Calling all Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church Artists! 

Yes! I’m talking to you!

Most of us don’t think of ourselves as artists—we don’t spend our days using color or form to produce beautiful images or objects that others contemplate to find meaning. Yet, many Christian thinkers have used the term “artist” to help us imagine what living fully and joyfully into God’s call for us might look like. 

An artist is not just someone who produces beautiful things. Artists create. Out of their sense of connection to truth, to goodness, to some inspiring spirit, they bring forth something real that they cannot help but share with the world.

As Christians, we are called to connect with the truth God offers us, we long for (and sometimes even receive) experiences of God’s goodness, and we are meant to allow God’s Holy Spirit to move in and through us. What is the result of all this? Is there nothing that we can’t help but create, to share with everyone around us?

I hope you’ll join us this Sunday as we explore the art that might be waiting to burst forth from all of us. Come imagine what God might be calling you to create for the world!

Peace,

Hardy

Theme for Sunday

Creativity takes courage—courage to explore one’s deepest self and to let in the depths of the world’s struggles and joys, torments and agony. Rilke put it this way: ‘Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes…. This sort of derangement, which is peculiar to us, must go into our work.’ The artist, he dares tell us, faces derangement itself. Artists need encouragement, the building up of courage, that community can lend us. The artist in each of us needs and deserves attention in order to build up the heart.

 

--Matthew Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet