Rediscovering Patronage
Science seems to be on the minds of a lot of Christians lately, whether they realize it or not. From the hot-button questions of viruses, vaccines, and climate change to less prominent questions about the structure and origins of the cosmos, Christians really do care a lot about science. Simultaneously, Christians seem to be retreating from the sciences. Christian churches are generally not known for encouraging young people to actively participate in the sciences (if this isn't your experience - thank God! It is unfortunately too common).
This is part of why Core Academy exists: We want to help the church come to value science again, and we want Christian young people interested in the sciences to succeed and thrive. If you're a Christian and you care about vaccines or the shape of the earth or caveman fossils, you absolutely should care about getting more Christians involved in science. We can never succeed in changing anything if we abdicate science to non-Christians and try to function only as outside, cultural critics. If we want to see change in the modern scientific culture, we must be a part of it. We must bring Jesus to the world of science.
I'm fired up about this tonight after reading a dynamite interview over at The Gospel Coalition with Justus Stout of Renew the Arts, a ministry dedicated to liberating Christian creativity. I was struck at how similar their ministry orientation is to Core Academy's. You could very nearly replace references to "art" in that interview with "science," and it would apply exactly the same.
Stout's big point in the interview is that we Christians ought to effect cultural change through artistic expression by adopting an attitude of patronage rather than philanthropy. Stout says,
Philanthropic giving is usually focused on proof of impact. There is merit to this kind of giving, but it can be difficult in the context of making art and culture, which has a very slow process of impact and is incredibly difficult to measure. A patron gives in a different way—because of a personal connection to the work, a relationship with the artist, and a peculiar insight into the goodness of the project at hand. This could be called discernment—perhaps the greatest characteristic of a patron.
Oh yeah, that resonates with me deeply. Traditional funding and philanthropy for science is completely (and myopically) focused on deliverables, publications, and innovation. Trying to adapt that model to the Christian world and creation research is incredibly difficult, especially when I'm dealing with many individual donors, most of whom do not understand the full nuances of the scientific work we do. I can brag all day about the research projects we've accomplished, the presentations we've given at conferences, the papers we've published, all the usual benchmarks of scientific accomplishment, but to a non-scientist who has a limited understanding of our work, those benchmarks sound impressive (maybe), but what do they really mean?
Stout brings us a new way of thinking, and it's packaged in this great concept of patronage: Patronage looks beyond the number of papers or students to the people being shaped into the image of Christ. That's not something that shows up on a project evaluation survey or a test tube assay. It's not even something that we can hope to complete in any lifetime. It's part of the Quest.
The quest needs patrons. We creation scholars, on our journey to conform our understanding of the world's origins to the image of Christ, need the church to gather around us, to pray for us, to disciple us, to support our work. Why? Because the world needs good Christian scholarship to guide us to the truth about God's world. And we scientists can't do it alone.
I'm going to have to think about this model of patronage a lot more. It's absolutely what Core Academy needs as we nurture the next generation of faithful, Christ-like researchers to explore the hardest problems in creation.
Justus, we should have lunch or something. Text me.
Have you read my book? You should check that out too!
