by Thomas Kinkade

Bonnie Tylerâ€™s Total Eclipse of the Heart pumps out of the battered speakers of a portable boom box. A young woman is approached by another young woman wearing sunglasses and a sign around her neck that says Drugs (in French). The skit progresses through a series of people with signs (drugs, sex, abuse) with each interaction ending with the person taking off their sign and placing it around the neck of the young woman. The last sign is worn by me. It says suicide. But before she takes my sign, Jesus appears and saves her, taking all of her signs on himself.

Our stage is brown tiled floor in a tiny church in a small city in France. We are doing a show for the congregation and their invited guests as part of a spring break mission trip. This sketch is one of our final pieces and the one that packs the most emotional punch.

As we finish the sketch I am amped up from the thrill of performing. This show is the capstone of a week of performances in churches and on the streets all over France. It feels like what we are doing matters, that the stories we are telling are powerful, that these performances have the power to change the world.

I thought that our art meant something. I thought that it was revolutionary. Honestly, compared to what else was happening it was. From the time I started doing drama in church I was repulsed by the simplicity of the scripts available. They were cheesy and trite. They had easy solutions and the lives of the characters were shallow. So I started to write my own scripts and in them I tackled the big stuff; sexuality, depression, suicide, death.

I still remember people coming up to me after I performed in tears. They told me stories about their friends and every conversation ended the same way, â€œNo one in our church is talking about stuff like this.â€

I look back on those scripts now and I cringe. They all ended basically the same way, either some got â€œsavedâ€ or they gave their life back to God and things got better. It was better than the stuff that was out there, but not by much. (And really, if youâ€™re competing with Amish romance novels and the Left Behind series, being not much better is still kind of huge.)

The thing is, I really believed that those skits would change people. I really believed in the power of art. But truthfully most of the things I wrote werenâ€™t art, they were propaganda. The conclusion was decided before I even put pen to paper. Now, to be sure, propaganda done well can be compelling, but there is a hollowness to it. It dissolves in the rain of truth.

I often wrote about things I had never experienced. I wrote of pain I hadnâ€™t known.

These days I still believe in the power of art, but I donâ€™t want to be a Christian artist. I donâ€™t want to produce writing that is safe for evangelical consumption. I donâ€™t want to water down my message so it can be commodified and sold on the shelves of Lifeway Christian stores. I donâ€™t want to have to compromise my humanity in order to sell my story to the church.

Art is dangerous. It challenges our thinking and our preconceived notions. It shakes us out of our complacency. It makes up empathize not only with people who are different than us but with people we might disagree with (or even hate).

I donâ€™t want to be a Christian artist because of all that it implies. It implies that Jesus instantly makes everything better. It implies that my life is sanitized and happy all of the time. It implies that I donâ€™t ever curse or drink or weep or get angry. It implies that I already know the ending, not only of the art that I produce, but of my life as well.

There is no clean narrative to my story and I have no desire to reduce myself to make the audience comfortable. I cannot fit myself into the acceptable narrative. My life and my art donâ€™t fit into those boxes. Itâ€™s messy and complicated. It continues to be full of pain. There is ambiguity and uncertainty. The ending is unknown.

My art has to include all of it. The death and the resurrection. The violence and the peace. The pain and the glory.

But the weird thing is, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I cannot separate my faith from my art. The themes that nurture and nourish my life are themes that I learned from my faith. Death and resurrection. Sin and grace. Brokenness and healing.

My life and my art must embrace all of this.

Madeleine Lâ€™Engle (my patron saint) has an amazing book called Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. One of the many brilliant quotes in that book is this: â€œThere is nothing so secular that is cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the incarnation.â€

I don’t want any forgone conclusions. I don’t want trite endings. I want to write about it all; the pain and the pleasure, the mystery, the passion, the agony. I want there to be space for questions and doubts.

I believe art can change the world so long as we tell the whole truth.

I want to tell the truth.