Finding my tribe at Hutchmoot UK
The delight and importance of community to creativity
Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the Hutchmoot UK 2022 conference, a Christian conference of arts and creativity, with writers, musicians and artists as speakers and performers, for all who enjoy arts and imagination. I was there both as an attendee and as a speaker, leading a seminar on Discipleship to Capture the Imagination – more on that later.
What is a ‘Hutchmoot’ anyway?
“Hutchmoot” is a bit of an odd name and takes a couple of levels of explanation.
First of all, it takes its name from ‘The Rabbit Room’, which is a Christian community in Nashville and online. ‘Hutch’ as in rabbit hutch, ‘Moot’ as in meeting (from the Old English word ‘mot’, such as the Anglo-Saxon council, the Witenagemot - or think too of the Entmoot in The Lord of the Rings).
But why the Rabbit Room? Well, ‘The Rabbit Room’ is the name of the room in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and the other Inklings would meet to talk theology, myth and story, and to share their writing together. It was here that they discussed early drafts of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, as well as other writings.
So at root, Hutchmoot is about stories, writing, creativity and art, in the context of the Christian faith. Or as the Rabbit Room describes itself, it ‘cultivates and curates stories, music, and art to nourish Christ-centered communities for the life of the world’.
Finding my tribe
You might notice more than a passing similarity to the ethos of this newsletter, centred around stories, faith and imagination!
I really enjoyed being together with lots of people who share common interests and reference points – from instantly getting allusions to Narnia or Middle-Earth, to sharing a common theological outlook and touchstones.
Within Christian circles, art and creativity aren’t necessarily mainstream concerns for churches. As singer-songwriter and author Andrew Peterson said in his keynote, creative Christians can often feel like ‘border-walkers’, caught between two worlds. Sometimes Christians can focus a lot on right beliefs and behaviour, and beauty and imagination aren’t necessarily high on the agenda. Artists and those with an appreciation of art tend to place more value on nuance, complexity and mystery than some Christian cultures are comfortable with. But within broader artistic circles, the perspective that the Christian faith brings to your imagination and storytelling isn’t typically well understood and appreciated by people without a faith of their own, especially in an increasingly secular culture.
So to have a place where both truth and beauty, faith and imagination, meaning and mystery are all on the menu is deeply satisfying. To get to hear artists performing or showcasing work that is both pursuing artistic excellence and expresses, whether explicitly or implicitly, something of their faith and Christian outlook, is wonderfully refreshing.
Creativity needs community
We all need community. That’s especially true of any creative endeavour.
While we might begin by making art for ourselves, usually we have the desire for it to be shared with others, to be enjoyed and appreciated. We gain inspiration and encouragement from community. We discuss and debate, and even our disagreements are often the creative friction that drive us to new ideas and approaches.
Part of the origin story of this newsletter is actually an evening of discussion with Andrew Peterson at the home of Dave Gobbett, my church pastor in Cardiff, last autumn. Andrew had played a concert at Highfields Church, and Dave invited a bunch of ‘creative types’ to come and hang out with Andrew at his house a few nights later. It was really great to get to hear more from Andrew about his experiences, creative process and the part his faith plays in that.
My time spent reflecting on that evening really helped coalesce my thinking about what to focus my writing on, leading to Bigger on the Inside and my exploration of imaginative discipleship.
So when it came to my own seminar on Discipleship to Capture the Imagination, I had a real sense of bringing something back to the Christian creative community that had already nourished me. These are also ideas that I have shaped in community – I’m particularly grateful to the Morphe Cymru arts group for letting me ‘test drive’ my material with them last month and for being so encouraging with it.
Another dimension of community that the conference represented was the chance to connect with people from the online unofficial UK Moot community, from the Facebook and Discord groups. It was really exciting to see in 3D people I’ve only encountered as pixels, to talk and share meals and wander round Oxford, and now our online interactions will be all the richer for it. I also got to hang out with various people I know from the L’Abri community in Hampshire, or are connected with it, which has a very similar ethos to The Rabbit Room.
Hutchmoot reminds me a lot of some of the smaller, more grassroots science fiction conventions such as BristolCon, which are much less of a media ‘event’ than your ComicCon type events, and more of a chance to go and hang out with sci-fi and fantasy authors and fans. This is the arty Christian equivalent of that – there was no green room or separation between speakers/performers and attendees. We were all mingled together for dinners and had plenty of chance just to hang around and chat. Someone commented at the end of the conference how refreshing it was to have an event without a sense of hierarchy or of being subtly evaluated to see how ‘important’ you are.
The plan for next year’s Hutchmoot is to have it somewhere further north, and to try to make it cheaper and more accessible to more people. The expectation is to double in size, capping attendance at 300, but the organisers are very mindful of the importance of not losing the Mootiness of the Moot.
I had a great time at the various seminars - Sarah Clarkson on darkness and beauty, Jonathan Rogers on the habit of art, Mark Meynell and Ruth Naomi Floyd on consonance and dissonance, Glen Scrivener on imaginative evangelism.
But as wonderful as the seminars were, the best part of Hutchmoot for me was the richness of conversation. I loved all the unscheduled deep discussions, often mixing old friends with new acquaintances, of everything from hospitality, to church leadership, to movie adaptations, to deconstructing faith, to gender theory – all with a thoughtfulness and respect that humans are capable of but so often fail to live up to.
In one of those conversations, we discussed how an event like Hutchmoot of a community like L’Abri can be a ‘mountaintop experience’ – it gives us a high, and going back to everyday life can bring us down to earth with a bump.
But the goal of a community like Hutchmoot is not to hold onto it, to wish we could stay there forever. The goal is to leave refreshed, to return to our own context and communities with some seeds of goodness, to nurture the same spirit of kindness and creativity wherever we are.
And my little newsletter? It’s one small effort to help scatter those seeds, to help you think how you can approach life with imagination and creativity.
I pray that wherever you are, you’ll find the nourishment you need in order to foster imagination and creativity and beauty.
♥️
Where have you found yourself nourished in creativity through community? Who has inspired and encouraged you along the way? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments…
Do you wanna come with me?
In my Imaginative Discipleship seminar, I mentioned how much Doctor Who has influenced my idea of the adventure of following Jesus. In the trailer below from Doctor Who’s 2005 revival, the Doctor invites the viewer along:
Do you wanna come with me?
Because if you do, I have to warn you.
It won’t be quiet, it won’t be calm, and it won’t be safe.
But I’ll tell you what it will be…
The trip of a lifetime!
That seems to me to capture something of the heart of Jesus’ call to follow him – the call to adventure isn’t safe, but it is good. Watch the trailer below!