Life and Culture Series

These are remarks delivered to introduce conductor John Mason Hodges as the first Birmingham Life and Culture speaker.

This is the first of what we hope will be an annual lecture on the arts and culture. Each year, we’ll bring a painter, musician, poet, sculptor, novelist, critic, architect, or scholar to Birmingham to teach us what it means to engage the arts and culture Christianly.

We all know our culture is decadent, if not deranged. As Christians, we cannot be satisfied with critique, important as it is. In our chaotic time, we must be even more concerned to encourage churches to be centers of creative cultural formation.

This is nothing new. The church has been a powerful cultural force from her beginning. Inspired by the Bible and the liturgy, Christians invented new forms of architecture, wrote captivating poetry, colored glass to fill cathedrals with unearthly light and painted canvases and ceilings to tell the story of God’s ways with the world. Christians cultivated new modes of education, created new languages and refreshed old one, pursued new disciplines of scholarship, formulated laws, advocated justice for the weak, and molded godly habits in daily life.

Nowhere is Christianity’s imprint more obvious than in the history of Western music, one of church’s greatest gifts to the world. And so it’s fitting that we launch this lecture series by focusing on what Luther called “the noble art of music,” which, next to the Word of God, he considered “the greatest treasure in the world.”