Last week we talked about the Cultivate Beauty Film Festival. As promised, we will bring you the audio lectures and Q&A panel from that festival, featuring Dr. Harold Best, author of Unceasing Worship and Music Through The Eyes Of Faith, along with Sojourn worship arts pastor Mike Cosper, Terra Nova (Troy, New York) pastors Ed Marcelle and Scott Womer, and Christ Church (Santa Fe, New Mexico) Pastor Martin Ban.Â
 ”Cultivate Beauty” is more than a weekend festival at Sojourn, though. It’s an entire month-long event known as Kill Your TV/ Cultivate Beauty Month. Below is an excerpt from Josh Thomas’ article on the history of this month-long event at Sojourn, a history that has seen the (literal) smashing of many TVs and the cultivation of beautiful works of art and relationships:
The Eye of the Beholder: A Brief History and Preview of Kill Your TV / Cultivate Beauty Month
By Josh Thomas
In the beginning …
It has become a moment canonized in our church’s history: A congregation of safety-goggled, sledgehammer-wielding crazies, smashing TVs and shrieking to the heavens.
If you’ve been around Sojourn long, you’ve probably heard of “Kill Your TV” month, the moniker bestowed upon the month of April in the infancy of the church when Sojourners were urged to go a whole month without setting up camp in front of the boob tube. But Kill Your TV wasn’t just a figurative slogan for Sojourners in those early days – it was put into action by actually destroying TV sets. “We had sledge hammers, and Daniel [Montgomery] would be screaming … If it was anyone’s first time at Sojourn, they walked away, like, ‘What is going on?’ It felt like it was a cult,” laughs Sojourner Lachlan Coffey. “It was totally creepy … little kids with sledge hammers and goggles going, ‘Aaaggh!’”
But the war being waged wasn’t against boxes made of plastic, glass and copper. It was being waged against passivity and against idols that stand in the way of recognizing God’s amazing creativity. “We in America act like we don’t have idols anymore, people out in Hindu-land have all the idols. But TV is such an idol. It’s amazing how many people are bowing down to it,” Coffey says.
But removing something negative is pointless unless something edifying is substituted in its place. So in an effort to balance out the negative tone of “killing” TVs, April was soon established as “Cultivate Beauty” month. For a full month, people were urged to do things that consciously nurtured an awareness of beauty. By the second year, an April calendar with specific suggestions for each day was created and handed out to the church. “One day was to write a letter to your grandparents. Every calendar came with a package of seeds [so] that you could go outside and plant something, take a walk, draw something,” remembers Coffey.
Inherent in cultivating beauty, Coffey said, is creation. So in 2001, the Cultivate Beauty Film Festival was established.
continued tomorrow here on sojournmusic.com
