November 12, 1999

By J. Martin Bailey

CLEVELAND—Throughout its half century of history, the National Council of Churches has helped the Christian community in America affirm and express its faith through the arts.

In its early, more affluent years, there were formal and funded programs that pioneered in encounters with the arts and with artists. One celebrated the interaction between worship and the arts. The somewhat controversial efforts of Roger Ortmayer and others were both provocative and prophetic. The financial and moral support of persons like J. Irwin Miller, and the collaboration of museum directors like Alfred Barr had a lasting impact.

I recall one intense discussion that involved Roger and some of the staff of what was then the NCC Division of Christian Education. A special issue of the Council’s International Journal of Religious Education was to be devoted to the visual arts. The hot debate concerned what should appear on the cover of the IJRE. Some committee members felt that the prime example of religious art was Sallman’s "Head of Christ." In those days, millions of copies of Sunday church school materials were illustrated with stereotypical biblical scenes. With the prodding of Roger and others, the editors finally placed Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" on the cover, supporting it by quotes from a Paul Tillich essay that defined religious art as more than biblical illustration, as that which evoked a vision of God’s creative grace.

Some of the same persons worked with the Art Institute in Chicago, mounting a massive exhibit that drew thousands of visitors during the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Evanston in 1954. That widely advertised show proclaimed an emerging theological interest in the arts that also was expressed in seminary classrooms across the land.

Music, poetry, dance, theatre and architecture were other art forms that the Council reclaimed for the church in the fifties and sixties. I say reclaimed because during the Great Depression and war years, the arts suffered their own dust-bowl experience in middle America and people of faith seemed to be satisfied with a very bland diet.

A prominent program in the Council at that time, stimulated by leaders like Truman Douglass and Scott Risdon, was in the field of church architecture. Hundreds of new church buildings were being constructed in the immediate post war years, and NCC urged a choice between catalog pre-fab houses of worship and striking contemporary expressions of faith in concrete and glass. I once complained that there were so few exciting new buildings among mainline Protestants; a colleague suggested that creedal churches, who were clear about their beliefs, could afford to take greater risks with their buildings.

Photography, too, became a significant art and communication form—especially during the struggle for civil rights. The brilliant and courageous Ken Thompson, working with the Commission on Racial Justice, documented the church’s involvement in that movement with black and white photographs of museum quality. They were published far and wide as were the images captured on film by John Taylor, an American who worked with the World Council of Churches in Geneva.

So here in Cleveland, on the 50th anniversary of the Council, it is a joy to see and hear and participate in a fresh encounter of "arts, artists and creative ecumenism." There may no longer be departments in the Council or in most communions that focus specifically on the arts. But happily it is not uncommon for local congregations to commission music and sculpture and even to provide studio space for "artists in residence." Some of these contemporary programs in seminaries and local churches clearly have their roots in the pioneering work that was done in the early years of the National Council of Churches.

(J. Martin Bailey began his work with the Council on the staff of the International Journal of Religious Education. When he retired in 1994 he was Associate General Secretary for Education, Communication and Discipleship.)