Holistic
An article on the Worship Arts Major
By Andrea Ykema
Every Tuesday I spend two and half hours singing a cappella music with about twenty students at my college. I auditioned for the choir in January and was resigned to the fact that I would feel out of place in the already well-formed group. But I was wrong – our director, Tony Funk, took us out to coffee for half of our first rehearsal. He has been a vivacious centerpiece to each of our rehearsals since then, drawing out our ability to adventure with our voices with his lively precedent. Yet while I certainly feel included in the family of the choir, that fuzzy, warm feeling is not enough to catch me up to speed on some of their more difficult pieces. For that, I have to head directly to Tony for some one-on-one instruction. My most recent meeting with Tony was also to include a bit of an interview for this article, and as I settled into his office with my tape recorder and laptop, Tony decided to do a bit of entertaining. Without fanfare, he pushed ‘play’ on a small window on his computer, and suddenly the room was filled with a burst of hyperbolic voices – Scottish accents, the voice of Dracula, the words of a slow Neanderthal man… It took me a moment to realize why I recognized all of these tones – they were Tony.
I applauded as the clip rolled a close. “That gives you a little idea of who you’re dealing with – he’s a little, um… mentally unstable,” Tony joked with a smile.
“That’s fantastic!” I was still recovering from what I had just heard. “When did you do that?”
“I did that in November. I took a cartoon course last year and I’ve kept working with my teacher, so we’ve been rehearsing through the fall. We went to the studio in November – I put two other tracks together as well. And we’re going to send it out to studios and agencies, because I want to start auditioning for cartoons. Life is too short to do the same thing all the time.”
Those are simple words to say, but daring words to live by. Tony Funk, Director of the Worship Arts program here at Columbia, is in the business of challenging the mundane ways that people think and act. With the partnership of Nelson Boschman, The Worship Arts program is designed to usher its students into new realms of understanding.
“Worship Arts is broader than students think,” Tony remarked. “They come thinking that worship is singing their favorite song that aggravates old people and they realize that it isn’t really about music… Not many programs try to get students to look beyond the obvious. So [the classes] Christian Imagination and Theology through the Arts give them ideas that many of them had never thought about – that faith and the arts are hand in glove – that, ‘I don’t have to give up my love for painting to be a better disciple.’ Because a lot of people come with that very misguided notion that somehow the gifts that God gave people to interact with the physical environment somehow will lead them astray.”
Adam Nash, a fourth-year Outdoor Leadership student at Columbia, was intrigued by Tony’s ideas and enrolled in Theology through the Arts last semester to learn under him.
“I felt a little out of place – as an Outdoor Leadership student, I wondered what place I had in a Worship Arts class… I was surprised at the beginning of the first class when we talked about Tony’s trip up north – he showed pictures of these amazing landscapes and one of the first things he talked about is how God is a Creator.” Immediately a bridge was made for Adam, one based in God’s creativity and artistry.
“A lot of the course is just making you more conscious of how you think about God and about yourself. That’s one of the things Tony does. He asks people to think about the roots of the things they think in a different way then they might have ever before.”
The focus of Worship Arts – preparing people for holistic worship ministry - is based in a philosophy that the truth of God is in more than the predictable places where he has always been said to reside. It is a gentle process, but an invaluable one, to bring a student to ask, “Where can I discern the fingerprints of God in a place like this?” Leaders with eyes and imaginations open to the variety of the presence of God are able to build more bridges to more people.
The program has recently installed an overseas internship for its third year students – a one semester opportunity to study at Taizé in the south of France, L'Abri in Switzerland, and Iona in Scotland. The three and a half months will also include visiting churches in Germany and sightseeing throughout Europe. This is an opportunity for students to exercise the eyes and imaginations that their first and second year classes challenged them to develop.
And yet, as student Adam Nash realized from his time spent with Tony in Theology through the Arts, the ability to open one’s eyes and imagination to the presence of God is not just a skill to be developed by students in Worship Arts.
“Even as a viewer, you are participating in [art]. We talked a lot about how God created us to be co-creators… in everything we do, we’re doing – we’re participating – we’re co-creating something, and we have a choice as humans in whether that’s going to be something that brings glory to God or whether that brings glory to something else.”
“We are all artists,” says Tony Funk, “because each of us shapes our lives every day.”
