I have some great news to share with you! Heather Heflin Hodges is now on board with Wineskins as our newest Featured Author! Heather brings so many talents to the table and I cannot wait for you to benefit from all that she is going to share here at Wineskins.org and at her new site – HeatherHeflinHodges.com
Feel free to Favorite or Bookmark her site, subscribe to new posts, or do whatever you do when you find good content because that is what you are going to find on her blog.
Heather is off to a great start on her new site. Her first three posts highlight some of her art illustrating the three “Losts” of Luke 15.
She has followed those posts up with A Renaissance of the Arts for Churches of Christ , Where are the Artists? and Art and Aesthetics in the Stone-Campbell Movement.
It is time Churches of Christ found a home for our artistic people and that we reclaim the gifts of those who have long gone neglected in our fellowship. Heather is going to help us understand how to do that in her articles and her art. I am very hopeful that this is just a start into something beautiful in our congregational life and ministry. So follow along with me and be blessed.
5 Responses
I’m glad you all are bringing up this topic. Too often people’s talents weren’t wanted. Some of it had to do with the regulative principle, the use of which prohibited almost everything. Another reasoning was that the cofC could not in any way be like any other group of Christians. Even if someone knew how to sing, they were limited to the pew and the song book and if someone wanted to sing a psalm right out of the Bible (which I could not see God sending someone to hell for doing), that was off limits and to sing one in the original Hebrew would have caused heart attacks. I could just hear the comments fly such as “you’ll be praying to Mary next Sunday” and “why don’t you just start taking communion monthly”.
The CoC has never been warm toward the arts; they have always been viewed as the Trojan horse for liberalism. The only exception has been singing; but even with that there has, over the years, been the battle taken up by many conservatives to keep the songs “scriptural” which brought about a hymnal of edited songs that removed much of the beautiful imagery from some of the great classics. The literal mind set of the conservative evangelical church fears imagery and symbolism. That is why good poetry and prose finds little room within its theological and religious frame.
A side note: One of the ironies of conservative Christians is how many of them love Rock & Roll and enjoy singing along with them when they hear them being played; yet, if the lyrics of many of them had been simply written as a poem the same Christians would view them as radical and dangerous.
To begin, now that most churches use PowerPoint with screens, why don’t you use the words to the hymns used by other Christians? They are on multiple websites but are not the official cofC song book words, e.g. God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity instead of God over all and Blest Eternally in Holy, Holy, Holy. The Trinity was only mentioned in a low voice at baptism time, which was very rare.
Your comments aim at one particular subsection of Churches of Christ. The Churches I have ministered at discuss the Holy Spirit regularly in classes, incorporate/recognize the Spirit in our prayers, singing, etc as well as use contemporary songs.
I’m glad they do.