After talking with FeaturedArtist: Troy Rowe last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of artists helping out ministries and missionaries… Here are some thoughts from June 2009 about artists initiating contact (with annotations in orange)…
"This is Joe, let me tell you his story..." Tree by brionnasweetie2 on flickr
Do you know any missionaries… personally?
I remember the very first conversation that I ever had with a missionary… I was 11. The conversation was about Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, which had just hit theaters. He was excited about the movie and I was feeling very mature because a bona-fide grown-up was having a conversation with me.
One minute we were debating whether Darth Vader was lying about being Luke’s father… the next minute, we were talking about hand-carved jewelry from Sri Lanka and how selling it was changing the socio-economic landscape of the village where he worked.
It’s been like that with virtually every missionary that I’ve known or talked to… They simply can’t help but tell their story.
Let’s help them…
Phil Cooke observes that “branding” is the visual hook for your story (in his book, Branding Faith: Why Some Churches and Non-profits Impact Culture and Others Don’t). What a number of independent missionaries need is a branded presentation that provides audiences with a visual hook. For a skilled graphics designer, this isn’t much more than a doodle. I work with a missions organization that recently had a pro designer volunteer to rework the branding… it has had a tremendous impact.
The other thing that could really change the impact of a missions presentation is a video or some quality photo images. We’re going to talk later in the week with a student filmmaker who has put together a brief documentary-style presentation for a missionary. Watch that video here. It presents the vision and mission in a powerful and engaging way that makes a great opener for the missionary’s presentation…
I mentioned poor photo quality yesterday and I wanted to touch on that again. Church groups that go on mission trips should take a photographer and let that be her designated job for the duration of the trip. I have been trawling through Flickr.com, looking for mission trip photos to invite to our Flickr Friday slideshow. There are LOTS of photos of the “people on the team” but almost never any with the missionary and very few good shots of the people being served. In other words, the photos are for the home church, not the missionary. I met a guy on Flickr who goes on missions trips with his church as “the photographer” and I’ll be sharing his story in the FeaturedArtist slot sometime in November…
This is where the focus needs to change and this is the practical reason that the artist should initiate contact with the missionary. We’ve got to find out what his story is… then we’ll know which photos to take, what footage to grab, which of the people being served has a story that the missionary likes to tell in presentations.
The other reason that we need to initiate contact is spiritual… Artists have so-called critical thoughts like, I could take a better photo than that one, often because the Holy Spirit is speaking to our hearts about a need we can fill in that person’s ministry. Initiating contact becomes a matter of obedience to God.
In the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt 25:31-46), Jesus makes it clear that once we become aware of a need, we are responsible to meet it as if it were Jesus himself in need. These missionaries that we’re talking about live that out in their daily lives and we can contribute to that work in ways that are empowering and engaging.
And remember that offering the works of our bodies as living sacrifices is our own spiritual act of worship (Rom 12:1)…
Are you getting any ideas?
