This is Michael Minkoff, and I’d like to speak to you at length from my heart. You may not know much of what I’m about to tell you, because we don’t regularly talk about it. I honestly don’t like talking about it, as anyone who knows me will readily confirm. But here goes.
We at Renew the Arts have been working for more than fifteen years to support art partnership and community within the body of Christ, and we have never had the resources to fulfill our full potential. By merely human metrics, we should have already ceased to exist, like other much larger and much more “successful” Christian arts organizations before us.
Regularly, people show great surprise when they become more familiar with our practical inner workings. Based on our output, our impact, and our longevity, most people expect that we must be a much larger organization with a much larger budget. Not so much. In fact, our entire organization consists of three salaried employees paid part-time wages and a handful of unpaid (or underpaid) volunteers. Our annual budget in total for the whole organization has regularly been less than the average income of a single American household.
Yet, year after year, we touch the lives of hundreds and thousands, sowing seeds of hope where there was despair, lending life-giving support and care to Christians—both artists and otherwise—who had felt unseen and unheard, cultivating community among those who live as strangers and orphans and widows, producing beautiful works and more beautiful lives in pursuit of Jesus in our small corner of the Kingdom.
Through foresight in the Spirit, we have sown abundant seeds concerning patronage, crowd-funding, the growing importance of arts and beauty in the church, in-person community-building, the desperate need for authenticity in worship, and the kingdom impact of hospitality. And we did this, again through the pressing of the Spirit, long before it was cool or hip to do so. We’ve been ahead of the curve, and yet, at the same time, so far behind. I sometimes mourn what progress we might have lost because we couldn’t convince more people in the beginning to invest in what I still believe to be the central concern of the current and coming generations: cultivating a vision of the beautiful life in Jesus within the church.
God has provided for us, and He has done it through people like you, giving what you can to something greater than politics, celebrity, and monetary profit. The value of our work cannot be measured in clicks, likes, follows, sales, attendance, or notoriety. We have attempted as faithfully as possible to pursue the way of Jesus, and with Him, we have had to learn to see as God sees—not the outward appearance, but the heart. I still believe in this mission, now more than ever and every season more than the last. I think God has limited our outward success up to this time so that our strengthening roots and trunk would not break under too much foliage and fruit. But I believe we’re ready to start producing fruits like we never have before in the field of the unreaped harvest both within and without the church.
So yet again, I’m asking for your renewed commitment to partner with us. If you’re reading this, would you prayerfully consider supporting our mission with your time, your talents, or your material resources? If you want to find out what you can do, reach out to us. We have a growing number of opportunities for you to join us behind the plough, in whatever measure and whatever manner God has given you to work for His kingdom. It has been my privilege and blessing to give everything I can to Renew the Arts for nearly twenty years. I greatly desire for you to experience that same privilege and blessing. Even though our reluctance to ask for your help has been well-intentioned—to spare you another burden, I fear we may only have robbed you a glorious opportunity. Let’s fix that together.
Feel free to send me an email here and let’s start a conversation about what partnership in the arts could mean for you.
God bless you all,
Michael Minkoff