Hotrods, Rat Fink, Sermons and the Bible. Somewhere, smack dab in the middle of that you'll find Jay Bakker. Jay shares with us his thoughts and views on Christianity and the Arts. Location: Blackbird Parlour - Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Photo: Michael Rowe Photography

I like it when you speak about Christians as unique individuals. I feel this becomes incredibly important when we talk about Christianity and the arts, where musicians, artists, actors and poets need to develop the characteristics that make them unique through their work. What are your thoughts on this?

Well, I think it's really important for artists, musicians, and folks in any realm really, to stay unique and interesting in their art because what we see alot of today is Christians or people who become Christians- we see it alot with actors, and they eventually throw their careers away and become second rate.

One of the things that inspired me is Johnny Cash thought about quitting music and doing preaching and he was talking to Billy Graham about it and Billy Graham looked at him and said- "I'm a preacher, you're a musician, you need to stay a musician, that's the talent that God has given you, stay with those talents."

Obviously, we see the impact that Johnny Cash's life and music has had on us. Not all of his music is Christ based, and I think if someone like a Stephen Baldwin would have stayed doing like Unusual Suspects, sometimes things like that I think give people encouragement; that I can be a believer, but I can still practice my art, I can still communicate, I can still act, I don't have to be a Christian character every time I have to act. I can still use my talents for the Glory of God.

I wish more people would do that, but I think there's alot of pressure in society, I think alot of ministers want to use those people as bait in a way, so they bring them down and tell them "don't do this, do this..." I think it's more of a disservice than a service. To take someone who has not felt called to preach, or called to the ministry- it might be an amazing football player, and you tell them to give up their career playing football and become a preacher.

Then they become preachers and they don't know what they're saying half the time. We've seen that happen with a famous football player, he was preaching a sermon and I can't remember exactly what he said, but it became this huge controversy. Not that everybody can't preach, but it seems like he had a calling of something that he could really do and what happened was it caused him to lose alot of his career opportunities. And I don't think that's because he was being persecuted as a Christian, I think it's because we have alot of misguided stuff out there.

I think we saw Bob Dylan go through that, where it was either all or nothing, and I think there's a danger in that because

One of the first things that attracted me to Revolution was your branding- cards, t-shirts, stickers and posters, it's very unique and consistently so. How does art play a role in your identity?

I'm always fascinated with graphics and things that move me. I don't own an old car, but I buy hotrod magazines all the time, because they inspire me. The art, even the lowbrow art inspires me. It's kind of like what Vince said, that when he's preaching it gives him inspiration to do his music. For me, seeing these guys using these different techniques for art and stepping outside the norm and doing something that...it has become more acceptable, but at one time it was not very culturally acceptable.

Design: Wes Montgomery

Like Rat Fink was made to be against Mickey Mouse you know? These guys were willing to just try something new and completely different and come up with something that had never existed before, to me is really exciting.

To me, it was alot of fun making t-shirts, not like let's do this to make money, it's just a part of expressing ourselves and who we were. Always, if I had a favorite band, I wanted to wear their t-shirt. I thought it was a neat way to get involved with the community that we were involved with. Alot of our friends were in bands and maybe we could make t-shirts too and do stickers and stuff.

I owned a skateboard clothing company with a friend of mine in 93', 94' called Saturday Skateboarding. I really enjoyed doing that, and during that I was also working at Revolution so I said let's just do a t-shirt with our logo on it since we're making them and see what happens. I just enjoy it, I enjoy sitting down and designing stuff. It's really wild. We have "Religion Kills" and I saw a kid with that tattooed on his arm when I moved here. I remember sitting down, with a pencil, I still have the book, just drawing something out, and then to see it on somebody's arm. You know, it's also part of the tattoo culture- imagery, and I've always liked imagery.

It's amazing that it meant that much to him to actually make a tattoo out of it.

Yeah, I really felt like it meant something to him, you know that's why we do it. Move people and get them to think.

Often art is connoted with beauty, and that beauty is an inspiration. On the other hand, I think for art to be genuine, it has to embrace life in its fullness which isn't always beautiful. I'm constantly inspired by musicians like Johnny Cash and Townes Van Zandt, who had weathered through tremendous storms, sometimes self inflicted, sometimes not, but through those experiences they managed to create beautiful works of art, granted they may not always be "pretty" but they are honestly transparent and speak of real experience.

Do we need to redefine the idea of beauty and what it's role is?

Oh, definitely, I mean on many levels. I think about fashion magazines and what it does to young people. We can walk out on the street here and see these kids who are rail thin, and I can guarantee at least one out of ten has an eating disorder; male or female. We've got this false perception of what beauty is and what beauty can be. I think what inspires me about Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan and guys like that is seeing so much of their art come later in their lives, they all had this really down time that was hard and rough. But it brought a sort of genuineness out of this bankrupt time in their art.

I think we've got to look at everything as beautiful and seeing hurts and pains from the past should be more validating for peoples art because it comes from experience. It comes from a place where I remember when nobody cared about me, or I remember when nobody wanted to listen to one of my records. It allows you to become more transparent. I think anytime you go through great loss or great pain, especially the type like losing my mom and things like that, it puts things in perspective and that's where you're really able to understand and enjoy the beauty of what you're doing with like the church; there was a time in my life when I wanted a huge church, not a 1,000 member church, but you know, a couple hundred people, because I thought that was success.

And I didn't want people to not like me, but I always preached sermons that were controversial and that really tore me up for a while. I didn't understand why people didn't want to hear about grace. But, what happened for me was, when you lose things that are close to you or you see how petty we can be with certain things, it allows you to put things in perspective and learn how to deal with things.

That's when ugly things do become beautiful. Like in that U2 song "Grace" Grace takes ugly things and makes them beautiful, and that's true, and we're able to share our experiences and appreciate through the gritty and ugly times, really appreciate, and see God in the simple things. Like maybe going to a movie, or going to a museum, or walking down the street, or a hotrod magazine. You see alot of fighting in the church today, and all of this us against them kind of thing, and you start to realize these are things that are so petty.

Design: Clay Summers

I think what we have to do is to define the difference between the real beauty of what Christ has given us and there are some really ugly things out there that I don't think should be considered beautiful, but should be considered as this is a waste of my time, and this is keeping me from being who God's called me to be and it's keeping me from loving all people.

As a pastor, one of your roles is to inspire people to action, to provoke a response and encourage a change of mind where it's needed. Sounds alot like the role of an artist no? Do you feel that this is your art?

Definitely, it's a calling. It's my purpose. Just like there's alot of people who's calling is art. To me, it's very free-form, I don't like to prepare sermons way in advance, usually I prepare my sermons the day of. I like them to be really fresh and honest and transparent. I think I'm more self taught in how I preach so I guess it is an art in a way- my own personal art. The thing is about art, you can't compare Ed Roth to Van Gogh, but you can appreciate both of them just as much. And you can't compare me to Joel Osteen, we both have our form and the way we do things. So in that way, for me, it's very art, its free-flowing, top of the head, very straight from the heart, not that the other isn't but maybe it's more prepared, more elegant.

I was trained as a fine artist, as a painter, I start out a painting with a blank canvas, sometimes I would purposefully lay down a shade of gray or any other color before I start painting just to get away from staring at a white field of nothing, other times this field of nothing was quite useful as I would sit and meditate on it until something starts to form. Are your messages that way, do you feel the Lord lay something deliberately on your heart and then there are other times when your experience speaks back to the Lord and that becomes a message?

Oh yeah definitely.

Is one more inspired than the other?

No. I mean sometimes one might be more inspired on a particular day. Or sometimes I go in with a plan and it's completely different and there's sometimes I come in ill-prepared and God uses that.

And I'll work around the mistake, and incorporate the mistake into it, and it's kind of like when I preach, the insecurities, or I say a word wrong or I get nervous. You just continue to go to the end. So in the same way that I draw, I'm gonna go from the beginning to the end, I can't even tell what it is sometimes in the middle even though I know what it's supposed to be, I try to morph it into what it should be, but it's not always what I expected it to be, but it does come out as a final product.

Something that people get something out of, and when I draw, I get something out of it and I'm able to learn from that and either take it to another level or like, I've got some pieces that I'm just really happy with the way they were. I have one of a skeleton, of a skull face with a flight cap, because I love logos. I kept messing up the color of the face, and finally, I ended up putting so much stuff over it, it became texture, it's almost like a bone feel to it. But that came from constantly trying to move past the mistake and learn from the mistake and even sometimes getting myself in deeper, but eventually, the outcome was really beautiful.

And I've done that a million times preaching. It's where I thought, oh man I'm not gonna get out of this.

It must be terrifying.

Yeah, it is and then God shows up. When I was in California I was preaching a sermon and you know I do little sidebars, and rabbit holes...

You do? [enter sarcasm]

Yeah, yeah, believe it or not, and I was referring to the woman at the well as a sidebar, but I got this huge revelation from that, and I went off of that and it shook me so bad, I mean it was so amazing that God revealed that to me while I was in front of a crowd of people, I was like "we're done, this is what was supposed to be said, and we're done". It was one of those things where it was going one way and it decided to go a whole other way. It's like freestyyyle...[laughs]

Speaking of...Music. I know that you are a die hard music fan- I am as well. Here's a question for you - Can you tell me why I don't listen to Contemporary Christian music?

Why you don't? I think alot of Contemporary Christian music is so contrived and alot of times it's trying to fit into the industry standard because it does become about a bottom line. It's probably like the music in the 50's and 60's when you had a really talented person, and then the producer comes in and says no, this is the way that we're doing it and you have to sing 5 songs from our catalog. It's unfortunate, because Christian music should be more genuine than probably any music.

But that's not the state we're in right now, so I'd say probably some of that, and people get lazy because they can get famous real fast in the Christian scene and make it big there. There's probably guys that make more money than any of us put together at this table combined, who we could go through this room of people and ask if anybody's heard of them and they would say "no". But you could go to a church and everybody in the place would know who they were. So there's not that tendency to make better art.

That's an extreme point but, you know, the search for perfection that may never be. But it seems like Christians just put stuff out, there are alot of great Christian artists, but the strange thing is, when you find all these really talented guys, you usually end up having to go outside of the church, because alot of the Christian book stores put boundaries on them so they aren't able to express their art in a true, honest way. So they get out of it, and it's really the ones that are willing to play ball and live under a sort of imaginary standard that religious tradition has put on them so you lose alot of genuineness in that, that's probably why you don't listen to Christian music.

Who are some of these genuine ones?

David Bazan from Pedro The Lion, bands like MxPx, their music's probably not the deepest music in the world but...bands like Me Without You, I don't listen to alot of Christian music either so it's hard for me to think, because I felt like when I listened to Christian music, there's a culture that goes along with it, it's almost like a scene, like all or nothing, and I really embraced the scene, but unfortunately, not the people, but the organizations built around the people, did not embrace me.

What I was looking for was something different, a different message, rather than a different style. What I found was just a different style like "we look crazy and we have great music" but we all still believe the same things, you know, and we're still all tied up in religious tradition. And it seems like if anyone breaks off from that, they're not involved anymore.

So I guess that's one of the reasons I don't listen to alot of Christian music, because it's hard to find great stuff out there, you know all of the places these guys play I was speaking at, but when I didn't add up to everything they expected of me and I didn't agree with all of their theology on these different events, they stopped having me. Then there's no freedom of expression and what if God does want to reach the Gentiles, what if Jesus decides to call a Pharisee to reach the Gentiles, oh now we can't do that and it's like we've locked it and said that the Bible is the last word, and now we've locked it and that's dangerous because God's still alive. Even the Bible can be a living entity, and I think that's what happens in the Christian culture, we just want to stay in one place and we don't allow God to be continuously God.

I'd like to get your perspective on teams, and specifically on team size. It seems from its conception Revolution has been a very hands on effort with a limited number of hands. How has this helped you, and what are the biggest challenges?

It's been easy for me to keep it small because not alot of people show up! No, but having a ministry is hard work, and it can burn you out. And I've seen many people go through burn out through Revolution, and who've worked with Revolution and had to move on. I even got burnt out for a year, but I've been doing it pretty much since the beginning except for one year. I just think there's something special about community and I think what's different now is we've seen opportunities here in New York where we can maybe do few things to really make the church explode, but not really wanting to do that at this point.

Design: Clay Summers

I think that's because of the team, and I look at the team aspect of it, and what is so important is, you know maybe I would be the point guard or the quarterback, whatever, but coming from someone who doesn't know sports at all [laughs], for me, I like to preach my sermons, I've got a vision for what the ministry is, but if it wasn't for someone like Vince, who has a fresh vision for something that I've been doing forever, and says hey, let's try to get some more people from the church involved, or let's do this, ok, and then those people come in and say we want to do this and we want to do that, that has to be a team effort.

I think a church has to be a body of people working together with a similar goal, but not all the same purposes or passions. Some people might have passions for social issues, some people might have a passion for the arts, but finding those people and getting us together on a common ground to communicate that and to work together as a team, and that's been a struggle in the past. Specially when you're doing something a little rebellious, because rebels are always such individuals, so you get a bunch of rebels who are trying to be a team and sometimes that can be a bunch of people trying to outdo each other. Or then you get the people who just expect the leader to do everything.

I've gotten to the point where I've had to become comfortable with the fact that I like to prepare sermons, I like to preach, I like to write thank you letters, I like to design shirts, but I don't necessarily know, or enjoy setting up this outing, or I'm not thinking, Oh, Easter Sunday is coming up, we should do Communion, to me, I'm just gonna go speak, and someone like Vince comes in and says we should do this, and someone else says, I make bread how about that?

What happened with Easter Sunday was it became a team effort, and the whole church really participated in it. But that was because of individuals coming together as a team. If I was to do church on my own, I would be better to quit Revolution and just become an evangelist.

thinking that I need to make sure that I do everything. Being comfortable in who God has called me to be and being comfortable in allowing God to use the people in the church too. It's ok if they do something successful, and they did it. I don't have to take the credit for it, you know what I mean?

It's ok, and allowing God to operate that way, and dying to yourself, and that's brutally honest, but that's part of it you know, and being comfortable in that, not just being the shining star, and that's what we're trying to do here. The last church I built was really based around me, not on purpose particularly, but because I preached all the time and never had anybody else preach. Not because I didn't want to, I just thought I had to be there, and now I've come to a point in my life where I don't have to be and a matter of fact, It's better if I'm not, because it allows the body to be the body, and not a group of people coming to see a preacher. I'm being very comfortable in that and finding alot of peace in that.

So it's important to have the right people around you.

You've got to have the right people around you, it will make you or break you. There's been times when it's broken me, and it's broken the people around me. There's been times when I wasn't a good leader, and these were people who had a captain that didn't know how to steer a ship. That was a difficult time, and now I'm letting other people help me steer the ship, and I'm able to call them and say, can you do this, and please do this, but before I think I operated out of fear, and insecurity. A team of people is very important, and the sum is always greater than the one.

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