Humankind
Tonight my wife and I went out with Keith and Liana Dickson to a program called Humankind at ROCKharbor church in Costa Mesa. I believe in the past it has actually been titled “Shimmer.” It was put on by the creative arts folk there and a theater company they have called three trees. It is basically a night of all sorts of arts – music, visual, dance, drama, poetry – all centered around one common theme. This time, the night was designed to cause us to think about community and to “remind you of the person across the street, across the world or sitting right next to you.” Here were some of the highlights from my experience.
- The night opened with some awesome music by Tifah Al-Attas from Revolution church. Of course part of the reason we went was to support her and she was amazing as usual.
- Probably the strongest component of the night were the dramas I thought. Specifically, there was a hilarious yet pretty convicting monologue performed by Shannon Cobb titled Looking For Friends In All The Wrong Places. It pretty much showed how ridiculous our personal relationships with our television can be, and the substitute that many people use it for instead of true personal connection.
- The other great drama was a recurring role by Chad Halliburton titled Mirror. It was done in three parts all pulled from the book Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. Wow! Definately the most thought provoking material for me and really well delivered by Chad. I was recently given this book by Dave and I am even more interested to read that book after tonight.
- The other aspect of the evening that I found impactful was video. There were three videos during the evening, all of them very well done. My favorite was probably when two girls sang For Good from the musical Wicked by Stephen Schwartz while a video played with footage from ROCKharbors most recent trip to India. It was pretty fun to see some folks from our church who went with them up there on the screen. But beyond that, the music and the video together were really powerful and emotional.
Overall, the night was just really well done and really caused myself and others I was with to think. One thing that kinda surprised me a bit was the number of people who were there. I’m not really good with numbers, but I’m thinking there probably weren’t more than 150 people there. Not a bad turnout, but they are a large church and having visited their service last Saturday night I know they advertised it quite a bit. I don’t know how many were there the night before but I wish more people would have been there to experience it. It also caused me to think about our church and my desire to do something similar. I wonder what the turnout would be like for a smaller community such as ours.
Above all, when I look at this evening from a ministry perspective, I am just reminded once again what an incredible vehicle the arts can be to provoke thought and share a message of hope with our culture. It is such a strong passion of mine and I believe a somewhat untapped medium in so many ways. I truly desire to use all of the arts more and more as we continue to comunicate the Gospel to our culture in a language that they understand. For me, music and theater have always made a deep impact on my life and I love using those things to impact others in such a positive way.
Congratulations to everyone involved with Humankind for presnting a great overall package. Keep up the good work!
