For the last few 48 hours I have been involved with an event called Art in the Dark, which happens across the road in our local park. Its run by some younger people (largely) who have come together to create a free community event that showcases spatial art and design using light. This year 34 installations by a range of different individuals and collaborations were set up and from eight till midnight for two nights, thousands of punters poured down through the park marveling at the creations and effects. It was mesmerising for children and not a few adults. http://www.artinthedark.co.nz

Many of the installations are interactive and invite the viewer to participate in some way and observe the effects. Light is particularly responsive as a medium. People’s curiosity and desire to be agents is rewarded for a brief instance. And then there is the simple joy that flows from observing the beauty of light’s colours and properties arranged and choreographed in the dark. Some provoke and tease, others simply celebrate. I had a hand in creating something with light strings in the children’s playground that gave a playground a new mystique.

As a community event, the synergies of artists, techies (the guys who knew what they were doing with electricity) organisers,  volunteers, Maori Wardens (security detail) and then the punters made for something special. It was a feat of voluntary organization and lots of good-will. There were some corporate sponsors, but they did not overwhelm – the dark is a great equalizer. Artists did what they did for little other than exposure and the joy of creativity and the free nature of the event reminded me not every act of creativity in this city has to be commodified or bent to fit the large systems of commercial eventing. People got a chance to give of their talents and time and created something of immense pleasure.

In a couple of weeks time, the Franklin Rd Christmas lights – another local initiative with a longer pedigree will kick off. I am beginning to appreciate what this kind of community known for its creatives, hipster lifestyles and media savvy outlook has to offer as one of its strengths. There is something holy and generative here that might be almost un-noticed in the attention. Amidst all the hype, people get to exercise something more deeply humanizing. Both volunteer initiatives, people get to give from their gifts and bounty, perhaps one of the signs of true citizenship. Block and McKnight speak of the strength of communities being when gifts can be shared. Gift-giving builds the social fabric of our society and when people can be connected to share the diverse gifts they have, then we have the means of forming more flourishing life.  This is what makes more liveable places.

Paul’s metaphor of the body and the functioning of the parts (each with a role to share the gifts they have been given) speaks of  forming the fabric of the church, but there is something deeply archetypal for human social flourishing. (no surprises here if the church is the first fruits of the new creation) But what is showing up is that the Spirit’s imprint may also be ahead of us in ways we have not realised. Church and neighbourhood can learn from each other. When church has become a consumer experience, designed to supply spiritual and social needs and services, then it has lost the means by which it becomes a holy and life-giving community. Even when church uses the rhetoric of gifts and giving, its immersion in a consumer imagination runs very deep (we expect your gift of ‘commitment’ in order to perpetuate the delivery of our goods and services, a sure sign that there is a consumer contract in the midst of church) There is something vaguely anarchic to an economy of gift-giving. It is not easily controlled. Its more about creating certain kinds of environments and I see Paul’s words on this to be of this nature – setting the scene, and ensuring that the ordering is life-giving (1 Cor 14:26ff)

Maybe the spontaneous associational life  that seeks to improve neighbourhoods has something to teach the church about the way diverse gift-giving works for the common good. Maybe too, if the church can reclaim its calling to be a community defined not be what I get, but what I give, where everyone gets to share their gifts (from God’s abundant grace through Christ – Ephesians 4) , then it might find itself with a practice of life that offers consumer society “living water” for dried out wells of human connectivity.