Brehm Center

Professor Shasberger, I greet you in the name of the crucified and risen Savior, in whose blood you have been washed, by whose Spirit you are taught and empowered, and in whose name you have been called into service at Westmont College.

When I first read the essentials of the position description for the Adams Chair, I was taken by its delightfully inventive nature. I saw these three quite usual words: worship, art, and music, taken beyond their cultural and evangelical typicality; I saw them newly readied to enable Westmont and its civic and ecclesiastical neighbors to provide the body of Christ with examples of what music, art, and worship really can mean when organically knit and theologically driven.

Your task is considerable; it is prospect- and problem-ridden, but I see a theological smile behind it all. This is what I believe Westmont is trying to say and what I hope you seek to accomplish: As for worship, it transcends Sundays and chapels. It becomes a comprehensive, life-wide, and Christ-centered word, a summative word for unceasing service to God through Christ at all times and in all places. It is now a word for personal holiness; a word for the exercise of faith, hope, and love from their new-birth start to their eternal consummation; it is a knee-bent word for pouring perfume on Jesus� feet; a bent-over word for washing the feet of brothers, sisters, outcasts, the poor in spirit, and the poor of purse. Your task, then, is not to reinvent worship, but to re-establish it within the limitless mandates of God-honoring, Christ-centered, and Spirit-driven work. Take joy in this. 

As for music and the arts, I see them removed from their tidy classical/popular, Western/non-Western, contemporary/ traditional packages. I see them placed within the whirl of world creativity: a world we will never fully understand or master. This world goes beyond the racially, commercially, and spiritually short-sighted passwords that front for multiculturalism. But world creativity calls for a comprehensive theology of diversity.  It begins with the limitless unimagined imagination of Creator God and continues in the rich creative peregrinations of humankind made in his image. And art is only a piece of the whole. Thus, despite the nearly irresistible grace, wild variegation, and aesthetic generosity of the masterpieces handed down to us from all civilizations, art is not a capitalized, idealized, or westernized word. It is not a code word for exclusivismor self-deification. It is a nearby and everywhere word, a nomadic and human word, made lively in that mysterious linkage between God and image of God. It takes in everything from the sublime to the pedestrian; it eludes objectification and static correctness; it posits its beauty less on a prescriptive aesthetic than on the ways and eyes of both wise and foolish beholders. It plagues us with debates about quality and usefulness, sensuousness and spirituality, means and end, cause and effect, feeling and intellect, time and timelessness.

You will be dealing with everything from praise choruses to Rembrandts, from jazz to Bruckner, and, for many, back home again to hip-hop. Deal with these leaps, anomalies, and variances ever so humbly, discerningly, and lovingly. Because you and your colleagues can only scratch the surface of humankind�s artistic work, try to create a deep-structure pedagogy that grasps the whole even when some parts are missing; a pedagogy that argues for quality in ways that go beyond the extremes of old-school narrowness and new-school relativism. Remember that God is not a classicist or a populist, an American or a Nigerian, but Creator and Redeemer who spun out a rose and a platypus with the same mind and the same smile. Build a strange aesthetic on how God imagines and makes, and smile with him as you extend it to how we imagine and how we make. Remember that what you personally may condone or condemn is of no consequence outside of a teachable worldview that takes your students beyond your upbringing, your tastes, your preferences, even your conscience. Since virtually all artistic choices are learned, I urge you to teach, teach, teach the differences. Don�t scold. 

Remember that style, aesthetic quality, and creative genius notwithstanding, the heart and soul of church music is congregational song the music of the people of God.  Teach young and old that there is but one worship leader: God's Holy Spirit who purges and carries the song. There is but one worship team: the congregation, engaged in song-ridden worship. Teach this without any musical style in mind. Remember that the sole purpose of the arts in corporate worship is to serve the liturgy, but only those liturgies that unconditionally serve the Word of God. Remember that artistic excelling is not the means serving the end, the means becoming the end, or the end trampling the means. It is simply and uniquely the unceasing process of becoming better than we were yesterday as we make artistic offerings to the One who in his Triune and eternal completion is Means, End, and Everything-in-Between. Remember that while you must dip deep into the artistic treasures of humankind, you do so as a highly specialized but willing and emptied servant who knows what countless others do not yet know and humbles himself to enhance their knowing. Do not mistake their ignorance or hesitation for poor taste. Remember that the bridge from artistic ignorance to your artistic treasure house is spanned ever so gradually, humbly, and discerningly. Try to remember that artistic poverty and spiritual richness can be simultaneously welcomed by a Savior who understands that faithfulness is not abetted by artistic good works. Remember likewise that artistic excellence has no standing before the Lord unless chaperoned by faith, hope, and love. All the while, do not forget how to sing "Jesus Loves Me."

Try to remember that there is not a moment in the artistic life of church and community that will be free of puzzles, dilemmas, even schism and that you have the choice of participating in the solutions or continuing the problems. Try to remember that artistic authenticity and God-centered action are more crucial than the narrower goal of keeping up with, surpassing, or changing culture. Try to remember that while you engage in the great masterpieces, you or your colleagues are not all that great. But you are good�exceptionally so. So while you have the honor of honoring and participating in greatness, you are to rejoice in the mere goodness of which you are a continuing part. Remember that while you understand the intricate languages of art and music, you will spend much of your time using ordinary words to explain these. Be sure therefore that you have excommunicated yourself both from the culture of verbal preciousness, where there just aren't words� and that of exaggeration, where most everything is awesome, incredible, or unbelievable. Read great literature, study the great prayers and collects, bury yourself in the magisterial works of civilization�s thinking poets. Seek precision, seek elegance, be temperate, be rich and varied in your daily speech, your public presentations, and especially your praying. Visit frequently the many enigmas about God and his work and solve them back to him as beautifully as you possibly can. Then perhaps those lost in the thickets of awesomeness will come to themselves and join in the rescue of this fragile treasure we call language.

Remember that there is an unseen and culturally forgotten citizenry out there, a citizenry on whose smallish shoulders the future rests: the citizenry of children whose eyes, ears, hands, voices, and minds are all too soon artistically ready for the things that full-grown adults hardly know.  Find a way to include them in your educational company; remember that the art forms of church and culture will come to depend on how they grow up into artistic action. Then perhaps something more than being relevant will frame the artistic signature of the body of Christ. Whatever it takes, find ways to engage with the children, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.

This charge would not be complete without firm words to the entire college community. To you I say this: Do not forget the conceptual genius that went into the design of this position and the radical body of work it expects. Do not assume that the creation of the Adams Chair is the end of the matter. Do not be unnerved if things happen that are not typically evangelical or nominally Christian, and that do not conform to current worship-speak, spiritual meringue, and artistic slapdashery. Be ready for leadership and do not worry if the profundities of art, the infinities of true worship, and the engagement of Westmont's surrounding communities shake out hidden provincialisms. And do not expect change to issue from Michael Shasbergeralone. What you expect from him you should expect of yourselves in your own work. Only then can we expect the creative shatter that true community can bring about�a creative shatter that refuses to limit itself to these few splendid acres we call Westmont. 

In the name of Jesus Christ, I wish all of you and Professor Shasberger, as ambassadors of Christ as if God were making his appeal through you, the Godspeed of the Goodspiel the Gospel from this moment on. 

Amen.

Theology, News & Notes (ISSN 1529-899X) is published for the alumni/ae and friends of Fuller Theological Seminary. It is published three times a year, in winter, spring, and fall.

The editorial content of Theology, News & Notes reflects the opinions of the various authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the views of Fuller Theological Seminary.

�2006 by Fuller Theological Seminary. Produced in limited quantities for alumni/ae and friends.

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