Sharon and I just passed through Chicago, and we ventured a run up to Addington Gallery in the River North neighborhood. There we had the good fortune (providential encounter) to catch up a bit with Dan Addington, the owner. He was about to drive to O’Hare to pick up some art, but he had some wiggle room for a conversation. 

For about a decade, Dan was our music leader at Evanston Baptist Church, a plant I served as pastor while I was also director of Baptist Collegiate Ministry at Northwestern University. He was a godsend, not only great for his choice and delivery of music, but also for his spirit and friendship. For one thing, his music was often up-tempo, something I sorely miss in prevailing church music today, where CCM/7-11 sets progress from one dirge-like song to another. Slow is good (as in Amazing Grace), but so is fast (as in Days of Elijah), and he gave us that, along with some bluegrass renditions of traditional hymns. 

Down at SBTS, I was sometimes asked about our worship-musician mix, and I would say something like, “Depends on who shows up.” We had a Moody Bible Institute music ed student; a chorus member with the Chicago Lyric Opera (whom we went to see in Pirates of Penzance); an acoustics engineer who studied at Cambridge, worked for NASA, and now profs in DC—his EBC instrument, a “canjo,” made from a Folgers coffee can; the leader of the Blind Anabaptist Blues Band (a group including Dan) who performed in clubs around town and who played the washboard for us in church. On and on. And Dan was the maestro, an impresario not only of musical skill sets, but also of musical personalities  

The last time we were at the gallery, I performed a wedding for one of our former parishioners at EBC, a poetry major at Northwestern. Another very memorable event at the gallery was when the artist Makoto Fujimura, attended a showing of the paintings (“illuminations”) he provided for Crossway’s four-hundredth-anniversary edition of the King James Version (1611-2011). Fujimura spoke briefly about the collection and even handed out some scent sticks provided him by a Scotsman. They had a whiskey essence, meant to honor the eponymous monarch who commissioned the translation, James I of Scotland. (Several years later, I saw the paintings in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D. C.)

Down at SBTS, I team-taught a course in aesthetics with Joe Crider of the music school, and we got to talking about (sometimes deserved) criticisms leveled at the arts by churches. Our conversation led to a book, noted elsewhere on this site, A Skeptic’s Guide to Arts in the Church: Ruminations on Twenty Reservations, and Dan was a major contributor to that dialogical enterprise. 

In our Evanston days, we had a great time with the Dan and Steph, his wife. One afternoon, they called to see if we’d like to go in a couple of hours to a puppet show in Chicago. Saying yes, we soon learned that puppets can be configured and deployed in some very arty and edgy ways. I remember one skit that involved life on some fantastical submarine and another that involved the discharge of a .45 caliber pistol (I trust with blanks). Then there was the one which recounted the story of the pregnant virgin and the dragon in Revelation 12; it was arresting and worshipful. Another afternoon, they took us to “Cameron’s” movie house in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the one with the garage where, in trying to roll back his dad’s odometer, they plunged the car into a ravine. (It’s in Highland Park, Illinois, not far up the shore from Evanston.) Oh, and we also did some biking together through Flanders fields in connection with a mission trip to Brussels. (Steph’s dad, Roger Roberts, was pastor of International Baptist Church in that city; Phil Roberts is Roger’s brother, and Steph’s uncle.)

Both Dan and Steph are excellent artists. She teaches art in the Chicago college system, at Truman. He works often in encaustic, using materials he says he can get at Home Depot—tar and wax. Sharon and I commissioned or bought works from both of them. Steph did a large watercolor for us, featuring an assembly of musicians helped in our worship at EBC. Dan did a series of scenes from Revelation, drawings tied to the texts I was addressing from the pulpit. And then there was an enchanting piece he’d brought from his studio to hang on our church wall, back when we met in the basement of the Fountain Square Building. It featured the side silhouette of a hovering angel with an outstretched arm in a dark, black-and-green setting, with small icons suspended in the wax. I named it The Valley of the Shadow when I bought it from him at a price reflecting his great kindness.  And then I stupidly walked home with it, a mile or so in the well-below-freezing night of Chicago winter. Sad to say, the wax didn’t take well to the cold, and it went milky on us. So Dan patiently reheated and repaired it, and we proudly hung it over our mantel when we moved to Nashville.

On our brief visit, we were talking about our preference for up-tempo church music, and mentioned one song that drifted into tedium, Hillsong’s Who You Say I Am. Dan still helps with music in his church, and he volunteered that he’d recently led them in a speeded-up version. We asked him for a demonstration, so he took down his guitar and got after it. It was wonderful. So is he.