by Lynne Hybels

Can art—a single photo, a carefully crafted sentence, a simple lyric and melody, a brief video clip—change the world? It’s a question I’ve been pondering lately.

Today, as I write, it is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. On television, radio, and Internet the poignant words of Dr. King reverberate. A masterful and passionate speech given 45 years ago speaks of “the fierce urgency of now,” and reminds me again that we have no time to waste in the pursuit of justice. This morning I read the entire text of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and felt undone, humbled, inspired. “Again and again,” he writes, “we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” Dear God, do I have the soul force to do that?

If changing the world begins with touching one heart, redirecting one mind, inspiring one prayer, King’s words once again changed the world by reaching out to me in the privacy of my upstairs study.

On YouTube this morning I watched a late-60s video of gospel legend Mahalia Jackson singing “We Shall Overcome.” How many times has that song, grounded in Negro spirituals, unified and encouraged a population short on hope? Following the American civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome” gave voice to minority Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland, anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, peaceful Czech protestors denouncing an oppressive Communist government in the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Prague.

Estonia, too, was freed in that quiet revolution of 1989. On a recent NPR broadcast, I heard an elderly Estonian claim that one song—which he called “our secret antidote”—kept hope alive during the oppressive decades of Soviet rule. He explained that every five years a huge music festival was held in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. The song selection was highly restricted and included many songs with a clear pro-Soviet theme. But at the end of each festival a massive choir led the crowd in a song called My Homeland Is My Love. More often than not, Soviet officials turned off the loudspeakers, but still the crowds sang. “The song never mentioned Estonia, and leaders of the festival tried to convince the Soviets that the song honored them,” the man said, “but everybody knew we were singing about a free Estonia. Singing that song together gave us strength to hang on for another five years, and then another and another, until we finally gained our freedom.” A simple song; a secret antidote; the fuel for hope.

But let me bring the power of art closer to home. In my breakfast room hangs a photo taken by my son, Todd, when he and I and my daughter Shauna traveled to Africa in 2003. Eight children dressed in rags stare at the camera. Siblings and cousins whose parents all died of AIDS, the children lived with their frail grandfather, who stood outside the photo. Todd snapped the picture at two in the afternoon. The kids had eaten nothing that day, and there was no food awaiting them. Because we were there by accident—detoured from our intended destination—we had brought no food to give them. In that moment, I hated who I was: a privileged American seeing desperate need and doing nothing. That wasn’t my intention, of course, but good intentions meant nothing in that moment. To those children, I was one more person witnessing their plight and turning my back.

The same photo hangs in my office, and one year I turned it into Christmas cards so my friends could see it too. Todd doesn’t consider himself an artist, but I believe that in a rural village in Uganda he became one—for me anyway—capturing a moment in time that repeatedly pulls me back to reality and truth. Every morning it reminds me of the plight of the world’s suffering children and of the vow I made on an April day five years ago to actively fight the injustice of extreme poverty and HIV/AIDS.

Over the years, I’ve discovered other evils to fight. Violence against women, including the most brutal forms of rape, is increasingly used as a weapon of war. I was first acquainted with this horror when I visited Bosnia during the war in the Balkans. The practice recently caught my attention again as the deadliest conflict since World War II plays out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to Reuter’s AlertNet, Congo’s conflict-driven humanitarian crisis has claimed more than 5 million lives since 1997. Some 45,000 Congolese die every month from war-related causes—mostly disease and starvation. In the last ten years, tens of thousands of women and girls have been systematically kidnapped, raped, mutilated and tortured by soldiers from both foreign militias and the Congolese army. Most of them—some as young as three and others as old as seventy-five—were gang raped. There are villages in which as many as 90 percent of the women have been raped.

How many people are even aware of this tragedy? When I tried to find out more about the conflict, I felt like I fell into a black hole of indifference. Fortunately, Lisa Jackson, of Women Make Movies, decided to do what she could to make the world aware. In her extraordinary film, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, the brave women of the Congo speak of their experience, recounting stories of horror as well as resilience, courage, and grace.

I don’t think it’s an accident that it is an artist—a filmmaker—who sets out to break the silence about the Congolese tragedy. I once heard artists defined as “sensitive souls trying to come to terms with a harsh world.” Poet David Whyte describes poets as prophets, those who tell the truths that others have not yet seen. That’s why in totalitarian regimes poets are often among the first to be arrested and imprisoned. Their sensitivity and honesty make their words dangerous and subversive. Like the Old Testament prophets, poets trade political expedience for truth. They ask uncomfortable questions and answer them in unequivocal terms.

According to the creators of a video series called To Be Told, “Artists listen and look in ways that are usually different from most people. They have a re-orienting voice, and artists who follow Jesus have a voice that re-orients the body of Christ to God’s reality.” To Be Told is a collaboration between film creators Steve Frost and Travis Reed from The Work of the People ; and Tom and Dee Yaccino from La Red Del Camino, a network of Latin American churches committed to wholistic, integral ministry. The series seeks to enable artists to find and tell the “quiet stories that don’t usually get told in a big loud culture.” These stories represent the signs of the kingdom Jesus talked about, stories that show how God brings change and transformation to the world.

In my own work and activism, I am often inspired and served by the works of artists around me.

I will never forget a moment at Willow during a service on racial reconciliation. Black-and-white images from the American civil rights movement marched solemnly across a huge screen at center stage. A single cellist sat in front of the screen playing a slow, haunting melody. A vocalist captured the pain the images conveyed in words that tore my heart. Recalling that moment speaks to me again of the high price so many paid for a dream not yet fulfilled, and it challenges me again and again to join the ongoing fight for that dream.

My friend Marg Rehnberg also inspires me. A contemplative abstract painter, Marg joined Artists in Action, a group of visual artists who use their art to highlight the efforts of Willow’s HIV/AIDS initiative in Africa. During one awareness-raising event, Artists in Action set up a huge canvas where members of the congregation could paint the names of one thousand orphans the church supports in Zambia. On a single canvas, the vague generality of “one thousand kids” became the unique specificity of beloved girls and boys with names like Precious and Gift. Since then, Marg has started Compassion Art to create fine art pieces that support the work of compassion ministries throughout the world. This spring Marg and I will collaborate on a project to help fight the global tragedy of gender-based violence.

A song written by worship leader Aaron Niequist so captured my passion that I asked him to sing it at Willow’s first forum on Global Poverty and HIV/AIDS. Aaron writes in “Changed”:

we have been blessed
now we’re going to be a blessing
we have been loved
now we’re going to bring love
we’ve been invited
we’re going to share the invitation
we have been changed
to bring change, to bring change

Isn’t that what it’s all about? We who are entrusted with the gifts of words or melody or film or dance or paint, are also entrusted with a responsibility. To look unflinchingly at reality. To discern truth. To let both the beauty and tragedy of the world break open our hearts. And ultimately, to let God use this process to change us, so that we can in turn become God’s humble, yet bold, agents of change in the world he loves so much.

As I clean the papers off my desk, I read again Dr. King’s speech. “I have a dream,” he said, “that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; ‘and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.’” 

May your glory, God, be revealed through me.  Amen.

Lynne Hybels grew up in southwestern Michigan, but after graduating from college in 1973 she moved to the Chicago area.  In 1974 she married a youth pastor, Bill Hybels, and in 1975 they started Willow Creek Community Church in a rented movie theatre in Palatine, Illinois.  Despite intending to become a social worker, Lynne was pleased to start a church instead, convinced that God has given the local church a clear mandate to address the needs of “the whole person in the whole world.”  For years she has been involved with Willow’s ministry partnerships in under-resourced communities in Latin America and in Africa.  Writing has been a means for her to honor her love of words and solitary hours, as well as an avenue of activism. She is the author of Nice Girls Don’t Change the World, and coauthor of Rediscovering Church and Fit to be Tied.  She most recently collaborated with the Willow Creek Association to develop Hope and Action – a DVD and participants guide that helps churches and small groups begin to address the AIDS pandemic.  Bill and Lynne have two adult children, Todd and Shauna, one son-in-law, Aaron Niequist, and one grandbaby extraordinaire, Henry. You might enjoy some other articles by Lynne Hybels, especially these articles about moms: Reframing: A Mother's Day Gift, A Note to Young Moms, and Mothers and Sons Letting Go.