c. 1998 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel, da Vinci had”The Last Supper,”and Tom Jennings has Manhattan’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church and his piano, where a bit of soul and a splash of Otis Redding dance along the keys during worship services.

Redeemer, which meets on the campus of Hunter College, is, along with”daughter church”Village Presbyterian, the New York home of the International Arts Movement, or, not coincidentally, IAM, one of the Hebrew Bible’s name for God. IAM is a multinational network of artists dedicated to bringing artistic talent into the church as well as bringing the church to the creative arts community.

The uninitiated walking into Redeemer find each week 2,100 worshipers and hear what may be New York’s finest gospel jazz ensemble. It’s a concept that seems to work quite well.

But Jennings, the church pianist, says Redeemer’s blend of the arts and worship isn’t about building a megachurch but about quality and that’s why the church serves as the New York-base for IAM.”I don’t buy into the megachurch approach, which says find something people want to hear and can understand and give it to them,”said Jennings.”If that were the case, I’d have a rap group up there.” IAM was founded in Tokyo and works with Campus Crusade for Christ in Tokyo,as well as Redeemer and the Village Church, Reedemer’s”daughter”church in lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The group’s goal is to”bathe the arts community with biblical prayer”and to”seek cultural renewal through establishing a standard of excellence in the arts … by living out the gospel in both words and deeds,”according to the group’s vision statement.

At Redeemer, the arts take center stage. Just ask the estimated 200 artists, four or five Rockettes, half-dozen soap opera actors and the church deacon who has a leading role in the Broadway musical”Jekyll and Hyde”_ all of whom call the congregation home.”There are two kinds of art,”said the Rev. Tim Keller, Redeemer’s senior pastor.”There’s art that depicts Christ, and art that depicts the world with Christ in it. That’s what we try to do.” The 7-year-old IAM seeks to reach artists who have either left the church or never found it because they feel traditional churches do not or cannot foster artistic expression, said IAM founder and director Mako Fujimora.”We’re not saying you have to understand the arts to be a Christian,”Fujimora said.”But at a core theological level, creativity is not an extracurricular thing, but it really defines a person.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

Fujimora, for example, is heading to Japan this month to work with Japanese”anime”animators and advertising executives to develop an animated evangelism series for Japanese youth.”We’re trying to get under the skin by going in under the radar,”Fujimora said.”We’re using a back-door approach … to reach something that’s a very deep-felt need.” Fujimora said IAM uses a”renaissance perspective”to reach both American and Japanese artists by employing unconventional techniques like animation to reach the artistic community.

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Tom Kurilla, a Manhattan jewelry designer who specializes in Christian crosses, works with Fujimora and heads up Redeemer’s IAM ministry.”When I became a Christian, I lost a lot of my art school friends,”Kurilla said.”Artists are seekers, they’re looking for perfection … and what we want to look at is our motive and who you’re doing it for _ to glorify God or yourself? We’re choosing to glorify God with our art.” IAM’s”urban missionaries”work to form artistic networks to offer discussions on Christianity, learn from secular artists and”reason the gospel”with a community that has largely been or felt left out of traditional churches.

Redeemer, for example, often features”Open Forums”at their Sunday night services, with activities ranging from Broadway stars sharing their talent to a recent workshop on relationships entitled,”Men are from Queens, Women are from Brooklyn.” And you won’t find the traditional _ some might call it stodgy _ hymns at Redeemer. The words are there, but Jennings and his ensemble match the lyrics with new jazzier melodies, or drop the hymns altogether for more contemporary songs and choruses.”Artists help us to see the gospel in a different way,”Jennings said.”They serve the function of turning intellectual knowledge into something beautiful and something that touches us. We need people like that (in the church).””God gave the music to make this a more livable place,”the pianist added.”That’s the language we use.” Less traditional, more free-style worship services _ even jazz services _ are nothing new for some Christian churches as they try to reach younger audiences. But such innovation frequently comes at the cost of theology. Not so at Reedemer, a Presbyterian Church in America congregation whose conservative, evangelical theology is not compromised to attractive the consumer-oriented”me”generation.”The gospel isn’t just for conversion, it’s for all of life,”said Fujimora. In the Gospels, he said,”… we experience humanity at its broadest, deepest level, and that means we become highly creative people. There’s a cultural dynamic at work, and how that creativity is played out is different for different people.”

DEA END ECKSTROM