Advent Workshop Statement
The role of the church in the 21st century is complex. The incredible pressures of our time and culture can easily draw the church into conducting itself like any other organization, optimizing a mechanized focus on productivity, functionality, and efficiency rather than the life-giving model of being fully human and devoted to walking the counter-cultural path of Jesus Christ.
Our thinking on the role of arts, technology, and ecology owes much to the work of theologian David Brown (especially his volumes Tradition and Imagination and Discipleship and Imagination), comics artist Lynda Barry (especially her work What It Is), poet-farmer Wendell Berry (especially his collection of essays What Are People For? and the cautionary essay ‘The Priesthood of All Chatbots?’ by Zac Koons.
As a means of holding ourselves accountable to the way of Christ and to better resist the temptations of following our culture towards ever-increasing isolation, automation, commodification, and despair, we long to support a Christian life built upon the following principles:
There are critical things about God which can only be said through the arts.
Artworks are not reduceable to singular statements; they carry a unique and infinitely expansive form of meaning which is vital in approaching the bottomless mystery of God.
This does not mean artworks say whatever we wish them to say or that all readings of a work of art are equally valid. Art puts us in conversation with specific configurations of symbol and idea; their meaning is infinite, but infinite in a certain direction and within certain boundaries.
Refusal to acknowledge this truth has resulted in the creation of much religious artwork which is shallow and decorative rather than engaging with deeper theological and exegetical work.
Aesthetic quality is important but also distinct from theological insight.
A work of art may aspire to both aesthetic excellence and theological truth and will benefit greatly from such a union; for this reason the Church should be the patron of skilled artists who create works which communicate powerfully and skillfully.
Just as the Church properly values the skills of scholars who help us understand new insights in Scripture and theology through the work of reason, so too the Church must value the skills of artists who help us understand new insights in Scripture and theology through the imagination.
Not all aesthetically skilled works carry theological insight.
Works which are perceived as displaying limited aesthetic development may still carry powerful theological insight. For this reason the Church must take seriously the artistic creations of children, amateur and ‘outsider’ artists.
The voice which incessantly asks “is this any good?” when one engages in creative work, generating shame around artistic experimentation, is to be understood as a force oppositional to God. Learning to silence this voice and to freely engage in artistic creation can be understood as flowing from Jesus’ invitation to come to God ‘as a child’ (Matthew 18:3); art-making is to be a lived exercise in the Christian embrace of grace.
The Church is called to engage deeply with the surrounding culture rather than retreat from it.
For most of its life, the Church has been a major presence in culture and the arts. This is a proper role for the Church.
Religion can be understood as an ‘extreme form of the arts’ (David Brown); therefore it must be in constant dialogue with the larger world of the arts (whether religious or secular).
We reject any inherent spiritual superiority of one artistic form or style over another. There is nothing inherently more spiritual about an organ than a banjo; classical music than punk rock; an oil painting than animation. Any sufficiently developed medium or style carries the potential for profound theological insight.
The Church must recognize that profound human experiences through works of art may be encounters with the Triune God, regardless of the artist’s faith or intention. The Church does not require the broader culture to agree with this way of understanding divine connection through art, rather this understanding serves as an exercise in humility for the Church as we recognize God at work within the larger world, well beyond our own religious camp.
The Church regards art as an essentially human spiritual practice; it is not simply a consumer product.
While maintaining an openness to the use of emerging tools and styles, the Church must resist the urge to regard art creation as a purely mechanical process which can be reallocated to AI or other forms of automation. Human connection with God must remain a critical part of artistic creation within the Church.
This value should be reflected in the church serving as both a workshop and studio which encourages all of its members to develop creative skills. In the same way the church calls disciples of Jesus to develop their minds through study, it must also call disciples to develop their imaginations through art and creativity.
The Church must be a place of learning. In a time when literacy and long-form reading are fading in our culture, the church’s mission requires the nurturing of these skills.
The church must not retreat from reading and study of written texts. The book as an artifact has been of major importance to Christians from our tradition’s earliest centuries and there is great value in sustaining this connection. The book is to be celebrated as part of our tradition.
Church libraries can play a role in curating texts of relevance to the concerns of the church, including (but not limited to) theology, literature, history, art, poetry and ecology.
Formation should be a central part of the church’s mission. Parish members must have the opportunity to gather regularly for study and discussion which expand their knowledge base and allow them to practice new skills.
While videos, recordings, and other media are a crucial part of the church’s education efforts, physical gatherings for study, art-making, gardening, cooking, and socializing are essential to the church’s ethos of deep learning and cultivation of human connection.
One aspect of the church’s educational mission is to teach disciples of Jesus how to connect deeply to their own specific region and land. This includes learning who one’s neighbors are and the shape of local history and culture. It also includes developing the ability to identify local trees, plants, birds, insects, and other parts of the local ecosystem. Jesus often taught with metaphors drawn from attentiveness to the natural world, thereby encouraging his disciples to think in such terms. Today, the church must continue mindful connection with our non-human neighbors.
The unwise use of technology, and especially AI, threaten the mission of the Church.
While not being inherently opposed to the use of new tools and technologies (see 3.c), the current drift within our culture (and also much of the church) is increasingly towards the use of technology to reduce activities which are central to the experience of being human. The making of visual art, the reading and writing of stories, the crafting of poetry and music, and the composing of prayers or sermons—these are activities which should not be assigned to machines.
There is a difference between engaging with God through rituals, stories, prayers, and art which have been crafted by another human being (perhaps vastly separated from oneself in time) and superficially similar materials crafted through a LLM. Human creations spring from the substance of human experience and spiritual discernment and deliberate reflection upon that experience in a specific time and place. Materials produced by an LLM hold only the ability to mimic the surface layer of such experience and discernment. The inability to broadly discern this crucial difference is itself a sign of deep spiritual crisis in our time.
Appropriate uses for technology (perhaps including AI) include the reduction of tasks our society has generated which are potentially dehumanizing: large-scale repetitive manual labor, the managing of vast amounts of data, filling out reams of bureaucratic forms, and so on. The inherent complexity of industrial civilization carries an inherent risk of turning human beings progressively into machines, valued only for their raw labor rather than their spiritual or creative essence. Technology may, if used with wisdom and great care, play a useful role in automating tasks which are properly meant for machines so that human beings may instead spend more time on activities which are fundamentally human (making art, reading, growing gardens, cooking, resting).
Technology also holds the potential to generate new tools which can empower and democratize creativity. Such tools are to be used with care and caution within the church and must never be allowed to fully displace traditional methods and processes which have inherent value as part of the Church’s living tradition.