“I Don’t Use the Gospel of Jesus Christ to Share My Talents. I Use My Talents to Share the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
In her Faith + Works Lecture, Alexandra Mackenzie Johns urged students to see creative labor as a spiritual act rather than an artistic accessory. She anchored her argument in a single conviction spoken plainly: “I would argue that our works are an embodiment of our faith, the tangible artifact of what we believe about ourselves, about God, about others, about the Earth.”
Drawing from the New Testament, Johns speaks directly to the nature of artistic creation. “As a theater practitioner and scholar,” she said, “this verse speaks to me of embodiment. When we talk of embodiment in theater, we are talking about the integration of the inner life, manifest or embodied in the outer life. The actor’s body as both carrier and maker of cultural memory.”
For Johns, that embodiment collapses any separation between what Christians create and how they serve. “Faith and works are one and the same,” she said. “They are all our creative works and our compassionate works. They are all a becoming of self, a revealing of self, of doing the work that God has called us to do.”
She then contrasted her early career ambitions with the shift that occurred during her graduate years at BYU. Surrounded by faculty and peers who reframed the purpose of creativity, she said her understanding of discipleship changed. “I don’t use the gospel of Jesus Christ to share my talents. I use my talents to share the gospel of Jesus Christ,” she said. “And that shift for me was everything.”
Johns illustrated the stakes of that shift through her production “Home,” a verbatim play created as a response to anti-refugee rhetoric that had intensified on the island of Jersey. “The discourse had become so polarized and toxic,” she said. “I was horrified.” She and collaborator Michelle Smith interviewed Jersey islanders and traveled to refugee camps in northern France, eventually inviting three refugee artists to join the cast.
The production evolved into something more than what Johns had even hoped. In the final moments of each night, Syrian choreographer Wasim Dallal invited the audience to learn a Syrian dance. Johns described standing across from a woman in the circle who began to weep. Afterward, the woman told her, “Why can’t it always be like this? Why can’t it always be this abundant?”
Another attendee told Johns the show had changed her position on refugee policy. “She said, ‘I’m not on the fence anymore. I’m saying, let’s welcome. Let’s bring these people to our island and care for them.’”
For Johns, that response captured what theater can do. “Theater can imagine futures and then embody them,” she said. “Right before us.”
Her second major example was creating the British Pageant, first staged in 2013 and later performed in the United States. Johns said she felt the Saints in the British Isles needed a work that centered their own stories of conversion, sacrifice and gathering. “It felt like you needed something across the British Isles that told the stories of the peoples of that land,” she said.
Images from the production showed children singing farewell songs, families reading scriptures, and young people portraying the early Saints as they left home. Directing the pageant, she said, taught her to stop over-controlling the work. “I realized that my role as a director was to get out of the way,” she said. “I did not need to teach these families how to read scriptures together beautifully.”
She ended with a story about a lighthouse on Jersey, where her uncle once worked. A few years ago, at the Provo City Center Temple grounds, she met an author who had prayed that morning for help writing a character from Jersey who runs the lighthouse. Johns connected the author with her aunt, who would deliver food to the lighthouse on horseback for her husband. The timing, Johns said, reminded her of God’s nearness to creative work.
“God is in the details of our creative work to the nth degree,” she said. “Not because our creative works are anything comparable to His — we are like little children with our works. But because He loves us.”