This is a chapter from a series of essays, perhaps a book, called “Which Art in Heaven”. I wrote most of it three or four years ago (apart from an obvious updated reference) and have been exploring its meaning with hungry artists since then. Why? I have this theory about being lost, it says that we become lost, usually, not because we don’t know where we are going, but because we don’t know where we are. (Any similarities or ironies about emergent church are yours to explore!)

But for the last eight or ten years I have been fairly convicted that God has much to say to artists because there is much that we can say, and do, that cannot be done in other ways.

In a sense, what I am exploring is the drift of Brueggemann, that when the voices of authority fail, finally, God sends his poets. My only request is that you realise that I am neither a theologian nor philosopher by training, I am an artist, a writer, and I claim with conviction that I am completely right, and utterly wrong, but I have no idea in what proportions.

Like anything else that bears the name of church, artist Christians stand as...

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Tom