As much as we may try, we often plant the same seeds everywhere we go. This is not a new idea. The old “bring it—teach it” paradigm is like a gardener with a single kind of seed, planting freely and assuming it will flourish in any soil. Energy is exhausted trying to replicate the same garden everywhere, when instead we should be finding and encouraging, discovering and cultivating what God is already causing to grow in that place.
We have moved past the old “bring it—teach it” mentality when it comes to artistic expressions, and that’s as it should be. But I’ve been pondering the temptations in our methodology to return to the comfort of that way of thinking. It’s easy, and low-effort. Perhaps we don’t bring foreign arts and teach them, but what about our methodologies? Is “ethnoarts” a methodology or a mindset?
In Indonesia, we’ve achieved some success, conducting dozens of songwriting workshops across the archipelago in the past decade and facilitating the composition of numerous local-language and -style songs through various events. I’m thrilled to see this aspect of ethnoarts embraced in Bible translation programs in Indonesia and to work alongside a great team. But I’m pondering what assumptions might lie behind that, to replicate what has worked elsewhere automatically. In Indonesia and elsewhere, we can read about success or experience it ourselves, and too quickly assume the same things will work here, too, in a new place.
But this gets the order of our thinking backward. The danger lies in defaulting to a pre-packaged solution, even though it might be a good one that values local artistic expressions. Rather, we should start with the community’s situation and discover a way forward together. We should come to methodologies from our situations and explore what resonates. And then, with the community, we find a potential solution—or at least something to try together.
I want to soften this, though. Sometimes, we’ve started with less-than-best, and there is a time and place to “do something” to catalyze the conversation. Excessive idealism can be paralyzing. In Indonesia, sometimes songwriting workshops were not the correct answer, but even so, they provided an opportunity for us to show up and open conversations with the community. Because we engaged, better things came later—more aligned with the situation.
I’ve been pondering this solution-vs-situation dichotomy, a near cousin of process-vs-product. Solutions emphasize products, and in some cases (like songwriting workshops), language programs love them because they seem quantifiable. Situations, though, include the messiness of process and relationship. I can throw a product at a problem as a solution, but process is about transformation. Where product is a static object, process lives in time. And time is where change happens, where flourishing begins.
The temptation is to see people as objects, and to freeze situations into still images so we can find the right solution, the right product. Thinking about situations and processes acknowledges that people are subjects-in-relationship, moving through time. Jesus looked at people not as objects, but as fellow subjects and imago Dei. And in the Trinity, we see the foundations for relationship, which points us beyond looking narrowly at the problem at our feet, lifting our gaze to see the bigger picture.
I want to encourage us to look at the messiness of situations and to thrive on the process. We now have numerous great resources available, including programs at several universities, frequent Arts for a Better Future workshops, the Sparking Creativity podcast, and a second edition of Creating Local Arts Together. And sometimes, we need to take decisive action and get started. But if we choose a solution and then look to our foundations for justification, we have it the wrong way around. Remain winsome and curious, and consider the situations we find ourselves in. Then, we can humbly walk alongside communities as they journey toward a better future.
So we return to the picture of a garden. The great temptation in our work is not necessarily to plant the same seed everywhere—we have moved beyond that. But we can still be tempted to create a methodological monoculture—to apply the same successful technique, the same workshop model, the same solution to every unique plot of ground we encounter. This may appear efficient and yield a quantifiable “crop” for a season, but because it overlooks the specific ecology of each situation—the unique history, relationships, spiritual landscape, and artistic vocabulary—it is fragile and unhealthy. Embracing the situation and the process is an act of faith as we garden alongside the community. It’s not defined by a single, repeatable thing, but by complex, wild, and diverse life-giving relationships. Our goal should not be to master a single, replicable solution, but to join communities in becoming patient stewards of a creative ecosystem.
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