If you haven’t seen the I Am Second website, check it out.

“I Am Second” is about stories. People sharing their life struggles and essentially discovering that they can’t or don’t want to do it alone.

The video work is excellent and captures the emotion of the stories. The site design is beautiful and the interface well done. Overall, a highly effective website experience that captures the essence of the theme.

There was a time when Christianity produced great and inspiring works of creativity. From paintings, sculptures, music, architecture, literature… Christian art lead the creative edge of western culture. Today however, when you consider the genres of Christian movies, Christian music, or Christian art, most people associate it as a cheap imitation, something of poor quality.

Part of the problem (at least in America), is the existence of a Christian sub-culture. This creates a paradigm of Christians producing stuff for other Christians. It often looks like Christian marketers copy what is successful in the culture and re-package it with Christian content. The result is often a poor imitation with no real creative edge.

Another problem is that the Christian mainstream often defines the value of creative work by its moral or religious message. If it preaches the Gospel and praises God, then it is good art, but anything else is bad. While the message is certainly a main component of the art, the importance of technical merit and innovation is often perceived as sub-par. A suspicion towards emerging technologies such as social media is often resisted rather than fully explored. While I agree there should be caution in all forms of media, the general perception in Christian circles tends to be defensive rather than pro-active.

In my opinion, engaging the culture in the arts is a means of ‘creating’ from within the culture, not apart from it. It is the presentation layer of a powerful narrative (Gospel) for the purposes of redeeming the culture, using the very best of innovation and quality.

This website (exit-25) serves the following purpose: To explore ways of creative excellence in Christian art within the culture. By art I mean all forms of media as well as emerging technologies. I will offer opinions on how I think this works, as well as highlight and showcase examples that are doing this well.