A while back, I externally processed an idea about house “concerts” on this blog. It was the brain child of a sabbath day’s worth of thinking and singing and dreaming and praying. And as time has passed, this dream hasn’t left me; nay, it has actually developed hope and structure inside my brain and my heart, and put me in a place where I have a vision about what art is about for me.

As I’ve thought more about what it would mean to show my art on a regular basis, I have been repulsed by the idea of doing “typical concerts.” To be honest, I think it’s dreadfully boring and useless for almost all involved. Let’s play it out: you go to see someone play music, and on a good day they are amazing. You go home, having been utterly floored by what you witnessed, you revel in it with your present company (virtual or otherwise), and then you go to bed. If it was spectacular, you talk about it more for another few days.

Unless you take fantastic amounts of initiative (or your soul is bent in a particular way), the art hasn’t done much to change you. By and large, you are still the same person you were, and the art has simply served as entertainment.

Entertainment. Breaking down this word, it can mean “to hold/maintain a particular state/space of consciousness.” Things that entertain you are carefully designed to keep you in a particular space and state of being. For instance, if I entertain you at my house, I want to keep you in a state of comfort in my living space.

Now, let’s extrapolate: by and large, most music we listen to is designed to put people in a particular “space.” What kind of space is that? My adjectives would be self-adulating and static. Self-adulating, because at most concerts you face the artist, and the artist places every ounce of the attention on themselves and their art. It’s about them. And static, because most musicians are too afraid (and perhaps, we are the lucky ones) to ask you to consider their art as a catalyst for growth, change, and good. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be moved into any kind of life-change by “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry. I’m pretty sure the kind of change that would invite me into would ruin my life.

But what if the role of art were to start or continue conversations?
Conversations with our inner selves about how we carry our own identities…
Conversations in our families about the joys and the skeletons that make us who we are…
Conversations in our schools about the insiders and the outsiders…
Conversations in our towns and cities about the things going right and the things going wrong…

Conversations between us and Jesus about how all of these things are totally beyond us, but also are an invitation for us to experience the immanent generosity of the Kingdom of the Heavens…

Good conversations are dignifying, not self-adulating.
Good conversations are dynamic, not static.

And these days, people want to disqualify conversations because they are slow, require intimacy and vulnerability, and “there’s too much to do to be sitting around talking.” Yes, conversations are slow and small. But when they are rightly cultivated and become full grown, they are more than words. They are clean water and freedom from slavery and an alternative to gangs. They are the homeless finding a home and the illiterate learning how to read.

I want to be a part of the thing that “is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” 

So, I change my mind. No more house concerts.
I want to have house conversations.

Look out, my friends. House conversations are coming in 2013…