the writings of Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, even Emily Dickinson, to try to understand what they were seeing in natural and cultural ecosystems. Rachel Carson is crying out in Silent Spring over the fact that what we have deemed a positive development of chemical toxins has resulted in nature being decimated. The same thing is happening in culture. There are beautiful creatures that see the church as this violent culture-war machinery that is out to get them. And in many cases, they are right. I'm there, trying to serve them or minister to them, and I can't defend the church because there are just so few good examples. So I have to kind of go to para-church organizations to find Christians who are actually doing the spirit work, like International Justice Mission and so on.
That is a huge issue. Now, if it was an issue just for me as an artist because I feel like I can't live in the cultural environment that my own church has produced, that's one thing. But I’ve realized that this is about the gospel. We are unable to proclaim the good news because what the world sees immediately is a threat, is violence, is anger, is self-righteousness, is hypocrisy. That's when I really began to think through, “How do I communicate this to my brothers and sisters so that we can hopefully begin to recover the good news and try to live in a community that is generative and is creative and imaginative, and has breadth and depth that the world will see?” I want them to not only feel invited to that, but be able to rejoice in that context.
BJO: One of the things that strikes me in Art and Faith, and this is a theme in Culture Care as well, is the huge role artists can play in this generative work. It's especially poignant in light of the fact that, broadly speaking, the art world has been viewed as epitomizing the transgression of the modern world.
MF: If I were to answer that question 15 years ago, it would've been a little different story, but today we have seen the fruit of cultural wars. I mean, we are all culpable; we are all part of it.
I used to have conversations with friends who said, “I don't want to send my sons and daughters to pursue the arts in New York City because it's the darkest place to live.” Meanwhile, some of their sons and daughters already lived there! So I would ask them, “What do you know about New York City? What do you know about the places that these young people are hanging out? Have you been to these bars and talked to the people there?” There are certainly dark places, but I've also experienced the oppressive darkness that we often fear in the art world from the church. I can't be judgmental about any of this because it's just human nature and sin, but the pervasiveness of human sin and the power of total depravity kicks in, and we're not immune from that.
I believe we can start fresh after the pandemic. The ground is even, and I think we will really have an opportunity right now to understand the fruitfulness of culture through our own children.
These friends I mentioned, if they want to, I take them with me to these dark places. They are a mission field as much as a church or any place. You have to be willing to have the Spirit lead you. You have to have a stance of humility rather than assuming that this is evil personified or something like that. And you have to be open to being surprised.
I've had conversations with parents of artists who are very afraid for their children. Now, I'm almost at a point where I say, "It's one thing to be fearful of the future, but it's another to see your own children having a different language you're not willing to learn. You're not wanting to listen to their songs, go see their performances, or look at their artwork." I see so much beauty and glory in these artists, even though they may struggle with the religiosity or piousness portrayed as Christianity—and that's turning out to be a problem in itself.
I believe we can start fresh after the pandemic. The ground is even, and I think we will really have an opportunity right now to understand the fruitfulness of culture through our own children.
BJO: What you describe in Culture Care is converting the cultural no-man's-land into a hospitable space where people can meet each other. What does it mean to convert that space from a place where we’re dodging bullets to a place where we meet and exchange with one another in a fruitful way?
MF: As his friends lay dying all around him at the front lines of World War I, J.R.R. Tolkien had to imagine a hospitable world: a shire. And he had to recall his own etymology of language to know for certain that that world could exist, even in the literal hell that he was experiencing.
C.S Lewis, wounded, imagined a world in which children would have to evacuate London and find a wardrobe to enter into Narnia.
I came to this conclusion during the pandemic. I knew that even before the pandemic, trauma accounted for a large portion of the genesis of great art. We wouldn't have had J.D. Salinger writing The Catcher in the Rye if he wasn't traumatized on the front lines of war. We wouldn’t have Hemingway or Faulkner. Shakespeare built his theater outside of London because of the Black Plague.
So my thought was, "If you removed all the world literature and art made by those directly affected by war, we would lose 80% of it.” Then, during the pandemic, I was doing further research on this and came to the conclusion that I don't think there's any art that doesn't have a direct tie to trauma. We're living in what we call a dark time of shutdown and pandemic, but that's where arts were birthed.
Now, I have many friends who cannot paint or write, so I'm not saying that everybody can rise above this, but I would say that culture is made up of this kind of generative way that the human mind works, and when you're faced with the reality of war and front lines, you come home devastated. You cannot even be yourself. Facing a writer's desk or a canvas may be the only way that person can wake up in the morning and have hope. That’s the reality and the backdrop of what you experience when you walk into museums, when you read literature, when you read poems by T.S. Eliot, Dante, Virgil. All of these people had to face even worse than what we do. So I think we should begin there, and then backtrack, asking, “So where are we? What's the new normal? How do we as a culture create an environment in which these things can happen?”
BJO: I think an easy application is remembering that what matters with gifts is how you apply them. Can you speak to this idea that there is a place where the secular and sacred meet in the arts?
MF: Exodus 31 is a great go-to passage that everybody skips because it talks about all these cubits and the materials for the tabernacle, but we have to remember that the Decalogue was given at the same time that the design for the tabernacle was given. The physical Law—the tablet—would be housed inside this beautiful communication box. To God, everything about this is significant. One detail doesn't represent whole worship or the way we interact and relate to this living God, though. Bezalel and Oholiab are hardly ever mentioned, but they are the first persons in the Bible to be filled with the Holy Spirit and are entrusted with crafting this beautiful Ark of the Covenant, the mercy seat, to which the priest will come every year to sacrifice an unblemished animal to atone for our sins.
So this is at the heart of worship. Two artists are filled by the Spirit and have the ability both to make and to teach. This is a beginning of a community, the beginning of the Church, the beginning of it all. This is what I call theology making. If you remove that portion, Scripture doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense that God created the universe ex nihilo, without needing to create. It's the aseity of God.
The world is not needed by God, but God created out of love and gratuity and beauty that's excessive. God made the world abundant.
Myself and those who do what I do must remind ourselves that we're not needed by God in any sense. The world is not needed by God, but God created out of love and gratuity and beauty that's excessive. God made the world abundant, yet we tend to experience the world in a Darwinian sense of survival of the fittest. From God's perspective, and therefore our perspective as followers of Christ, the world cannot be experienced with an assumption of scarcity. It completely upends the common notion of, "We're here to survive at all costs. We are here to win." No, we are here to serve, and that sometimes means losing—even losing our lives, losing our communities. That part often gets lost in whatever we're doing in the church.
The way back is Bezalel and Oholiab. It is to consider what God cares about and how he wants to communicate with us. It is through beauty, and it is through mercy. It's through sacrifice. And those are things that we don't understand that well as Christians, and we also haven't cultivated this for the next generations of younger people who are enormously creative. They have the technology and the ability to bypass all the modernist assumptions people in my generation had to go through. They're already creating, so there is an opportunity for the church to harness by really listenimg to the Spirit through them.
BJO: This brings us to a really important tension where both ministry and mission are part of the conversation. You contrast the theology of making with the theology of fixing or “plumbing.” Can you compare and contrast these for us?
MF: I’d say 80% of the sermons I hear utilize plumbing theology, which is this: “God created the world. We screwed up. We were fallen from the glory of God, and then Jesus came and rescued us. We received Jesus, and hallelujah, we are resurrected with Him. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes and unites us, and then we go into the world on our Great Commission.” That's the gospel that I often hear. Now, is there anything wrong with that? No. It's just incomplete.
What I say in the book is that it is like going to church where you receive tools every week to fix your pipes; you go home and you can fix your pipes because someone at Sunday school explained how to use this or that tool. You say, "Hallelujah! I fixed my pipe. I'm going to bring my neighbor back to church because next week they're going to give us new tools." This continues as you go back to church with your neighbor and you learn how to use the new tool to fix your pipes.
Now, there is nothing wrong with that, except that you're never told what is actually going on in the pipes. Why are you fixing them? So I talk about three things: the blood of Jesus that sanctifies us—that continues to sanctify us; the water of the Holy Spirit that rejuvenates and empowers us to move into the impossible task of being a Christian in the world; and the wine of new creation—that wine is coming through the pipes, backward into us today.
So the new creation is breaking in if we understand and allow ourselves to receive it. N.T. Wright says something that is perhaps more incredulous than the resurrection itself. It is the fact that God is inviting us to take hold of that wine, to really take that in, and then co-create the future of new creation. That part is missing from many of the sermons you hear today. So we sit there in churches understanding our want and need to be saved, to be with Jesus, as well as the wonderful reality of God’s presence in my life, but that's it. We leave each Sunday with that mindset and come back to church with that mindset, but we don't do anything between Monday through Saturday to create something new in the world. The reason why we're here is to enjoy God's presence. When we do, the wine of new creation comes flowing back into our lives, and then, co-collaborating in community, we can invite others to this impossibility of creating beauty in a world that is faced with ground-zero scarcity. We get to provide mercy in a place where people are battling one another just to survive.
That kind of impossibility is something that I have learned by practice, by understanding, and by reading the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. When I read N.T. Wright's many books, I finally honed in on what I've been sensing but couldn't articulate. The theology of making flows right out of what I call the theology of new creation.
Chaim Potok’s book, My Name is Asher Lev, is another great book about exactly what a young artist growing up in a church will often experience in feeling like they have to choose between their religion or art. That's a huge assumption we have built into the system which is not biblical. Great stories like that are so important because they identify what the Spirit is doing in culture. Even if the person is not cognizant of that work, it allow us to see ourselves better and help us understand that what God is desiring in the world is so much richer and so much more extravagant than we can ever imagine.
BJO: You see common grace—a way of illustrating what God is doing in the world—in the traditional Japanese art form of kintsugi. Can you describe that art form for us?
MF: Yes. In Japanese, "kin" is "gold", and "tsugi" means "to mend." It's the tradition of mending broken teaware, stemming from the generations of tea masters who had important tea vessels with which they served dignitaries in the land of many earthquakes. Many times they would break, and families of tea masters would keep these broken bowls for generations to finally give to a Japanese lacquer master. In Japan, lacquer is a notoriously difficult art form. It's made from poison sumac, so it takes many years of practice to master it. But using Japanese lacquer, they mend the broken bowls and then accentuate the fracture by pouring gold on top. This is a very Japanese way of doing things. The Western way would be to throw it away, buy another one, or superglue it back together, so it doesn't look like it was broken.
But the Japanese say, “No, if it's broken, it can be more beautiful than the original.” We value the history of what happened by creating something new. By accentuating the fractures, they become a river of gold, a mountain of gold, a landscape through which we can see past the trauma to something more glorious.
The whole purpose of kintsugi is not to admire the object, but to use it again. It's a vessel that's not just been fixed, but mended to be made new, and it becomes part of the cycle of the tea ceremony again. I love this reality as an example of new creation.
In post-resurrection appearances, Jesus chooses to show up with his wounds, with his nail marks. What is amazing about that is, first of all, he chose to be human. Why, after having gone through all that he did, the suffering, the rejection, why did he choose to be a human? Not only that—he came back as a wounded human. That's an astonishing reality of hope for us. There’s supposed to be no more tears, and yet, through his wounds, we are healed. So we are looking at the wounds like Thomas did, and we can worship because Jesus has chosen to be with us in our wounds.
We shouldn't look like we are perfect or powerful. We should look like we are broken, but we are still the utensils that serve the world. We are the vehicles through which God can communicate this vision—That it is only through the cracks that we can see God's light.
So what does that mean for our wounds and our fractures? What does it mean when we are broken? When you think about that, you begin to realize that this venerable Japanese tradition—though Japan is not a Christian country—has captured something that the gospel has hidden and embedded in that culture that is perhaps being kept for us in its pure form. We can look at it and say, "Oh my goodness, this is what the church ought to look like!” We shouldn't look like we are perfect or powerful. We should look like we are broken, but we are still the utensils that serve the world. We are the vehicles through which God can communicate this vision—that it is only through the cracks that we can see God's light. It's the gold that is poured in that speaks to the new, and that reminder through the kintsugi process can be revelatory for our church. So I've been speaking a lot about that art form.
BJO: How can this attitude extend to readers who are not artists by trade or don't imagine themselves to be the kind to make things at all?
MF: All of us are makers. We were created to be creative. We are all creatures of the imagination, yet we have done very little to cultivate and sanctify that imagination.
My colleague Dr. Ellen Davis at Duke has said that words translated as “hearts” or “heart” in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the Greek language, could translate into one word in the English language: imagination. So when the Bible talks about the heart of men or the eyes of our hearts, that word “heart” is imagination. Yet we have separated imagination from our rational, analytical side. We think imagination is suspect, and we say things like, "Well, you're imagining that." That's the typical assumption we make, but imagination is at the heart of knowledge; it's at the heart of logic, actually. You can't imagine a prime number—the prime number doesn't exist. So it's critical that we regain this.
At one point, the church was the place to learn how to develop, train, and sanctify your imagination. Then that became liberal arts, basically. Many people became what I call totalitarian pragmatists. All that counts is purposeful, bottom-line efficiency. Again, there's nothing wrong with making refrigerators that work, but there is something wrong when we can't use our imaginations except to worry about the future.
You'll see that this is proof that we are imaginative human beings. Humans cannot help but imagine something. It's either creating something out of fear or creating something out of love. I hope non-artists who read my book realize, "Oh, I’m an artist too. I'm making a pie. I'm growing a tomato. I am tending to my chickens,” or whatever. This is all part of how God has created us to be creative, and through these activities, through the earth, we gain a sense of humanity. When we do that, we are creating what we think are sandcastles on a beach, but what God sees are permanent mansions that he wants to partake in. So it is an amazing reality of the gospel that we are invited to co-create as makers. That's why I think “What do you want to make today?” should be a question for people coming into church.
BJO: How can church leaders facilitate a church culture that celebrates making and generative work?
MF: First of all, every church is different, and the context is different. The culture is different. You have to ask that question to your congregation, especially the children. Children and teenage sheep instinctively try to leap over the fence. Where are they going? Follow them. Instead of creating higher fences, our youth ministry should ask, "Where do you want to go? Can I come?" and learn. They are going to get lost; there are going to be a lot of lost sheep in there. I was one of them. Maybe instead of fearing that, we should anticipate that and say, "At least one of you is going to get lost, but I'm going to come get you; that's why I'm out here. The good shepherd is there leading us."
So what does that look like? I think it looks like an ordinary, small community that has strong, healthy boundaries to protect the sheep. That is a safe place for the sheep at night when they come home but that has open doors to the world because the cultural nourishment, the good grass, is way out there where most of us cannot reach it. Young sheep have the antenna to find where that is, so follow them, go with them, and guide them so they can come home. But don't be afraid because the good shepherd promised that he's not going to let us go; he's going to be there. There are wolves and stones and strange things in the forest, but that's also where treasures are to be found for the church.
BJO: I think one of the things that often motivates the antagonistic culture war mentality is that we're trying to create a better world for our children. In terms of culture care and multi-generational generative work, how does what we do now create this space that we're talking about?
MF: I will say that I have learned from my failures. I have learned from disappointments. I have learned so much from things I didn't expect to learn from. I learned from trauma. What I’m saying is not really an answer but an invitation to join those of us who have not only been humbled by what we thought we were good at or we thought we knew but who have also realized that the beginning is often our end. We can only start on this co-creation journey if we're willing to let go of all of the assumptions that we have about God, about culture, and about ourselves and our children. Only then can we see the abundance of creation breaking through the fractures in and around us.
We have to be open to walking right through the ashes if we are to be able to see the light beyond that. Artists are good at this because their propensity is to go right to the darkness. For those of us who have submitted ourselves under Christ's authority, we have discovered that Jesus was already there, way ahead of us, and we have come to learn that this good shepherd is not only leading us, but is knowingly allowing us to go into places we didn't think we could.
Every time I do that through my art and through my life, Jesus inevitably shows up and says, "What took you so long? I've been waiting here for you to enter this interior castle full of splendor and delight and light, but you were so afraid to enter a journey deeply with me. Now that you have, you can see so much more. You can go back to your tribe and let them know that there's this splendor out there beyond the darkness that each person can find.” Communal commitment is to create a safe space where people can come back, even if they're fractured, even if they're traumatized, to be able to share their journey deeply, honestly, and vulnerably. Not to try to fix it, but to say, “Because of what you’ve experienced, we are now a little bit more complete. Those pieces are fitting together, and we're going to behold you as precious broken vessels, as beautiful as anything can be, even before you’re mended.” So the kintsugi master has to see the beauty of that fragment before your sheep start to mend.
We're going to behold you as precious broken vessels, as beautiful as anything can be, even before you’re mended.
If the church becomes that, the world is going to be flocking to us. Open the gates!
You know, art communities, these transgressive communities, are very judgmental. They're very intolerant. And people learn quickly that even if you run away from the church, the world that you’re running into is just as corrupt, just as power-based. So if we had a small, authentic community that allows us to be ourselves and it's a safe place to share who we are and what we have done and what we can potentially do, it would be such a healing place for anybody. And it doesn't take much to create that.
BJO: Is there anything else you would like to say before we end our time together?
MF: I want to thank the listeners who are making efforts and sacrificing so much to be part of the universal church and trying to establish churches. I've been part of the City to City church-planting team for a long time, and I can tell you that the best advice I have has been gained through failures and disappointments and brokenness. I say that not in jest, but in hope. During the pandemic, pastors faced difficult challenges of not being able to meet together, having to do everything through Zoom, feeling like there is no purpose to all of this, and I really want to say thank you for your heart to serve.
I think it really does make a difference for those of us who have been trying to find light in very dark places. I know that it matters. And the beacon, however faint—people can see it. So keep going. I hope that whatever we learned from the last 30 years of church planting and trying to share the gospel is going to create a new season for all of us. It's going to be a season, I believe, just like when Shakespeare built his theater and brought in the Renaissance. These moments of severe darkness often create lasting, enduring legacies of hope. That's why it's so important for pastors to be encouraged in such a time as this. And I will say, finally, that artists can help you both understand the calling and the requirements that this new world is going to challenge us with. Artists are makers, and through their making, we will find our voice, and we will find our community.
About the Author
As well as being a leading contemporary painter, Makoto Fujimura is also an arts advocate, writer, and speaker who is recognized worldwide as a cultural influencer. His books include Refractions (NavPress), Culture Care (IVPress), and Art+Faith: A Theology of Making (Yale Press, with foreword by N.T. Wright, 2021.