Song notes: Tiny Town came out of my growing frustration with the narrow confines of what was primarily considered acceptable artistic expression within the Church sub-culture. Christian artists ( musicians, authors, film makers, etc.) were presented with the choice of either pulling back and playing it safe, (thereby garnering sanction and acceptance), or else sticking to their guns and, in some instances, risking indifference, disapproval, and even unspoken ostracism (with the resultant financial hardship) as result of nonconformance to the restrictive standards within the Church's narrow artistic paradigm. For instance, work done outside the acceptable "witness to the world" trope, or the feel-good, uplifting, scripture-laden, easily understood and digestible matrix, was considered more or less taboo, (unbiblical), or interpreted as deliberate attempts to avoid the name Jesus for various nefarious reasons. I've always been surprised that more Christians, using this same logic, haven't complained about C.S. Lewis calling his Lion, in The Narnia Chronicles, "Aslan" rather than Jesus Christ. Where was Lewis's bold witness? Was he being deliberately evasive? Had he lost his first love? Had he sold out to the "secular" world? By the way, it was Lewis who said something like this: "What we don't need are more Christian books, but more good books written by Christians." Be that as it may, there are some Christian artists who have been brave enough to forge ahead with their unique, God-given, artistic visions, but the question is how many young visionaries did we lose along the way, and may be still losing, as a result of forcing them to find validation and support for their creative expression outside the Church's sanction? How many potential Scorseses, van Goghs, Dylans, Hemingways, Amsel Adamses, and Shakespeares, has the Church failed to nurture and embrace because they failed to fit into our narrow theistic criterion? On the other hand, this may have been the Church's loss, but not necessarily was, or is, it a loss in regard to the expansion of the Kingdom Of God. A providential God alone knows the answer to this question. Still, wouldn't it be a wonderful testimony to the world at large if the most cutting-edge of artists were actually proud to be associated with, supported and nurtured by, a Church known for, among other things, its beautiful, cutting edge, honest, wildly unpredictable and, at times, even controversial and subversive, artistic output?
Of course, there are always exceptions; amazing, supremely gifted individuals who continue to work, for various reasons, within the confines of the sub-culture. These are the rare artisans who remain faithful to their calling despite relative obscurity in the world at large, and who are fairly unconcerned as to the number of people (great, small, or somewhere in-between) who make up their following. Their concern is not with numbers, but with these words they hope to hear at the end of their sojourn here in this present world: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."
We've all heard it said before (in various forms) but it bears repeating: We in the church serve the very Creator of the universe and everything within it; shouldn't we, his people, his body, be the primary standard bearers of His wondrously rich, multifaceted, creativity? Shouldn't we be reflective, as sub-creators, of the highest levels of originality and cutting edge artistry, instead of stooping to regurgitate some paltry, sterile, second rate imitation of the often amazing craftsmanship found in much of what we refer to as "secular" music and art? Isn't all art, by its very existence and nature, and whether or not it has been distorted and misused, in some sense, a gift of God given to bless all the world, not just the Christian subculture? Whether the artist himself, or herself, recognizes who The Source of this gift to the world is, in many ways, irrelevant; the sun shines on both saint and sinner alike.
I've told the story before, but it also bears repeating: The first man on the street who entered the great room in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam displaying Rembrandt's massive painting, The Night Watch, fell down on his knees and began worshiping God. The painting has no religious significance, and Rembrandt felt no compulsion to paint the words "Jesus Saves" somewhere on the painting in order to meet many evangelical criterion for God-sanctioned and useful "witnessing tool" artistic expressions. Night Watch is "merely" a portrait of a local town council. To give you an example of the depth of absurdity to which this kind of thinking can lead, I once asked, (good-naturedly and off the cuff), a large concert crowd who'd come to see our band play, if anyone knew the score of a certain baseball game I was interested in. A lone voice in the back of the auditorium cried out "What about Jesus?!"
In rejecting our creative visionaries by means of engaging in small minded pious thinking on the matters I've raised here, I believe that we, (as a Church), have diminished our capacity to fully impact the world for the Kingdom of God. Because of our restrictive demands on the artist, primarily extraneous and unrelated to doctrinal error, we fail to present the culture with a testimony that more fully extols the creative splendor of an awesome, unpredictable, and creatively outrageous designer of the universe. This is what is at the heart of the song "Tiny Town."