It Was Good: On Collaboration

“Why as Christian artists should we participate in collaborative projects and value them as we do our solo work?”

-Bauer, It was Good, page 276

The response to the question in the book is this… “All art gives artists the opportunity to love God with all their heart and soul and mind, but collaboration gives artists the unique opportunity to embody the second commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself” (Bauer, 276).

I think my favorite part of this chapter was the second answer to the question at the beginning of this post. It says, “solo success is certainly not wrong or ‘selling out,’ but it can cause the artist to depend on himself, lose his focus on God as the true creative power and separate himself from the community at large for whom he makes his art” (Bauer,276).

What an awakening.

Let’s be real though, I hate working with other people. There are so many potential complications when you have to depend on someone else to do their own part and it almost seems like more effort than to just do it all on your own. But that’s the point, you can’t do it all alone, we weren’t created to in the first place.

Currently, in the internship I have, the team members are supposed to collaborate on the marketing projects and content we have to do but no one actually does. Our coordinator noticed and then in one of our meetings, addressed it and gave us some tips on how to do better. He showed this video of Steve Jobs talking about how Apple is an extremely collaborative company, he even calls it the key to Apple's success.

Jobs said “teamwork is dependent on trusting other folks to come through with their part without watching them the whole time, but trusting that they’re going to come through with their parts.” This is huge! Trust is the most important component to collaboration and working with a team, yet it is so difficult to trust one another.

Trust is difficult in general and such a blind concept. Losing and winning trust can be too easy at times but the fact is, we have to trust one another. It makes me think of trusting in God, which to me seems like the best example of blind trust. We trust God is with us, walking alongside us, just as we trust the people around us. Trust in God takes time to build just like trust in others must be built over time.

To bring it all together, collaboration calls for trust and amazing things can happen when we do trust. God calls us into community and created us to work with one another to make beautiful results in any kind of endeavor. It is easier to work by yourself sometimes and it is not wrong to do so just as long as we stay humble and recognize who the one, true creator is. Although, even better results can happen when we “merge two or more artistic visions” (Bauer 276).

Resources:

Bustard, Ned. It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God. Square Halo Books, 2006.

Group, ET. YouTube, YouTube, 23 Oct. 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYCe9rXnBh4.