Something to Think About

One of the first things I learned when I entered the Interior Design Program at The University of Alabama was that in certain philosophies of interior design ornamentation should carry meaning, an idea which certainly appealed to me. This was a response against those earlier design philosophies such as French Rococo which said that if a little ornamentation was good, more ornamentation was even better.

The subject came up when I was on Spring Break Outreach with Chi Alpha at Florida State University my Senior Year of College.

We had done a mime routine a bit earlier, and were fitted out in black clothes and white make-up. I wandered with one of our guys around the green searching for students to talk to.

"Why the white make-up?" a young man asked. We explained to him what we had been doing, talked a little bit about University life, as well as our designated courses of study, those things all students have in common. There was a pause, and I said to him, "You know, in interior design I learned that all ornamentation should carry meaning, and yet here I am wearing white make-up. It has no meaning. In a sense this make-up is a violation of my principles as a Christian, one of which is to be honest and transparent in the way that I face the world. What do you think of that?"

From the outside this may not seem like much of an evangelical message, but I believe it opened up the conversation and showed this guy that we were willing to treat him like an actual person we had met instead of as a stop on some imaginary evangelical pilgrimage. (It must have been the work of the Holy Spirit, because I am not very evangelical as a rule.)

I'm thinking about this incident in a couple of ways as we approach the subject of relationship evangelism at Grace Church in the following weeks.

In one sense I'd like us to discuss how ornamentation carries meaning in our lives as Christians as we face the world from day to day. Lauren Winner has a lovely little book called Mudhouse Sabbath that applies to this in some ways. It talks about ways that certain Jewish traditions can be profitably incorporated by the Church.

The other way I'd like to discuss this is in terms of different evangelical techniques that we have tried, the ways that they have been effective, when they are appropriate and when they are not. Mime, for example, can work beautifully in some cases, and in others it may be offensive (in a detrimental way: remember not all offense is detrimental) because it uses artifice to convey an extremely didactic message.

Discussion?