How We Think
Reluctant step from lush comforts of Eden onto acid-dry mud of broken desert, Imago Dei cracked and shadowed
Scabby feet trudge under the infinite weight of Law, then sprint beaming through YHWH’s burying and erupting to deep, freshening breaths, still somehow caged
Now we direct every sense and cell to crushed Eden restored, matured, crafted into God’s city.
Come.
Diverse Arts
SIL celebrates the variety of artistic expressions in cultures around the world and the worship practices of the global church. Each demonstrates God’s creativity and the diversity of the Body of Christ.
Meaningful Arts
SIL recognizes artistic expression as necessary for human thriving. The arts are integral to initiating, transmitting, and reinforcing interpersonal communication. They mark messages as important and draw on many different ways of experiencing and understanding the world. They instill solidarity, reinforce identity, and serve as a memory aid. They inspire action, provide socially acceptable frameworks for expressing difficult or new ideas, and open spaces for imagining and dreaming.
Historical Awareness
SIL situates its goals and activities within global, regional, and local histories and their sociocultural dynamics. It recognizes the complex, ever-changing nature of individual and communal artistry and worship practices. SIL recognizes that local artistic traditions—especially those of ethnolinguistic minorities—are often suppressed or neglected. It seeks to support all people and communities in the use of the arts that are meaningful to them. SIL also celebrates multilingual, multicultural, and multi-artistic identities and creative expressions, which mark an increasing number of communities.
Human Agency
SIL respects the rights and capacity of all individuals and communities to shape their artistic realities. Artistic products are made and given value by people. SIL encourages the diversity of artistic creativity locally and wherever these arts are found. SIL honors and values the unique artistic creations and contributions of individuals and communities. Therefore, SIL nurtures these gifts to support individuals and communities as they continue exploring the dynamic arts central to their identities.
Locally-Grounded Methods
In its collaborations, SIL favors methods that amplify local agency and creativity. SIL encourages the development of a wide variety of arts in the life and Christian worship of communities, promoting local decision-making in choosing art forms. SIL prefers participatory methods like appreciative inquiry in ethnographic research, autogenic approaches, and sparking creativity. SIL esteems local categories and practices of artistry, rooting its analyses in the practitioners’ worldview. These preferences affirm locally created expressive arts' communicative, motivational, identity-strengthening power.
Excellence
SIL carefully integrates insights and methods from the many disciplines that contribute to accomplishing its goals and develops resources that honor the voices of the communities they work with. In research, writing, and practice, SIL endeavors to meet global standards of excellence and integrity.
Confident Hope
SIL embraces holistic visions of flourishing that all communities can work toward. SIL nurtures spaces where people can imagine and plan for better lives: access to scripture, education, more justice, health, artistic diversity, love, well-being, creativity, vibrant churches, vital spiritual formation, and transformational adoration of God.
Creating Local Arts Together (CLAT)
EthnoArts scholars and practitioners have drawn on ethnomusicology, missiology, cultural anthropology, performance studies, linguistics, communication studies, therapy, and other established disciplines to craft an unprecedented fusion connecting creation to eschatological consummation. A seamless fusion of engaging with whole humans on a common path to the shalom of Heaven.
Undergirding much of our training and work is a flexibly-applied set of seven conversations or steps:
1. Meet a Community and Its Artistic Genres.
Explore artistic and social resources that exist in the community. Performing Step 1 allows you to build relationships, involve and understand the people, and to discover the hidden treasures of the community.
2. Specify Goals.
Discover the goals that the community wants to work toward. Performing Step 2 ensures that you are helping the community work toward aims that they have agreed on together.
3. Connect Genres to Goals.
Choose an artistic genre that can help the community meet its goals, and activities that can result in purposeful creativity in this genre. Performing Step 3 reveals the mechanisms that relate certain kinds of artistic activity to its effects, so that the activities you perform have a high chance of succeeding.
4. Analyze Genres and Events.
Describe the event and its genre(s) as a whole, and its artistic forms as arts and in relationship to broader cultural context. Performing Step 4 results in detailed knowledge of the art forms that is crucial to sparking creativity, improving what is produced, and integrating it into the community.
5. Spark Creativity.
Implement activities the community has chosen to spark creativity within the genre they have chosen. Performing Step 5 actually produces new artistic works for events.
6. Improve Results.
Evaluate results of the sparking activities and make them better. Performing Step 6 makes sure that the new artistry exhibits the aesthetic qualities, produces the impacts, and communicates the intended messages at a level of quality appropriate to its purposes.
7. Celebrate and Integrate for Continuity.
Plan and implement ways that this new kind of creativity can continue into the future. Identify more contexts where the new and old arts can be displayed and performed. Performing Step 7 makes it more likely that a community will keep making its arts in ways that produce good effects long into the future.
CLAT Books & Resources
Worship and Mission for the Global Church: an Ethnodoxology Handbook + DVD offers theological reflection, case studies, practical tools, and audiovisual resources to help the global church appreciate and generate culturally appropriate arts in worship and witness. From the expertise of numerous practitioners, this volume integrates insights from the fields of ethnomusicology, biblical research, worship studies, missiology and the arts.
Creating Local Arts Together: A Manual to Help Communities Reach Their Kingdom Goals is a manual designed to guide an individual or group into a local community’s efforts at integrating its arts with the values and purposes of God’s kingdom. The practical, playful text reduces experience-based scholarly insights gained from multiple decades of incarnational ministry worldwide into a flexible seven-step process.
Derivatives of the Handbook and Manual include The Shorter Manual to Help Communities Reach Their Kingdom Goals (also known as Shmanual), Mission Frontiers Ethnodoxology issue, and the Orality Journal's Arts and Orality Parts 1 and 2.
Ethnodoxology: A Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith - A peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing rigorous treatments of ideas and field data related to arts made by or for Christians.
These schools incorporate SIL's EthnoArts theory and methods into their curricula:
Center for Excellence in World Arts (Dallas, TX USA)
Payap University (Chiang Mai, Thailand)