Speakers

Malcolm Guite

Poet-Priest Malcolm Guite was Chaplain for 20 years at Girton College, Cambridge and remains Supernumerary Fellow. He is the author of several books including Mariner: A voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Love Remember: 40 poems of loss, lament and hope, and David’s Crown: Sounding the Psalms. Guite earned degrees from Cambridge and Durham universities.

His research interests include the intersection of religion and the arts, and the examination of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and British poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Malcolm has a particular interest in the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty and continues to reflect deeply on how poetry can stimulate and re-awaken our prayer life.

 

Beth Moore

Author and speaker Beth Moore is a dynamic Bible teacher whose conferences take her across the globe. She has written numerous best-selling books and Bible studies and recently celebrated a landmark 25 years of Living Proof Live conferences and she’s still counting. She can be seen teaching Bible studies on the television program Living Proof with Beth Moore aired on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and YouTube. Beth and her husband Keith reside in the country just outside of Houston, Texas where they share a gleeful love of dogs and wildlife. She has two adult daughters she calls her best friends and an armful of grandchildren.

 

Makoto Fujimura

Makoto Fujimura is a leading contemporary artist whose work has been featured in galleries and museums around the world, including The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, The Huntington Library in California, the Tikotin Museum in Israel, Belvedere Museum in Vienna, C3M North Bund Art Museum in Shanghai, and Pola Museum in Japan. His process-driven, refractive “slow art” has been described by David Brooks of the New York Times as “a small rebellion against the quickening of time.”

Fujimura is the author of 4 books: Art+Faith: A Theology of Making, Silence and Beauty, Refractions, and Culture Care. He is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2023 Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life and the American Academy of Religion’s 2014 “Religion and the Arts” award. From 2003 to 2009, he served as a Presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts. He has received notable recognition as a speaker, with one address selected by NPR as among the 200 “Best Commencement Addresses Ever” and by CNN as one of the top 16 “Greatest Commencement Speeches of All Time.” He is a recipient of four Doctor of Arts Honorary Degrees from Belhaven University, Biola University, Cairn University, and Roanoke College.

 

Haejin Shim Fujimura

Haejin Shim Fujimura is a lawyer and an entrepreneur. Fujimura is the Managing Partner of the law firm, Shim & Associates, which was founded on the vision of culture care and advocacy for the oppressed. She has extensive experience litigating various civil lawsuits and representing companies ranging from startups to publicly traded companies.

Fujimura is also a co-founder and the CEO of Embers International, a global NGO protecting, restoring, and empowering the victims of injustice to end intergenerational exploitation and prevent human trafficking for the vulnerable groups, including the children born into brothels. She has been involved in various anti-trafficking efforts for over 20 years, including her work at International Justice Mission.

Fujimura is also a co-founder and the President of Academy Kintsugi and the founder and curator of Estuary art gallery.

https://www.shimassociates.com/about

https://www.embersinternational.org

https://culturecarecreative.com

 

Miroslav Volf

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and is the Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He was educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany, earning doctoral and post-doctoral degrees (with highest honors) from the University of Tübingen, Germany.

Miroslav regularly teaches and lectures in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, and across North America. He has given over 30 prestigious lectureships at universities around the world, including the Dudleian Lecture at Harvard University; the Chavasse Lectures at Oxford University; the Waldenstroem Lectures at Stockholm School of Theology; the Gray Lectures at Duke University, the Stob Lectures at Calvin University, and the Cadbury Lectures at University of Birmingham.

He has written or edited more than 20 books, over 100 scholarly articles, and his work has been featured on The Today Show, in the Washington Post, Christianity Today, Christian Century, Sojourners, and several other outlets, including NPR's Speaking of Faith (now On Being with Krista Tippett) and Public Television’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.

Some of his most significant books include:

• Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996; revised edition, 2019), translated in 9 other languages, winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and one of Christianity Today’s 100 most important religious books of the 20th century.

• Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most

Your Hosts

Hannah Anderson is an author who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Her works is shaped by the rhythms of rural life and include Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul and most recently Turning of Days: Lessons from Nature, Season, and Spirit and Heaven and Nature Sing.  Hannah is currently a student at Duke Divinity School where her studies focus on the intersection of theology and art. You can find more about her work at sometimesalight.com.


Travis Lowe is an ordained minister, financial services executive, and occasional writer. Currently, Travis is the President of the IPHC Extension Loan Fund which serves churches across the United States and US Territories. He also leads HopeWords, a nonprofit that exists to tell and cultivate redemptive stories by creating radically hospitable and generative events and conversations. Travis also serves as a founding board member of Together for Hope, a rural development coalition engaging the 338 counties of persistent rural poverty in America. He, his wife Jessi and their two kids, Graci and Dayne, moved to Oklahoma City from Bluefield, WV just over two years ago.

Location Information

  • First Baptist Church
  • 1201 N Robinson Ave, Oklahoma City, OK, 73157 US
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Cultivating Oaks Press

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Painters, Prophets, Poets: Imagining the New Creation Together

What? 

An interdisciplinary gathering designed to cultivate spiritual imagination and promote creative partnership in pursuit of Christ’s work of New Creation.  

Why? 

To counteract current fragmentation and inspire participants with their shared calling of cultural renewal

Who?

World-class artists and thinkers in conversation with local creative agents, ministry leaders, and community organizers

Where?

Oklahoma City

When?

October 4-6, 2024

BACKGROUND AND VISION

PPP is modeled after the successful HopeWords Conference that emerged from Bluefield, West Virginia. Inspired by the creative determination of this former coal community, HopeWords founder Travis Lowe envisioned a gathering that would bring world-class thinkers to Bluefield while also offering Bluefield as a model of how New Creation breaks through in the most unlikely places. The result of this partnership has been a yearly conference that benefits speakers, participants, and host city alike. 

Having seen the impact a local, interdisciplinary gathering can have, PPP hopes to replicate the core values that have made HopeWords Conference so successful, namely:

•    An affirmation of the creativity of all people

•    The cultivation of interdisciplinary partnerships

•    The discipline of Christian imagination 

•     A commitment to place

We believe that what differentiates PPP is the conviction that the call to create is not bound to a particular vocation, profession, or set of gifts. Nor is art a luxury for those with time, education, and wealth. Instead, the creative, imaginative impulse is an expression of our shared humanity as people made in the image of creative, imaginative God. Because of this, PPP also believes that the underlying principles of design, beauty, and wonder are relevant to every calling. Teachers, doctors, miners, pastors, homemakers, engineers, farmers, and foresters--all are invited into the work of envisioning and promoting Christ’s work of remaking the world in their own particular places, in their own particular ways.

Because of this, PPP is intentionally multi-disciplinary, bringing a diverse set of voices into conversation around our shared pursuit of New Creation. Not only do such conversations foster individual growth, they allow for synergy and partnership across denominational, class, vocational, and political lines. For Christians, such opportunities are especially important to the discipline of spiritual imagination as we long to see the kingdom come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Correspondingly, the work of spiritual imagination requires a prophetic vision, the ability to observe and name things for what they are so that we can imagine what they could and should be. PPP believes that the creative arts allow for such a vision, both by granting new points of access to entrenched conversations as well as providing new opportunities for meaning making and expression. The kinds of breakthroughs that we need as both church and nation will only come as we are able to step away from current paradigms and imagine new ways of naming our challenges and confronting them. In this regard, PPP hopes to energize participants’ own creativity so that they can return to their specific callings with a renewed sense of purpose and participation.

At the same time, PPP recognizes that such creative work is contextually bound. While we may share a common vision, the work itself is embodied in real times, places, and relationships. For this reason, PPP is committed to regional gatherings that will “seed” an area with a vision of New Creation and promote local partnerships and connections that can cultivate these ideas after the conference is over. PPP imagines the gathering, not simply as a collection of individual inspirational experiences, but as a holistic event that brings together the members of the body of Christ across profession, class, and discipline in a local area for the shared work of re-imagining what their community could look like. Ultimately, the goal of PPP is to promote God’s shalom in a particular place and through particular partnerships.  

FAQs

What is “New Creation”?

New Creation is the belief that Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection initiated a Spirit-led work of redeeming and restoring the world. In much the same way that Christ is the agent of original creation, Christ is the agent of New Creation by which individual people, families, communities, and nations are restored to the harmony and flourishing. As his followers, Christians are called into this work with him, using whatever skills and resources we’ve been given to creatively imagine and pursue God’s shalom.

How does the idea of New Creation relate to the arts and creativity?

Not only is the creative impulse an expression of our identity as God’s image bearers, it is also the means by which Christ is remaking the world. Because of this, beauty, design, and art are more than luxuries to be enjoyed by those with time, wealth, or education. Creativity is essential to every discipline because it opens up new lines of inquiry and invites us to imagine a world that does not yet exist. This requires a rich, theological understanding of Christ’s own creative work, but it also requires bringing theology and art into conversation in order to bring forward questions and answers that we would not consider otherwise. Beyond this, art and creativity allow for an embodied expression of what we say we believe. Just as God’s own creative work manifest in the Christ the Logos being made flesh, so too our beliefs must take creative, embodied expression in whatever fields we’re called to. 

What do you mean by an “interdisciplinary gathering”? 

PPP is intentionally interdisciplinary in that it attempts to name and harmonize the creative impulse that undergirds all vocations. Rather than emphasizing the differences that each vocation offers (as a multi-disciplinary conference might), the goal of PPP is to excavate what we share as followers as Christ in pursuit of his New Creation.  United by this vision, participants may discover a renewed sense of unity and coherence with other disciplines which will allow them to place their own work within the larger whole. This, in turn, will help them consider unlikely partnerships and coordinate their efforts in new ways. We believe that the strength of PPP is bringing people together in a time that tends to name us by our differences and narrowly-defined callings. 

What kind of speakers do you intend to platform?

In keeping with the goal of interdisciplinary conversation, PPP intentionally curates a broad slate of speakers, trusting that their unique synergy of gifts and perspectives will unlock new ideas and approaches for everyone.  This year’s confirmed speakers are painter Makoto Fujimara, poet Malcolm Guite, theologian Miroslav Volf, Bible teacher Beth Moore, and lawyer/entrepreneur Haejin Shim Fujimura. By platforming these speakers, PPP also hopes to illuminate the common thread that runs through all their work and unites them in a shared vision of God’s work of remaking the world. 

Why not simply attend another conference where these speakers are already speaking?

It would be rare to find these speakers together at one conference because most gatherings tend to have a narrow vocational or denominational focus. By contrast, PPP is intentionally eclectic, bringing together voices that would not typically be in conversation with each other. Besides this, the cost of travel, lodging, and admission make attending national conferences financially prohibitive for certain demographics. Hosting a conference locally reduces costs for attendees. As well, PPP hopes to offer scholarships funded and supported by local donors which will both grant broader access and foster regional partnerships.

How else will PPP accomplish the goal of regionality?

PPP recognizes that it would be easy for even a regional conference to focus on guest speakers to the loss of local voices. To help root the gathering in the local community, the conference will also platform regional makers, spiritual leaders, and community mission through 15-20 minute “spotlights.” These will expose participants to ministries and initiatives that they may not know about but whose regional proximity could lead to future partnership. As well, PPP will book visiting artists and speakers in smaller, targeted spaces throughout the community like local galleries, churches, and professional organizations as a way to focus on regional efforts.

How will PPP foster real-world connections among conference participants? 

As mentioned, PPP will highlight local efforts, but more practically, PPP will intentionally direct ticket sales and distribution to the local region first, only marketing more broadly once the target area has had a chance to secure tickets. This will effectively curate a local audience who will then have potential for real-world partnership after the conference ends. PPP will also intentionally limit the number of lectures and sessions to provide ample time for organic interaction and networking. Finally, PPP will offer opportunity for shared meals and fellowship designed to promote conversation and the seeds of collaboration. 

What do you hope this gathering will accomplish? 

The goal of PPP is to plant and cultivate the seeds of creative partnership in the broader region through the shared vision of New Creation. A successful gathering will offer a renewed vision of God’s own creative work; provide opportunities for local connection and partnership; and encourage participants in their own creative, imaginative endeavors. 


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