Audiences

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. (1 Cor 10:31)

The ultimate goal of art, as with the human life, is to glorify God. There are three primary ways that art can be used to accomplish this, each action separated by its target audience:

Express
Edify
Evangelize

Expression

My lips will shout for joy, when I sing praises to you; my soul also, which you have redeemed. (Psalm 71:32)

The first action, Expression, is between the artist and God. That is when God is the audience, and the artist is focusing on Him. The majority of the Book of Psalms falls under this category. This is the primary mode and essence of praise and worship.

Edification

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Ephesians 4:15-16)

For the second action, Edification, the target audience is the church, which includes the artist. In this case, the primary purpose of the art is to bolster the audience’s love for God, understanding of God, and their desire to fulfill his commandments with all of their being.

Evangelism

And thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, "Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand." (Romans 15:20-21)

With Evangelism the target audience is the people in the world who are living without Christ. (Using art for evangelism is arguably the trickiest of these three categories to successfully implement.)

Each of these categories has a unique danger that Christians need to be aware of:

Expression: Though not frequently, I've seen some people who focus so much on their individual relationship with God and yet lose sight of the people around them.The reality is that much of our relationship with God takes place through our loving others.“’This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’” (John 15:12).“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” (1 John 4:12)

Edification: The danger with the second category is to look to art as some kind of drug that we can rely upon to get us through the day. Art can be a useful support to prayer, Bible study, and Christian fellowship, but it cannot replace them, and even the most God inspired work of art can become a distraction if we begin to think we depend upon it.

Evangelism: Art can be a very powerful tool for evangelism, but that course of action has many dangers.Unlike creating art focused on edification, evangelical art attempts to engage people who have not submitted to Jesus as the Lord of their life.This creates an incentive to compromise the potency of the message so that non-Christians will more readily lend their attention.That is a big issue that I'm not going to tackle right now, but regardless whether or not such a compromise is right or wrong, it can lead to a product becoming impotent or even destructive.One concern for evangelical artists is that they don't become wrapped up in the world they're trying to minister to.This is especially difficult when Christian artists are given a fair amount of success and are put in the limelight.That is an incredibly challenging test of a Christian's devotion to the Lord.

A work of Christian design generally contains some composition of all three of these categories, so I am not suggesting that these categories are mutually exclusive. These categories are not set in stone and are meant simply to be a guideline to assist you in identifying which mode a work is predominately using to glorify God. This is profitable because there are many things you can do to glorify God and yet you can’t equally do them all at once. We have a finite amount of resources to glorify God with, and if we understand the economics surrounding those resources we will more effectively maximize their use.

Sincerely,
Chris Johnson