How Can Christians Use Art to Engage the Culture

Can something you make carry gospel truth without turning into a sermon? Sho Baraka argues it can, by a specific method. You take one conviction you actually hold and place it inside ordinary material, the way he names his wife whenever he raps about love. Then you repeat it, and you make the work good enough that people want to come back to it. This guide turns that method into a practice. Over one week you will choose a single true thing and build it into something you are already making. That might be a song, a short story, a lesson plan, a photo series, a sketch or a meal you host. You can work through it alone in a few sittings, or with a group across two meetings: one to plan, one to bring the finished work.

The goal is modest and concrete. By the end you should be able to point to one piece of your own work and say what conviction it carries, how it carries it, and whether it does so honestly.

Begin with something that already worked on you

Before you make anything, look at what has shaped you. Most of us absorbed beliefs from songs, films and books long before anyone argued with us about them.

Take ten minutes. Write down one piece of art that made an idea feel true to you before you could have explained the idea. It does not need to be Christian. It might have taught you something you now think is false. Then answer three questions in a sentence each:

• What did the work assume was good or normal?
• Did it ever state that idea outright, or did you pick it up from what kept happening?
• How many times did you hear, read or watch it?

Keep this page. You will come back to it at the end.

Read before you make

Three passages give this practice its footing. Read each slowly and notice what it says before deciding what it means for your work.

Exodus 31:1-5

God tells Moses he has chosen Bezalel for the work of the tabernacle. Exodus 31:3 reads: “And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship.” Notice the order of the list. Workmanship sits alongside wisdom and knowledge as something the Spirit gives. In the following verses the passage names specific skills, with gold, silver, brass, stone and timber. This is narrative about a particular sacred building, so it does not promise that every creative project is inspired. It does show that God cares about skill and counts craft as real work in his service.

Observation prompt: What does it suggest that the craftsman in this passage is equipped for excellence, not just for sincerity?

Matthew 10:16

Jesus sends his disciples out with this warning: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” Baraka reaches for this verse when he describes how Christians should communicate in the wider culture. Hold the context in view. Jesus is sending messengers into hostile towns. He is not giving advice about lyrics. The pairing still teaches something you can test your work against. The serpent half asks you to understand how a message travels. The dove half forbids you to use that understanding to deceive.

Observation prompt: If you kept only the first half of the command, what kind of art would you make? If you kept only the second?

Philippians 4:8

Paul writes: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” Paul is telling believers what to dwell on, not what to produce. Using this verse as a test for what to put into your work is an application, and it should be held as one. It is a fair application, though. What fills a maker’s mind tends to end up in the work.

Observation prompt: Which word in Paul’s list names something your usual medium rarely shows?

What Baraka actually does

Baraka’s method has three parts, and each one will shape a step in your practice.

First, he aims to make an idea believable, not to win an argument. His model is C.S. Lewis. As Baraka tells it, Lewis did not write the Narnia books mainly to make converts. Lewis wanted Aslan to work as a picture of Jesus so that “when people were presented with an idea of sacrifice and atonement for sins, that it wouldn’t be this farfetched idea.” That is a smaller goal than conversion, and an easier one to keep. Baraka explains why it matters: “people don’t talk about sacrifice for the sake of others in mainstream culture.” The story supplies a category the culture has stopped supplying. Your work can do the same with one idea.

Second, he places the conviction inside ordinary material. When Baraka writes about relationships, he makes a point of naming marriage. “I want them to know when I’m talking about a young lady in a relationship, she’s my wife,” he says. He explains that he is communicating two things at once: that marriage between a man and a woman is serious, and that commitment matters. Nobody hears that line as preaching. They hear a man talking about his wife. The conviction rides inside the subject.

Third, he relies on repetition and quality together. Baraka says that “Christian art can be an apologetic” when “you just communicate countercultural views in a very fresh, dope way, and those things are repeated.” Both conditions carry weight. A single clever line does little. A conviction repeated in weak work gets ignored.

He also names the two ways makers miss. One is to “lay out the message in a way that is gonna be accepted and palatable for youth groups,” which reaches only people who already agree. The other is to blend in so completely that “you’ll just make music that has no real depth to it.” Baraka draws a line around his claim, too. Work made for worship and teaching inside the church should be clear and detailed in doctrine. And embedding is not hiding: “I’m also not saying, don’t say Jesus.” His concern is how Jesus is presented to a world that does not share the church’s assumptions.

Test the method before you trust it

Here is the hard part. Baraka’s clearest example of embedded messaging comes from the Five Percent movement, whose language he says passed into hip hop through artists he loved as a young listener. He believes that movement teaches error. So the technique is not holy in itself. Story and repetition will carry whatever you put in them.

That means your practice needs a test, not just a technique. Before you finish your piece, ask it these four questions:

1. Is the conviction true? Could you defend it from Scripture in plain words if someone asked?
2. Do you hold it openly? Would you be comfortable if a listener asked you directly what you meant? If you would want to dodge, something is off.
3. Does the work respect the audience? Is it trying to show them something, or trying to slip something past them?
4. Does it flatter anyone? Baraka warns against groups “answering supremacy with supremacy.” Art that gives dignity by lowering someone else fails the dove half of Matthew 10:16.

The practice: one true thing, built in on purpose

Work through these steps over the week. Each takes between twenty minutes and an hour.

1. Choose the thing you are already making. Do not start a new project for this exercise. Use the song in progress, the next lesson, the post you were going to write, the dinner you are hosting Friday. The point is to change ordinary work, not create a special Christian side project.
2. Name one conviction in a single plain sentence. Make it narrow. “God is good” is too broad to embed. A sentence such as Forgiveness costs the person who forgives, or A promise kept when it hurts is a kind of love, is narrow enough. Check it against Philippians 4:8.
3. Find where your culture leaves a gap. Baraka chose sacrifice and covenant because popular culture rarely shows them. Ask what your medium usually assumes about your chosen idea. Write that assumption down.
4. Place the conviction in a detail, not a speech. Look for the equivalent of naming the wife. It might be a character who keeps a promise and pays for it, a lyric that treats a parent with honor, a lesson example where someone admits fault first. If you notice yourself writing a paragraph that explains the point, cut it and find a detail that shows it.
5. Push the craft one level further. Revise once more for quality alone, ignoring the message entirely. Bezalel was equipped for workmanship. The conviction will not land in work nobody wants to finish.
6. Run the four tests above. Adjust anything that fails.
7. Plan for repetition. Write down two other places in your upcoming work where the same conviction could appear in a different form. One piece plants an idea. A body of work makes it familiar.

Be ready for what the work starts

Baraka describes what happened after his album Talented Tenth. A few lines in one song brought a stream of messages from people with questions. His response was not to celebrate but to study: “if I’m gonna be answering questions and people gonna be asking me questions, I gotta actually know what I’m talking about.”

Lisa Fields names the problem this exposes in many churches: “a lot of people don’t know what they believe and why they believe it.” Art that raises a question and leaves no one able to answer it opens a door for someone else to walk through.

So add one last step to your week. Write the question your piece is most likely to provoke in someone who notices the conviction. Then write a short, honest answer of no more than a paragraph, with at least one Scripture reference. If you cannot write it yet, that is useful to know. It tells you what to study next.

If you are leading a group

Split the practice across two meetings. In the first, do the opening observation together, read the three passages aloud, and have each person say their one-sentence conviction and the project it will go into. Keep this brief and practical. Nobody should have to explain why they chose a particular conviction.

In the second meeting, invite people to bring their work. Sharing is optional. Some pieces will be unfinished, and some people make things they are not ready to show. Those who share can play or read the piece first without explanation. Let the group guess what conviction it carries before the maker says. If nobody can find it, that is not failure. It may mean the conviction is buried too deep, or it may mean the work is honestly subtle. Talk about which. Critique the craft as seriously as the content, and keep the four tests in front of everyone.

Questions for discussion

• Look back at the piece you named at the start. Having walked through Baraka’s method, do you see anything in how it worked on you that you missed before?
• Baraka admits the technique he admires was used to spread ideas he rejects. Does that make you more cautious about embedding convictions, or does the honesty test settle the concern for you? Why?
• Where is the line between subtle and hidden? Can you think of a work that crossed it, in either direction?
• Bezalel’s gift included workmanship. How do you weigh craft against message when time is short and you cannot perfect both?
• Which of Baraka’s two failures, the palatable message for insiders or the work with no depth, are you more tempted toward? What pulls you there?
• What question did your piece seem most likely to raise, and how confident were you in your answer to it?

Return to where you started

Pull out the page from the first exercise. Next to the work that once shaped you, write the name of the piece you made this week. Ask one question of both: if someone took in this work twenty times, what would they come to think is normal?

Your answer for the old work tells you what formed you. Your answer for the new one tells you what you are now offering someone else. Pick the next thing you will make, and decide whether the same conviction belongs in it too.