Mood-Makers, Story-Tellers, and Picture-Framers

Eight hundred years ago, imagery was one of the most commonly used assets of the Church in worship. Serving a congregation of mostly illiterate worshipers meant that the "worship leader" had the heavy responsibility of commissioning art and imagery that would teach without words about the grand luminosity of a GOD who was also as close as our next breath. Even in our literate age, we find that words still fail to communicate the "bigness" of themes and ideas in the same way that an image or a symbol does.

In recent weeks we've been conversing about the power of media and image in story-telling; but we've also been talking about expanding our vocabulary and even crafting a new "dictionary" for terms that we take for granted inside the culture of faith. Beautifully, these two endeavors serve each other.

Surely every worship leader, worship VJ, liturgical artist has discovered that you can change what a word means or the intention of a space, a song, or a theme by the image or symbol that you present alongside. The image itself becomes a frame. A story-telling device. An interpretive voice.

In the same way that our language has become too small - not wrong, just too limiting - so have our frames. And this then feeds the too-small vernacular of a giant faith. So we create more small-frame pictures to tell our now diminishing story....you get the picture. (no pun intended)

Hear me out, I'm not just talking about the use of clip art and primary colored vector pictures of a cross. I'm talking about well-created, fabulously executed, uber-savvy images that come from Christian culture that say one thing to one audience. When art becomes that purposeful, that monochromatic (so to speak), that agenda driven it becomes propaganda, no matter how excellent the execution of design.

There's a song we do every now and then at Ecclesia that you probably know: "Grace Flows Down" by Lou Giglio. Here's the thing. Depending on the framing, that song can be either a very feel-good song about how GOD is soaking me in happy grace vibes OR it can become a reflection on the missional work of GOD in our lives to transform us (painfully), nourish us with hope even when we are dry with feeling,
keep our eyes on something entirely bigger, grander, and far more
important than me and my stuff. Really, I'm not trying to be sarcastic...

The song lyrics read: Amazing grace / how sweet the sound / Amazing love / now flowing down / from hands and feet / that were nailed to a tree / your grace flows down and covers me.

Here are two images to consider for framing that song: