Studio of Faith

Last year, the Denver Art Museum featured an incredibly moving exhibition by Kent Monkman, titled, History is Painted by the Victors. Monkman’s work is at once haunting, indelible, illuminating and yet very humorous. He explores themes of gender expression, injustice and climate change using imagery that taps into our many shared associations with Romantic imagery. I cannot recommend enough spending time with his work.

But one of the ideas that the exhibit most dramatically etched into my mind wasn’t the themes of his work, it was the style of his collaboration. Monkman has created a collaborative studio where he paints and teaches with others. They meet not to learn what is right or wrong, but to help each other improve each other’s work. It’s loosely based on the old “Atelier,” method. That’s a fancy French word that simply means, “studio,” and now you might have a new word to throw around at your next dinner party to sound quite the highbrow aficionado.

Artists working with Monkman are not apprenticing with a guru, they are learning by doing together. Certainly, Monkman is quite the mentor both in technique and in terms of living a fearless life. But I imagine that mentorship is shared across the atelier and may be more spiritual than technical. They practice their craft and give each other courage. It seems to me that this process is about flourishing as an artist, as a human being and less about strict apprenticeship. I’ve always been a more natural collaborator than solo artist in my life whether screenwriting with a partner, composing music in groups and although my visual art has typically been a solitary affair, I intend to seek out opportunities in all areas of my life this year for more artistic team-ups. Isn’t collaboration a kind of embodied holiness?

Why aren’t our churches this way? Our liturgies are designed around shared practices and formed around an experience of the living Christ. Yet so often we’re bogging each other down with dogmatic issues of theology and interpretation. Why are we so eager to pronounce guilt and punishment instead of helping each other practice the shapes of human flourishing and character development? Certainly, our faith should include feedback on moral accountability, but the focus should be moral growth and not condemnation. How many people show up expecting a kind of ritualistic performance each week rather than seeking to fully perform the rituals themselves?

Walk into a typical church in the United States and you will probably receive a clear thesis statement: humans are sinful, Hell awaits and if only you could join the right club, you can escape eternal damnation. Even mainline denominations whose seminaries have long given up on these false soteriologies are still populated with the rest of us unschooled pew fillers who have soaked up more about Christianity from popular culture than from the history of the faith. It’s so ingrained that many might wonder what the purpose of the church is if not to rescue others from damnation. Isn’t that what it means to spread the Good News, after all?

I don’t know about you, but it never struck me as good news that our God is an angry God that demands justice. None of us asked to be born, how could any of this be our fault worthy of eternal hellfire? It’s no wonder this narrative structure is creating more atheists than followers. I recently stumbled on the Barna Group’s State of the Church 2025 report (note: I know almost nothing about the Barna Group so do not take this as endorsement of any kind), that demonstrated an interesting shift in how younger generations are approaching faith. Church attendance continues to drop yet more people say they are turning to Jesus. 66% of U.S. adults in their survey say they made a personal commitment to Jesus, up 12 points from 2021. But here’s a real kicker, nearly 30% of those who say they are not Christians still say they follow Jesus. How do you like that? There are more people of The Way, but The Way doesn’t lead up to the narthex doors.

We like to think of the unchurched in our communities as atheists and agnostics who find church a little too cute for the modern mind. The truth is that the perception of what “church,” is supposed to be seems to be at odds with who Jesus is. Or as French theologian Alfred Loisy famously observed, “Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God and what came was the Church.” Hypocrisy is everywhere, and bad for evangelism it would appear. Bringing more people into the faith has nothing to do with the music you play, the coffee you serve, viral posts or forsaking liturgical practice for something more entertaining. It has to do with an invitation into the living presence of Jesus. It’s not about luring people in to save them Hell, it’s about joining our atelier for a life of relationship, participation and healing.

I’d love to see church reimagined into what I think the early followers thought they were doing, taking Jesus as our model out of love and gratitude, following our Master. In the earliest days of Christianity, we hadn’t worked out all the ideas about the detailed mechanics of salvation, virgin births, the Trinity and so much else we take for granted. We just knew that Jesus was special, God was doing something amazing in the resurrection, and we wanted to be faithful to following God in the way Jesus did. It was a commitment of faith, but more from gratitude than fear. Church doesn’t have to be about doing what’s right or believing the right secrets, it’s about a pathway of discipleship. Spiritual practices aren’t corny relics, they form us. It doesn’t have to be about Sunday morning, either, it can be a movie night, a prayer group, a justice rally. That’s because it’s not about a rule book we follow, it’s a living Christ we follow.

Of course, to some, saying we should follow Jesus as revealed privately to each of us is just a recipe for chaos. Witness some 45,000 denominations and come to your own conclusions. A common critique my own faith community gets from other kinds of Christians is that our church is not biblical. Setting aside the fact that we usually read four verses every week and sing very rooted hymns out of the ELW, why should being “biblical,” matter? We aren’t called to worship the Bible; we’re called to experience the living Christ. Besides, most of the New Testament portrays discipleship as following Jesus and participating in the Kingdom of God, not seeking out legal pardons or escaping this world. I would argue that focusing on the living presence of Christ is a much better biblical fit as well as a healthier spiritual formation centered on intimacy with Christ through prayer, worship and increasingly necessary silence. I think a lot of churches could benefit from flapping their gums a little less about what they think is biblical and focus more on the mystical presence of Christ.

It changes the missional focus of the church as well. Yes, it’s important that you are forgiven and healed and that we are all reconciled through Christ. But the redemptive work we are called to do is more about living into that restoration than saving people from God’s wrath. We shouldn’t serve others because we’re saving them from Hell. We should serve others because Jesus served. Besides, we encounter Christ when we serve the poor, when we fight for justice, when we work to make peace.

Matthew 25:40

And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’

We should leave our broken theologies and empty-headed bibliolatry behind if we want a faith that is vibrant. I happen to think that vibrancy means leaning into ritual even more, not installing stages and fog machines. And no, I’m not saying that there is no such thing as sin. I think sin is the most obvious thing in all of Christianity. God is often hidden, but sin is everywhere. And I’m not saying the Bible isn’t important. I think scripture becomes even more important when you are open to reading it beyond a naïve literalism. Scripture isn’t a flawless letter from God, and it’s more beautiful because of its peculiarities. It’s a living art gallery of many different pictures of and testimonies of the eternal Christ. I think our primary revelation is Christ and we can experience Christ in our lives right now. We become Christ collectively, not just in church, but in all ways, we meet through prayer, song, film and more. We are called to listen to the Spirit as they are speaking today.