I just got back from Boston, where I attended the world premier of the musical “Drawin’ on the Walls” by my son Chris Guin, as well as my grandson’s first birthday party — an excellent weekend.
In fact, all four of my sons and my two daughters-in-law were all there to see Chris’s musical — and we had a great time enjoying his play and listening to the audience praise his work (samples song are here — the fourth is my favorite of the group). If you’re in the area, you really should go see it. It’s a powerful, moving story.
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. One of the grave errors of the Protestant Reformation was to throw most forms of artistic expression out of the church. We need to encourage and celebrate our poets, composers, playwrights, painters, and sculptors. There are many, many ways to communicate the Christian message, and yet for some reason we limit ourselves to non-fiction writing and hymnody.
And the Churches of Christ are particularly narrow-minded, having inherited — unintentionally — the aesthetic narrowness of 18th Century Calvinism — an era when the Calvinist churches frowned on all but the simplest architecture and rejected nearly all forms of artistic expression as frivolous (or even unauthorized).
We really need to find a place for the artists, recognizing that their gifts are God-given and therefore God-glorifying.
