Artists in the Church: Be Your Creative, Weird, Beautiful Selves
Just know that you might not always be understood, and that’s okay.
The artist rests a blank canvas onto a well-worn easel. Soft light pours through the window and he waits. He listens to the sounds of his soul. Slowly, he dips his brush into a puddle of color and glides it back and forth, transforming a white rectangle into something entirely new. It requires equal amounts of passion and precision. As the colors grow, every ounce of his own joy, anger, hurt, happiness, success, and failure are poured out through his fingertips. Hours and days pass until finally, he steps back. His very heart is displayed, vulnerable, hanging on a wall.
The artistic process comes with great risk. Art is often born out of pain and honesty. If an artist is lucky enough to share their creation with the public, their carefully crafted work is then open to scrutiny and an ever-shortening attention span.
As a worship leader, I can confirm that musicians and worship leaders share the artist’s heart. We love our craft. We pour our deepest selves into a crowded room with our voices and instruments, and we too are met with the verbalized, unabashed opinions of strangers.
As long as my and my husband’s worship project Lovelite has existed, our songs have always had a dual purpose: to worship Jesus and to be a genuine expression of the season we are in — whether that season is as colorful and alive as spring, or as dry and reaching as the winter. Has our music always been well received? Definitely not. We have been told more than once by people in the music industry that our songs don’t fit anywhere because the music is too strange for Christian audiences and the lyrics are too Christian for secular audiences. We have always landed in some musical third place — a purgatory of weird synthesizers and anthems to Jesus.
But there was a certain point in our career when we decided we had to be okay with that. After all, who are we if we are not simply ourselves? The body of Christ is made up of the strangest and most beautiful things. It is not uniform; it is a great mishmash of colors, personalities, abilities, and backgrounds. When you see it up close, it might look like a mess, but when you step back, there is a working masterpiece that points to a Creator. And there is so much freedom when we rejoice in our uniqueness and recognize that our individual gifts working together create a true work of art — and God is the painter!
The praise of man does not define a person’s worth. I will say that is admittedly difficult to be vulnerable when our culture places such value on numbers: number of YouTube views, number of Instagram followers, number of TikTok followers, number of likes per post — numbers, numbers, numbers… these are the world’s empty measures of success. But it is when we choose to be open and willing to be who God created us to be that our light can shine most effectively. Whatever our gifting, let us use it to grow the kingdom of God, and not just our own careers. At the end of the day, with all of our quirks and flaws, as long as we allow our creator — the greatest artist of all, to use us as HE intended, then HE will always be glorified, and the church will always be a unique tapestry of wonderful weirdos, working together in His name.
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10, NIV)
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