Artists at a Shift in Time: Courage in an Age of Conflict and Change

By Christ John Otto

Artists at a Shift in Time: Courage in a Time of Conflict and Change describes time as a road in the wilderness. Artists, rather than being "ahead of their time" are in truth, accurately understanding the times they live in. The book is divided into three main sections. The first section describes the place of the artisan in scripture

• Language: English
• Publisher: Belonging House Media
• Release date: Feb 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798987409923

Christ John Otto

In 2006 Christ "rhymes with wrist" John Otto was called by God to begin writing, leading worship, and hanging out in a local coffee shop. His adventure, and the people who joined him, eventually took the name Belonging House. Today after lots of coffee, five books, and thousands of emails, Belonging House has become an international "house" for creative culture shapers. Christ Otto holds degrees from Houghton College and Asbury Theological Seminary. Since 1986 he has worked in a variety of media as a freelance artist including decoupage, faux finishing, mural work, sign painting, commercial and retail design, and catering and pastry. He is a classically trained tenor and vocal coach. Through it all he has learned to be a son, and bring others into a relationship with God.

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Artists at a Shift in Time: Courage in an Age of Conflict and Change. by Christ John Otto, Manchester, New Hampshire, USA.

Copyright © 2024 Belonging House Media, LLC.

Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition) Copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the Unit- ed States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foun- dation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (The Jersualem Bible) are from The Jerusalem Bible © 1966 by Darton Longman & Todd Ltd and Doubleday and Com- pany Ltd.

Portions of the Prayer Rhythm for Artists are adapted from The Daily Office SSF, copyright the European Province of the Society of St Francis 2010.

Material used with permission.

For Derek

Rest eternal grant to him, O Lord:

And let light perpetual shine upon him.

May his soul, and the souls of all the departed,

through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Amen.

Acknowledgements

Pulitzer Prize winning portrait artist Aileen Ortlip Shea once said If you see a turtle on a fence post, you know they did not get there by themselves.

Self-publishing books is a huge undertaking, and this is my thirteenth attempt. This one in particular took eighteen months, and a number of tragic events occurred in the process, all of which slowed it down and increased the cost of production.

I am especially grateful for our Belonging House community. You are often the springboard and testing ground for my thoughts and ideas. I am blessed to have a very committed group of men and women who pray for me. Thank you Jim, Herman, Elizabeth, Rachel, Val, Zuzana, and Laché and those who receive my regular prayer updates. And of course, you cats keep me honest.

Thank you to everyone who gives at the fifty dollar or higher level on Patreon and Buymeacoffee: Barbara Anne, Tim, Jerry and Elizabeth, Martin, Karen, Heather, Derrick, Joe and Tammy, Vera, Deborah, Luann, Courtney, Betsy, Sean and Kirby, Lynski, Andrea, Steve, Brontis, and Eric. Many of you have supported me for many years and not just your support but your friendship is a treasure. It is all about relationship.

Thank you to everyone who read the draft chapters under many titles on Substack. I am especially grateful for the feedback from Jörn Lange, Glenda Gibson, and Bill Wade.

Special thanks to Liz and Andy Dorton who have been a big part of the past year. Your friendship and help kept this project going. Thanks to Chris Mitchell for your friendship in this season.

Thank you to Benjamin Chua who made the editing process not only smooth but fun.

And of course, thanks Pete for all the proofreading over more than a decade.

The Road in the Wilderness

Part I

Not About You.

A Bigger Vision

The Goal

Global War

The Solution

The Charashim

Silence and Solitude

Magic

A Levite

Terror

A City Without Walls

Part II

The Generation of the Sons of Eli

The Point of No Return

Aligning Your Heart

Becoming a Warrior

Freedom from Trauma

Your Body is the Weapon

A Worship Revolution

The Throne of David

Part III

By the Waters of Babylon

A Kingdom Grid

The Ancient Pathways

The Power of Going to the Dangerous Place

Four Men in the Furnace

Three Times a Day

Babylon is Doomed

A Throne in the Earth

Part IV

The End of the Pilgrimage

The Ancient Pathway: A Prayer Rhythm for Artists

Prayer in the Morning

Prayers throughout the Day

Night Prayer

The Fire Team

Helpful Prayers

Works Cited

Citations

The Road in the Wilderness

Leonardo da Vinci was ahead of his time.

So was Vincent Van Gogh.

And so was Pablo Picasso.

And so is Ricky Raccoon, an artist on Tumblr,

and about a thousand

other people I found

when I did a quick search online for the words

Ahead of his time.

For hundreds of years,

artists have been described as

being ahead of their time.

Usually this cliché

is applied after the artist has died,

and after

they were misunderstood

by the conventional thinkers around them.

And as we all well know,

after their death,

the works they produced

sell for millions of dollars.

Lesser men

and weaker minds

benefit

from the ones who appear to be ahead of their time.

Picasso once said

that every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

He was talking about his mission as a modernist

to tear down the culture he inherited

and release his particular vision on the world.

Thinker Paul Kingsnorth

describes this process as the great uprooting.¹

It seems that the job of an artist

in the past one hundred years or so

was not the building

and establishing of something,

but rather,

the destroying

of everything that came before.

The best way for us to understand this

person who is ahead of their time

is to go on a journey into the wilderness.

There are trees,

mountains,

rocks and rivers,

and unknown things we are going to discover.

History and culture

are like a road being cut through the wilderness.

Most of the people walking

on this road find it to be well worn and smooth.

And most of them look for the easiest way to walk.

We call this the path of least resistance.

And in school, and in society,

most people learn to take this path,

and to avoid taking risks

or upsetting the way things are.

This easy place is how the world works.

These are established systems,

and by the time the majority of people—

the conventional thinkers—

come to that place in the road,

the system is well established,

and often

there are well known short cuts

that everyone has begun to take,

and those short cuts become

what we know as

corruption

in the system.

Many conventional people mistakenly think

that these roads just happen,

and ignore the price,

the risk-taking,

and the personal sacrifices brave individuals make

to establish a civilization.

Because of this mistaken view,

the vast majority of the people

on the path

have been taught

that to go off the path

is too dangerous to try.

Stay in line.

Keep your head down.

Get a real job.

Don’t make waves.

Go along to get along.

This is the way to a reasonably successful life.

And of course,

the worst thing a person can do is go off the path—

because there might be dragons in the woods.

At the front of this pack of people

in the woods

is a small band

of courageous souls.

These are the ones who, at

the same moment as the mass of people

are walking far behind them,

are surveying the terrain

and paying attention to the situation.

These folks are following

a narrow pathway

in the woods.

They are looking for ways to cross rivers,

and ways to get over rocks.

They have come upon grizzly bears and rattlesnakes,

and they are coming up with solutions.

These are the creative men and women who understand

that the world is a sea of problems,

and they have to first identify the problem

and then create a solution.

Although the mass of followers see them ahead,

they have no interest or understanding

in what they are doing.

In fact,

the great pack of people

are yelling to those up ahead.

Hey you, get back in line!

Who do you think you are?

You think you can leave the pack and run ahead!

"What you are doing is really irresponsible

and making us all look bad."

Now let’s think about time again.

These two groups of people are on the same road,

and they see one another.

Look at your watch.

Notice,

they are living at the same time.

That group of artists and creative people is not

running ahead of their time;

they are running ahead of the pack.

They are living at the same time as the conventional crowd.

They are accurately seeing the problems and issues

of the times they are living in,

and they know that there is danger all around.

They know there are cliffs ahead that the whole crowd will fall off.

They know there is a rotten log that

someone once used to cross a river,

but that the mass of followers

behind them

is heavy and slow.

Those folks

will need

a bridge.

They know that the workarounds in the system

are now so corrupt that they are no longer helpful.

These folks are accurately understanding the times they live in.

They are, as the Bible describes,

like the sons of Issachar, who rightly understood the times they lived in.²

The sons of Issachar were not prophetic;

they were observant.

These folks are not ahead of the time,

but are rather living keenly aware of the moment.

And most of the people in the pack are

either not thinking for themselves,

trying to get by day to day,

or simply are not interested.

Because the pack dwellers are the majority

they create the illusion that they represent the times.

They do not.

The pack is behind the times.

They are using roads someone else built,

and systems someone else created.

They are behind the times, not in them.

This perspective is the largest audience,

and so, mass media,

mass marketing,

and mass communication

puts the focus on them.

And this reinforces the perspective

that these are the times we live in.

It is an illusion.

Now look at this from another point of view.

Let’s take an aerial view of the situation.

Deep in the woods,

way ahead of the group of creative people

is another group.

Some of them are alone,

and some of them run in little groups.

They are listening to God for themselves.

And God is leading them into deep and dangerous places.

These are the scouts and the pioneers.

These are the prophets and the apostles.

These are the ones

who are cutting a little path through the brush,

so someone can follow.

And as they walk into the unknown,

they discover an ancient pathway,

and learn that there is One who has been here before,

and that the ancient pathways never get old.

To the creative men and women

these forerunners are interesting and intriguing.

But to the pack of conventional thinkers,

they are wild-eyed crazies.

These are the ones who,

if you listen to them

will destroy everything you have come to know.

The creative people know

that the little path they found,

and the makeshift solutions along the way

were left for them

by the prophets and apostles.

The forerunners give direction

and show the way for everyone else to follow.

And then there is a fourth group.

This group drags at the end of the conventional pack.

And they tend to lag behind, and some sit by the way.

They are carrying heavy baggage filled with old stuff.

To us it looks like a lot of junk.

Big heavy books.

Beat-up furniture,

broken dishes,

and old clothes.

This is the church.

And it wasn’t always this way.

Once upon a time,

it was the church that blazed a trail,

and led the way,

but a lot of bad thinking has taken over,

and the church,

with a few notable exceptions,

consistently lags about thirty years behind the center of culture.

And when the road begins to look scary,

instead of listening to God,

the church

sits by the road,

digs through their heavy baggage,

pulls out one of their old books

full of

what to think,

not how to think—

unquestioned answers to questions no one is asking—

and

begins to argue.

And some sit down

and never catch up.

And others die in the wilderness.

And when someone catches one of the adventurers

far ahead in the woods,

the church leads the call to have them punished,

and joins the side of those trying to stop the Kingdom.

They rip them apart on the internet,

have their books censored,

and call for their public humiliation.

They spread fabricated stories of scandal,

and stone the ones who can show the way.

And so, throughout history,

the religious folks kill the prophets

and stop the revivals.

And the culture cheers,

because now they can stay the same

on the broad road that leads to destruction.

In 2006,

an angel appeared to me

in my living room

and said:

"Jesus is calling you to raise up an army of artists

who will build him a throne in the earth."

I didn’t know it at the time,

but God was calling me out of the pack,

and out onto the ancient, dangerous pathway.

About three years later, a wave of others

appeared on the scene

and they also began raising up artists.

One even used my ideas without asking,

but I,

like Paul,

accepted that the message I was called to carry

was spreading,

even under someone else’s name.

In 2013,

I published my book An Army Arising.

I was writing into a void

that I could see as others began to emerge.

I noticed that none of the ministries

appearing on the scene

understood the times we lived in,

and that God wanted to raise up artists

for a strategic purpose.

None of them understood the need for artists

to be deep disciples,

and none of them were helping artists

grow strong against the tide of culture.

In the Kingdom,

the WHY is always more important than the WHAT.

And the HOW is always the most important of all.

We are not living in ordinary times.

In 2005, God called me to a life of radical faith,

and I now know that this lifestyle is a prophetic act

in the face of gross commercialization.

My warnings to other leaders in private have gone unheeded,

and the majority of arts ministries

quickly moved to a sales and marketing model of ministry.

Instead of preparing artists

to lead in the times we live in,

times of conflict and war,

these ministries

catered to the American church

and tried to make as much money as possible

in the shortest amount of time

from conventional marketing methods.

They all had short-term successes of three to six years.

In most of the evangelical church world,

successful marketing is considered credibility,

and many know how to sell things,

but have no marketable product.

And a majority of the artists I meet,

seventeen years after I started,

still are not deep disciples of Jesus,

still quote Marx

and think it is the Sermon on the Mount,

and still act in a childish, precious, and immature way

about their art

rather than like professionals,

willing to learn their craft,

take risks,

and work hard.

I’ve now seen two waves of arts ministries come and go,

and have now noticed a third one beginning to emerge,

with all the same underpinnings of the previous two.

So far, it seems

no one is learning from this cycle

and