Tonight I'm hosting what I hope will be the first of many
open mic events at Kwantlen. When I was a college student I loved playing music
at open mics, so when I started thinking of fun community events to put on at
Kwantlen this was an obvious choice for me. People of a wide variety of
experience and skill all gather around and enjoy each other’s music, poetry,
and art. Music achieves one of its many levels of greatness simply by grabbing
a guitar from the closet and singing “blowing in the wind” to a crowd of
classmates avoiding their homework.
At a chaplaincy meeting yesterday we went over the chaplain's job
description and the very first line says something to the effect of “being a
Christian presence on campus”. I think that events like this open mic is part
of that Christian presence. It’s certainly not explicitly evangelistic
(depending on how you interpret that term, little to none of what I do is), it’s
not even overtly spiritual or “Multi-faith,” but I think it certainly is part
of God’s activity here on campus. God is the creator of beauty, the creator of
artistic expression, and so to celebrate that and give others a chance to share
their art is part of God’s redemptive act in the world because that act is beautiful, is beauty itself.
So opening up a stage and microphone to anyone who wants to
share their gifts and talents, whether they are honed to perfection or not,
whether they identify with the Christian faith or not, is an opening, and
window, into who God is: a God who is beauty,
most abundantly in the person and life of Jesus Christ in whom we live and move
and have our being.
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