Stealing past the watchful dragons

I was dragged kicking and screaming to your show. I anticipated it with all the pleasure of dental surgery.”

That is how the director of an elite university’s drama department wrote to me after attending a performance of Mark’s Gospel. He then described the presentation as powerful and moving, regardless of whether one held religious belief. He had not come expecting to encounter serious theater drawn from the Bible. The performance got past his defenses.

That letter helped confirm the conviction that eventually led my wife, Sharon, and me to establish Fellowship for Performing Arts: Theater can transport Christian truth into where it is often not heard—and engage people who might reject it before it is spoken.

I did not grow up with a serious Christian faith. In college, I discovered theater. Two literary works also awakened something deep in me: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. Unbeknownst to me, these were early murmurs of the Holy Spirit, preparing my imagination for what came next.

After graduation, I moved to Germany and met Sharon, who invited me to a small, English-speaking church. I went reluctantly, but the people I met were intelligent and unafraid of my questions. One of them casually mentioned how Jesus was a person in history, like Lincoln or Washington. That was news to me. I had assumed He belonged to the fairy tales.

That prompted me to read John’s Gospel, and I finished it in one sitting. My imagination was overwhelmed. Here was no meek and mild Jesus. This was a hero—the hero of whom all other heroes are merely copies. As I read about His life, miracles, unjust trial, and crucifixion, I was in tears. The resurrection was one of the most cathartic experiences I had ever encountered.

There, I was given eyes to see. I was loved, and He could save me. I also realized that I had been deceived. Those two revelations changed everything.

Sharon and I married and moved to London, where I continued my theatrical training and encountered some of the finest theater in the world. I began asking why art of this caliber wasn’t being produced from a Christian worldview.

After London, we moved to New York, where I became immersed in theater. Yet as my faith deepened, I found the actor’s life unfulfilling. I started to wonder: Why not take my acting skills and techniques and apply them to the Bible?

Many evangelicals were suspicious of the arts and their influence. The arts, meanwhile, dismissed Christian expression as sentimental and artistically inferior. Christian drama then consisted mostly of sketches used to illustrate sermons. But people enter a theater expecting to be engaged, provoked, delighted, and perhaps surprised. If the work fails as theater, the audience has little reason to take its ideas seriously.

Our first responsibility is to capture the imagination and leave room for the Holy Spirit to do His work.

C.S. Lewis described the power of story as the ability to “steal past the watchful dragons”—assumptions and defenses arising whenever people sense they are being told what they must believe. Lewis understood that truth embedded within an imaginative experience can carry an audience into the story before its members even consider resisting.

That insight became central to our work. Lewis’ writing is unapologetically Christian, but it is also witty and alive. It does not avoid unbelief; it understands its attractions and exposes unbelief’s weaknesses from the inside.

Over the years, I have watched audiences lower their guard as the lights go down. Skeptics found themselves laughing with The Screwtape Letters before realizing that Lewis describes their own temptations. People who would never attend a sermon wrestled with Lewis’ movement from atheism to faith in The Most Reluctant Convert. Some have come to Christ; others have returned to faith they had abandoned. Many have simply begun asking questions.

That is what theater can do. It should never replace the preaching of the gospel or the work of discipleship. Those are essential. But it can awaken the moral imagination. It can challenge assumptions, create a longing for something beyond this world, and open a door to truth.

No political or cultural movement—and no single worldview—has an exclusive claim to the arts. It is our responsibility as Christians to create work that is excellent, truthful, imaginative, and worthy of the gospel we proclaim.

The house is dark. The audience is ready. The curtain is rising.

—Max McLean is the artistic director of Fellowship for Performing Arts