W. David O. Taylor
24 min read ⭑
“My conviction is that artists are not more or less important to the Kingdom, but I do think they have a unique role to play within the life of the church, the Kingdom and our society. I like to say that artists are the Imagineers of our society and that they help us to imagine the world otherwise, for better and for worse.”
When W. David O. Taylor isn’t teaching seminary courses about the intersection of art and faith, he’s probably talking about it. One of the driving passions of his life is to help people understand art’s vital role in our relationships with God and to come alongside Christian artists as they find their place in the church. He pursues these goals in his work as a priest, professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of books like “A Body of Praise,” “Open and Unafraid,” “For the Beauty of the Church” and more. In this conversation with David, we’re covering a wide range of topics — from his love of sports to how poor he was in graduate school and from his raging battle with anger to his delight in unifying diverse members of Christ’s body to reach the lost. Find out how imagination has transformed his life as a Christian, pastor and scholar and which modern-day artists are helping him see Scripture in a new light.
The following is a transcript of a live interview. Responses have been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?
My hometown is Austin, Texas, and in 1992, when I was in college at the University of Texas, I started working at a Tex-Mex restaurant called Chuy’s. It’s one of the best in the business, and I spent several years in college working there. In 1995, I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, to go to seminary at a place called Region College. Every summer during my five years of seminary, I would travel back to Austin and work part time at a church, and the rest of the time, I would work at Chuy’s. I love the food. I absolutely love Mexican and Tex-Mex. I would ask the kitchen staff to tell me how they made what they made. I would ask if they could share recipes with me. Some of them were secrets of the kingdom and could not be shared, but others were free to share, or they would just give me a general sense of how to make certain things. I always thought to myself, I would love to learn how to make this myself.
In graduate school, I was very poor. To give you an example of how poor I was, my monthly food budget was $35 during my first couple of years of graduate school. In today’s terms, that’s about $55 or $60 bucks. I was very poor. I could not afford meat. I could not afford cheese. I could not afford milk. I never had enough money to go out to eat, so I lived a very sparse, Spartan life.
During my last year of seminary, I had a chance to get a couple of jobs to make a little bit more money. I lived with seven other people in a house. We lived kind of a community life together. All of us seminary students and I had just a little bit more spare money. At the end of that year, my schedule was somewhat more open because I was at the end of my studies, and right before finals week, I told my housemates that I wanted to cook for them. They said, “Yes, cook for us! Go for it.” I told them that I wanted to cook Tex-Mex, the food that I had served for years and years at this Tex-Mex restaurant, and they said, “Great.” So I bought all the ingredients and asked a couple of them to help me make it. I made homemade chicken enchiladas. I made green chili rice. I made several salsas and margaritas. We had this multi-hour feast, and it just made me so terribly happy to be able to make something for them, to bring my housemates happiness, for them to be able to share in the profound joy that I had in this kind of food.
Having grown up in Guatemala, I have these long, haunting questions like, Where do I belong? I grew up in Guatemala until I was 13 and moved to the States as an eighth grader. I felt unstable all throughout my teenage years and even into my adult years, wondering, Where do I belong on Planet Earth? And I felt Tex-Mex food — even though it’s Mexican, not Guatemalan necessarily, it’s tied to my Latin American heritage — tapped into something deep in me. The sense that food and hospitality, which is something that my mom had done for years, was some deep, true part of who I was. That meal in the spring of 2000 was one of the highlights of my entire adult life. I enjoyed the food, but even more so, I enjoyed preparing it, making it, serving it and then eating it with my friends and seeing how much laughter was shared. Guatemalan culture is a very joyful and laughter-filled culture, so to share this laughter and joy with my friends is a memory I still cherish in my heart.
Ray Shrewsberry; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?
The eighth grade was my first year to study in the U.S. in Deerfield, Illinois. At some point in that year, they gave us an aptitude vocational test in which you answer scores of questions on a blue Scantron piece of paper to figure out what you like and are good at. I didn’t really have a clear sense of what I wanted to be when I grew up. All I knew was every time a question asked, “Do you want to be outdoors?”, I always answered yes. I love sports, I love playing with my friends outdoors. I always felt very alive in nature. For the aptitude test, you answer 200 to 300 questions, send in your answers, and then it comes back and says your most likely occupation. In my case, the answer was “You’re going to be a farmer.” I wasn’t going to become a farmer. I don’t come from a family of farmers. I’ve never imagined myself a farmer. I imagined very different things for myself, so it just gave me a big laugh at the time.
Around 40 years later, my wife and I experienced a series of circumstances and bought 21 acres of land east of Austin, Texas. Never in a million years did we imagine we would want that much land. But it’s what happened and is what we felt called to acquire. My wife comes from many generations of farmers. And even though I don’t, being on this land surrounded by cornfields and millet fields, I’ve found myself coming alive in a way that I haven’t in decades. We just moved in this past March (2024), and when I started working on it, I had to learn how to run a bulldozer, run a roller, run skid steers — all of which I’ve never done in my life. I’m an academic by training and profession. I spend most of my life at a desk, reading books, writing and so on. But I’ve come alive, and now I chuckle to think back to my eighth-grade aptitude test predicting I would be a farmer. To be clear, I’m not actually a farmer — although I have great respect for them. There’s somebody farming all the fields around us named Farmer Aaron, and everyone’s asking for his insights on farming.
I’ve realized that God is in the business of bringing things to completion even though, early on in our lives, we don’t have a clear sense of how it will all hold together. In light of my love for nature and sports, one of the things that rings true for me is that I’ve always felt so alive in my body. I love to use my body. I love being outdoors. I love feeling the elements of cold and heat and snow and rain and being outside. I’ve come alive in a way that feels like being a kid again — maybe an eighth-grade kid — and happy.
I try to explore some of these things in my most recent book, “A Body of Praise.” In it, I aim to understand why we have bodies, what our bodies are for and the goodness of our bodies. But now, here on our 21 acres, I have a chance to be in my body, to work the land, to let the land work me and my body. And as a result, my heart and my mind and my sense of my life before God are getting integrated in my 50s in a way that I never imagined prior to this, so it’s very life-giving for me.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness. Every human too. We're just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you hide it?
When I was a kid, I was very cheery, buoyant and happy. I was that way through my teenage years as well. When I got to college, I found myself angry a lot. I can picture myself walking across my college campus with this low, rumbling growl — as if there were some kind of angry wolf inside of me, constantly angry and constantly on edge. Usually, it was family and close friends who would bear the brunt of these outbursts of anger. At the time, I didn’t understand those outbursts. There was no logical reason for them. I wondered, Why am I angry? Eventually, I realized there was a generational component to it. It was something my mother struggled with as well as my grandfather (her father).
After seminary, I took a position at a church in Austin as an associate pastor. A few years later, we were in a normal staff meeting — there was nothing unusual about it. A fellow pastor was saying things that, for no good reason, were rubbing me the wrong way. Then I said something, and he responded in a way that touched a wound inside of me — a deep, sad, mad place inside of me. All of a sudden, I was yelling at the top of my voice, I was shouting, and I was angrily attacking him. God bless all the other staff members. They were petrified since they had never seen me this way. They were scared, and rightly so. My friend — an older friend I’ve had my whole life — was terrified of me because I was attacking him. I couldn’t figure out in the moment how to stop myself. It was like a volcanic eruption of anger. Eventually, it subsided.
Afterward, a senior pastor — somebody I love and admire and trust — had me sit down, looked me in the eye and said, “David, I think something is happening with you and in you that we need to pay attention to, but right now, staff meeting is over, and I’d like to talk to you.” So our staff meeting stopped and everybody left. We didn’t even get to everything on the agenda.
The senior pastor, like a good shepherd, was able to care for me — which included confronting me and saying, “Hey, what you did was wrong. I think you’re going to need to do a lot of work to repair this relationship. But more important than repairing this relationship is your own well-being, your own heart, your own soul. Something’s going on that has been going on for years, and it just showed up. It’s a sign that something is not well. We are committed to walking with you, to helping you get well, because I don’t want that to happen again — not just because it’s not good for our staff to have this happen, but because I care for you.”
So he was able to shepherd the whole process of reconciliation, which thanks be to God, allowed the friendship to heal and mend, and we are friends to this day. I was encouraged to get counseling, read books and really pay attention to what was going on with this anger, where it was coming from and how God might bring about healing. I talk about this very frankly in “Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life” because I ask readers to be honest in the first chapter of the book. The Psalms demand that we be honest and point out that no true freedom and fullness of life comes without some kind of brutal honesty. And if that’s true and I’m asking my readers to be honest, then I have to lead by example.
It’s in that chapter on anger that I write about multiple outbursts of anger, of which I am embarrassed to this day. I am truly ashamed of what I did, but thanks be to God, there were people around at the time who loved me, truly cared and shepherded me. My anger has come up in my marriage and in my relationships with my kids. Still, to this day, I sometimes have these little moments of eruption, but thankfully, I have a wife who loves me well and is not afraid to tell me like it is. And I have children who love me enough to say, “Hey, Daddy, that hurt my feelings when you got mad.” And I have friends who love me enough to say, “Hey, I think you need to go talk to the therapist. Maybe something new has come up that you need to attend to.”
So anger is my besetting vice. I’m in a healthier place today in my 50s. It may be a lifelong thing that I have to pay attention to and continue in humility to ask the Holy Spirit and the people of God to help me with.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?
Public health. I never imagined, as a kid, as a teenager in my college years or even in my 20s, that God would call me to serve artists. My mother was a classical music pianist, and the arts were always a part of our home life. But I never imagined that I would grow up to be somebody who cared as much as I do today about the arts and who cares as much as I do about artists and their well-being and their flourishing. I’ve been a pastor for almost 30 years. I’ve been an academic for 10 years. I am married to an artist. My children are artists. My friends are artists. I have had the privilege of writing books related to the arts. The first book I ever edited — called “For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts” — was the first attempt to explore the place of the arts in the life of the church. A book I wrote called “Glimpses of the New Creation” explores the arts within church worship. I’ve edited a number of other books that artists have contributed to.
My conviction is that artists are not more or less important to the Kingdom, but I do think they have a unique role to play within the life of the church, the Kingdom and our society. I like to say that artists are the Imagineers of our society and that they help us to imagine the world otherwise, for better and for worse.
One of the questions I ask artists on a regular basis is “How can you help us imagine what might be in our world — the empirical evidence notwithstanding — so that we could glimpse signs and experience a foretaste of the fullness of the Kingdom of God?” That’s an abiding passion of mine because my lifelong calling is to serve artists — both those who feel called to serve the church in explicit ways and those who feel called to work in different industries and fields of the arts. I want to come alongside them to equip and resource them and to build bridges.
This is what keeps me up at night — in a joyful way. This is what I dream about: ways to continue serving artists. I do it because God has purposes for their lives individually but also because I believe they have such an invaluable role within the life of the church, the Kingdom and society to help us. As I said, they can help us imagine how the Kingdom of God might become viable and hirable and malleable and capable and touchable, real and consequential in our lives. So that is my passion today. It has been my passion for the last three decades. It will be my passion, I think, to the end of my days. And I’m deeply grateful for the opportunities I’ve had and will continue to remain grateful for any opportunities God offers me in the years to come.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Cashiers, CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it's God when it happens?
I feel fully alive and sense the Spirit of God in me and working in and through me by grace when I bring people together. It’s something I started doing when I was a teenager in high school. In my senior year of high school, I was the president of what was called the Christian Union in our public high school. One of the things I deeply wanted to do as a teenager was to bring kids from different churches — Baptist, Methodist, Apostles and so on — to come together, pray, fellowship and discover ways that we could reach the lost together. I kept doing it in high school and when I was at the University of Texas (UT). I got so much joy from being with Christians from different ecclesial communities, theological commitments, and family and cultural backgrounds and saying, “Hey, what could we do together in Jesus’ name to bear witness on the South campus in Texas?”
It reminds me of the words inscribed on the tower of UT’s main building: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” There’s no name given to that quote, but we knew, of course, that it was Jesus who said it. So that was the work I did, and I felt so profoundly alive when I did it. I did it in seminary, too, when I was a pastor. I was always trying to figure out how artists from other church communities could forge friendships and build partnerships in Jesus’ name. That didn’t mean we had to agree on everything. It didn’t mean we had to like everything about each other. All of us — Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and charismatics — would often gather over a meal because that was usually the secret sauce helping us feel somewhat at home with people who otherwise would be a little bit more suspicious to us. In that context, we could discuss: “Is there one thing that we could do in Jesus’ name to bear witness to the goodness and grace of Jesus Christ in our time, in our place?”
That desire for mission-driven unity is also why I did the Bono & Eugene Peterson project. I wanted to bring some unlikely characters together (even though they were aware of each other). I wanted to bring them together to bear witness to, in their case, the goodness and the truth and the beauty and power of the Psalms. But beyond that, my hope was that the short film would show people that it’s possible in the Kingdom of God for unlikely bedfellows to be at the table together. There are plenty of things that Eugene and Bono would disagree about — plenty — but they came together in their shared love of the Psalms, what the Psalms meant for them personally and the Good News that the Psalms could be in the world. My hope was that the short film would continue to bear witness that, in Jesus’ name, all things can be held together in Christ. Seemingly irreconcilable people and communities could be reconciled.
In our time, there is plenty of evidence of Christians being at odds, perceiving each other as enemies of the gospel. But I do believe that one of the central callings of my life — when I feel most alive and sense the Spirit’s presence in my life — is doing whatever I can to bring members of Christ’s body together to say, “Hey, what’s one thing we could do to bear witness to the unity that Christ prays for us in perpetuity and which he by his Spirit can only truly achieve?” That is the place where I get so wonderfully energized.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So spill it, which spiritual practice is workin' best for you right now?
When COVID shut the world down in March of 2020, one of the spiritual disciplines I adopted as a way to help myself to feel present — present to God, to people around me and to myself — and not to completely freak out with the unpredictability was writing prayers. This is something that I had done before. It’s something that I taught my students to do, but it’s not something that I grew up with. I grew up in a nondenominational world where the only kinds of prayers that we really prayed were spontaneous prayers. I continue to pray spontaneous prayers. I was a pastor of the charismatic church and have witnessed very beautiful, spontaneous prayers. I believe that they’re biblically true, and Christians have been praying them for centuries. But it wasn’t until I became an Anglican while in seminary 25 years ago that I discovered the beauty and the power of a written prayer. I also discovered that written prayers are intrinsic to Scripture. The Psalms are all written prayers, and we continue to sing and pray them millennia later.
One of the great written prayers is in Matthew 6. The disciples say, “Teach us how to pray.” He gave them a prayer — which we call the Lord’s Prayer or Our Father — and we continue to pray that written prayer. But my tradition just couldn’t wrap its head around the fact that those are written prayers. There’s something really unique in the ways that written prayers can disciple us and, in a sense, give us language for what we don’t know how to say at the moment. They’re a gift that members of Christ’s body bequeath to us down through the centuries. So when COVID happened in March of 2020, I simply started writing out prayers as a way to try to put pen to paper, asking, What is it that I’m feeling? What am I thinking? What do I want to say to God, and what do I want God to say to me? I use language from the Psalms. I use language from the prophets. I use language from the Gospels and the epistles to guide my writing.
As the weeks and months went on and I would post these on social media, I started getting requests. People in the medical field would write to me and say, “Hey, it is a very anxious world in hospitals and elsewhere. Would you write a prayer for us?” I had somebody reach out and say, “Would you write a prayer for garbage collectors because they’re exposed?” I had moms and dads and schoolteachers write and say, “Hey, the fall is coming, and we don’t know what school is going to look like. Would you write prayers for us?” And then people would write in and say, “Hey, my dad died from COVID-related circumstances. It’s a shock to all of us. Would you write a prayer for us?”
So I just kept writing prayers to present myself but also to present friends or strangers to God. As a pastor, I offer the sorrows and the joys and the fears and the hopes of God’s people back to God himself. Then I ended up writing prayers for all sorts of circumstances. For midlife crises or children who have abandoned the faith or strength to accomplish an impossible task. Pastors started asking me to write prayers for them, so I wrote one for letting go of the “would’ve, could’ve, should’ve” or for beginnings and endings or for when things don’t go according to plan. Then parents started saying, “Hey, I have infants whose diapers I change all night. Would you write a prayer for me?” So I wrote for changing diapers in the middle of night or going on vacation or job interviews or driving through traffic.
Then the election happened in the fall of 2020, so I started writing prayers for our wounded country, for grace between believers across political lines, for strained family Thanksgiving meals, for marriages where people disagreed with each other politically, or for cynics, skeptics and other people leaving the church. I wrote prayers for children. I wrote prayers for people in the public square. Eventually, I had over 400 written prayers, and my wife said, “Maybe those prayers could help other people in a book instead of sitting on your hard drive or floating through social media.” It was at that point that we pitched the idea to InterVarsity Press and they finally said yes. It turned into the book “Prayers for the Pilgrimage.”
My wife’s spiritual discipline when COVID happened was painting. She’s a visual artist, and that was a way for her to remain grounded and present to God. Eventually, we realized the book could be a combination of words and images. One of the themes that she had been painting was little miniature houses in vast landscapes. It was a way for her to picture how God tabernacles — that is, makes his home with us — in often the most unlikely places. She wanted to be able to capture in visual form the idea that, whatever our life circumstances are, God can make his home with us.
The other theme she used was very thin, gold filigree that would descend from the top of the painting and intercept Earth in ways that you might not notice unless you looked very closely. It captured this idea that God is making us his home and that the Kingdom of God is established in heaven and on Earth again — despite what we see now. In our personal lives, families, churches or country, we might not see evidence of the goodness and grace of God. So for her, these thin elements of gold coming down is her way of saying, “No, the Lord is faithful. He is present. He is at work in the world, but we need eyes to see it.”
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources — lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff too. What are some resources that have impacted you?
Two people who have been deeply formative for me as a Christian are Eugene Peterson and pastor-novelist Frederick Buechner. Again, I was not raised in a church tradition that valued imagination and the arts. I read Eugene Peterson’s writing for the first time in 1993 — an essay on how the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky had shaped his pastoral imagination. That was a paradigm shift for me. I never heard any pastor talk about the benefits of novels. If anything, novels were a form of escape and not a formative influence.
Since then, Eugene Peterson has helped me understand how important imagination is to the Christian life, the Gospels and Jesus’ own ministry. All the stories that Jesus tells are imagination stories, focusing on “as if” or “what if.” For example, what if the Kingdom of God were like this woman or that seed or this encounter with a stranger on the way? To have someone like Eugene come along and say, “The goodness of imagination is endemic to Scripture” changed things for me. A few examples include “Praying with the Psalms,” “Answering God,” “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction” or a collection of essays in which he tries to make sense of the relationship between his pastoral calling and the arts called “Subversive Spirituality.” They’re very helpful to me personally and professionally as a pastor and scholar to understand the power and the goodness of imagination in our spiritual formation.
Then there’s Frederick Buechner. He was a Presbyterian pastor. He passed away a few years ago, but I think his main gift to the body of Christ was his collection of memoirs. He came from a very broken and profoundly dysfunctional family. His father was an angry — and in some ways, abusive — man who later committed suicide. In response to that, his mother’s cardinal rule was “Thou shalt never talk about it.” It wasn’t until he was an adult that he had the courage to begin making sense of his father’s suicide. He wrote a trilogy of memoirs titled “Family Album: The Sacred Journey, Now and Then, Telling Secrets.”
I read those when I was in my 20s, and I don’t think I’d ever encountered a memoirist, pastor or theologian who was that brutally honest. He didn’t hide all the dark, scary, ugly aspects of his life. He wrote about it in a way that was neither sensationalist nor exhibitionist, and he didn’t hide, polish, edit or tidy it up in any way. He simply said, “This is my life, as broken and ugly as it has been, and this is how the grace of God shows up.” I found that incredibly freeing for myself personally, and it’s also informed my life and calling as a pastor and academic. So Eugene Peterson and Frederick Buechner have been wonderful resources for me.
We all have things we cling to to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season — and tell us what it's done for you.
I have three. The first one, which I think will be very familiar to folks, is the Bible Project. I think what their team is doing is fantastic. The ways in which they’ve brought the stories of Scripture alive through images and videos and film and animation — I just think they’re amazing. They’re one of the best things that have happened to the early 21st century. Kids obviously benefit from it, but adults can also use their resources to understand how the stories of Scripture hold together. I think it’s a beautiful, powerful example of how art and faith and Scripture come together to serve the body of Christ.
The second is a resource that may be less familiar. It’s run by a group of folks at King’s College in London. It’s called The Visual Commentary on Scripture. They ask individuals to find three very different works of visual art and bring them into conversation with one text in Scripture. A biblical story, a passage of Scripture or sometimes difficult aspects of Scripture come alive or make sense in the ways that visual artists have represented them either directly or indirectly. I think it’s an amazing resource, especially for pastors and teachers, to be able to use in their preaching, teaching and ministry. They can use these images to say, “Hey, perhaps it’s hard to see how this makes sense, but what about this artwork? How can this artwork help us to make sense or bring meaning to aspects of Scripture?”
Then there are some individual artists using the visual arts to make Scripture and theology come alive. Joel Schoon-Tanis has an incredibly playful way of making the gospel come alive, especially for kids. It’s reminiscent of Pixar and targets kids, but adults can also enjoy it. He uses Western classical painting styles with very childlike scribbles — the kind of drawings that 5-year-olds make — and he writes the gospel story and the stories that Jesus tells with spelling that maybe a 6-year-old would use. They are so playful and delightful and winsome as a way to help the gospel stories come to life for kids and adults.
Kreg Yingst does linocut woodcuts. He’s done one of all 150 Psalms and the Gospels to help us re-see the meaning and power of Scripture through visual art. Lots of artists in a ministry called The Rabbit Room have done that, so I find those immensely helpful. I’m naturally drawn toward art and faith resources. I also find other kinds of resources helpful, but I like recommending these to folks because they might be less familiar with them. I just love the way they provide a fresh encounter with Scriptures that may seem overly familiar.
QUESTION #8: dream
God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
Honestly, the thing for me is our 21 acres of land. As my wife and I have reminded each other, we’re engaged in a project of cultivation and hospitality with this land that’s going to extend beyond our own lifetimes. We’re planting trees that will not come to their fullness for 10, 20, 30 years. God willing, I’ll still be around, but we’re planting things that will require an extraordinary amount of patience and imagination to say, “OK, all these little things will eventually look like this in their fullest fruition.”
One of the hopes that we have is to return this land that has been farmed for decades to its original prairie land ecosystem. That will involve burning the land down, which is one of the techniques that is used in conservation efforts, reseeding it, and then doing this season after season after season so that eventually all the native grasses, flowers, bushes and trees have a fighting chance to take root. That, in turn, will draw indigenous insects, birds and animal life to it.
I'm excited to see how rhythms of nature and prayer will come into being in my own life — how the work of hospitality that my wife and I are doing to the land will translate into new practices of hospitality with people. Or how manual labor will inform my scholarly labor. (Every weekend, I work the land with my hands or with machinery.) Or how watching creation come alive slowly but surely will form my creative activity. I'm excited to see how, as I attune myself to the rhythms of land and gardening and farming, I find myself doing less and slowing down more. With God’s help, I’m figuring out how to be more present in the present rather than always charging at a million miles into the future and, in consequence, not really savoring or cherishing or attending to what is here and now. Those of us who are parents know that this life goes by so fast. So I’m hoping that working on the land will translate into muscles and habits that help me be more present in each season of life with my children.
I’m not a farmer. I’m not a gardener. But I do think that God’s creation on this 21 acres of land has a great deal to teach me, and I'm excited to see how it will show up. I have no idea how it will show up, but I'm excited to have it show up in my teaching and writing and preaching ministries.
Who was the first person to incorporate art into faith? No, it wasn’t Michelangelo. Or whoever carved Christian symbols into the walls of second-century Roman catacombs. Or even King David.
You could argue that the very first person who ever lived never distinguished faith from art. From naming the animals to cultivating the Garden of Eden, Adam used his creativity to love and obey God — until sin interrupted that divine connection. Selfishness, sin and cruelty seeped into artistic expression, tainting what was meant to be a form of worship.
But in Christ, that creative heritage is restored, and we can experience more of him in art that we and others create. From music to visual arts to dancing to writing and more, each artistic expression is a chance to delight in God and point others to him. Will you?
David Taylor is a theologian, author, speaker, priest and director of initiatives in art and faith. A professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, he has lectured widely on the arts, from Thailand to South Africa. He has written for The Washington Post, Image Journal, Theology Today, Worship, Religion News Service, Christianity Today and Books & Culture, among other publications. He lives in Austin with his wife, Phaedra, a visual artist and gardener, along with his daughter, Blythe, and son, Sebastian.
