We held an art exhibition at Central London Church for one week from the 21st July 2019, which culminated with Sabbath worship on the 27th. We used one of the upstairs rooms with lots of windows for our exhibition and displayed 17 artworks, 3 installations and 1 audio-visual booth, created by 8 artists. Of our artists, 6 attend CLC regularly or occasionally, 1 attends a different church, and 1 more does not currently attend church. Part of our aim with the exhibition has been to showcase the work of Christian artists (and thereby give us, as Christian Adventist artists, a platform to share about faith through our gifts of creativity and the arts), but we also want to be able to offer non-Adventist and non-Christian artists a space for their work to be seen, especially where we can engage with them on big topics of interest that we share but may have different approaches or responses to.
This exhibition was entitled ‘Utopia: Can the World be Better?’ This gave all our artists an opportunity to engage with this theme and think about what a good or perfect world would look like, and how we can think about that in terms of how we want the world to be now. There were numerous different creative responses to this, focused on things ranging from the environment, to heaven, to the Beattitudes, to Kingdom-people, and more. This was the basis of our event and meant that when people came in, I (as well as some of the other artists and volunteers from the church) had some very interesting and in-depth conversations about the Bible, the future, the idea of a perfect God, the idea of living in a created world and how we should try and live if we believe all of this.
Over the course of the 6 afternoons when the exhibition was open (we opened 3pm-8pm from Sunday 21st to Friday 26th inclusive), 55 people not from or connected to the church visited the exhibition, as well as 16 who were from or connected to CLC. A small number of these people came from other Adventist churches, where they’d heard about the event and had come because they were interested in art and creativity. 2 people came because they’d received a flyer through their door. The rest came because they happened to see when they walked past and thought they’d pop in and see or were encouraged to do so by a volunteer. 2 of those people were very interested in the London art scene and wished they’d known about it beforehand as they would’ve brought a group of people to see, so for the future, advertisement that reaches out further into the London art scene and also in wider London events would be useful.
Of the people who visited in the afternoons, some had a quick look round, and others stayed and chatted for a while. Some shared about their own journeys with faith, many of whom had once had a faith but had drifted from it. This seemed to be a recurring theme, and it was encouraging to be able to have really long conversations with some of them about the art, but also about what faith in God is and what that means in their and our context today.
As well as the exhibition, we hosted 4 evening talks on the Monday-Thursday evenings, and 1 open mic night on the Friday evening. For these, 2 speakers were Adventist (1 was myself and 1 a pastor who also runs a creative business), 1 is a Christian of another denomination (who also writes for a creative Christian magazine), and 1 isn’t Christian (who works in art therapy and spoke about that). For the open mic night, we had 4 Adventist performers and 1 Christian of another denomination.
In terms of the talks and the open mic night, 82 people attended in total, most on the Wednesday night, as the people who regularly attended the church’s prayer meeting joined us that night. The vast majority of these attendees were people from or connected to CLC, with only 6 people across all the evenings being not from or connected to the church. These talks will need better advertising outside of the church in the future.
That said, these talks gave very good food for thought and action to the church members who attended, particularly in regard to creativity and the arts in ministry. The talks looked at ‘Art & Theology,’ ‘Art & Therapy,’ ‘Art & Hope,’ and ‘Art & Ministry’ and the open mic night tied into our theme of Utopia again. These all then pointed to the creative worship shared on the Sabbath, where I spoke about Utopia and Heaven, and Jesus and Creativity. The service included spoken word, music, artworks displayed, creative response and a piece of mime. People responded well to the service and it was good to involve more people with different creative skills and gifts, as this was one of our major aims with this exhibition.
