For the past several years, Ken Heffner has been the unassuming man behind the curtain bringing together the cultural uprising taking place at Calvin College.  From giving artists like Sufjan Stevens and more a forum to share their art and connect with artists, critics, and insightful music lovers alike, Calvin College's biennial Festival of Faith and Music has grown considerably since it's inception in 2003.  Infuze's Matt Conner recently sat down with Heffner to discuss the festival's roots, it's prevailing philosophy, and the deeper theology ungirding it.

Ken: I think it's the lineup of artists that we've got coming.  And there was some intentionality about that, picking some people that we thought would generate more national attention.  And I think secondly, it's just watching how some people have really blown up.  Sujfan Stevens has blown up since we booked him.  We have a long-term relationship with Sufjan that goes back about ten years or more.  So we have a good relationship with him (and) that's why he accepted our invitation.  But we weren't bringing him in because he's kind of become famous; we were bringing him in because we think he does brilliant work.  And then he got famous.  (Laughs) So that just kind of became the icing on the cake.  I think we also did a better job of marketing this time.  We've got people in the office who are good at web marketing, which I'm going to guess you guys are as well, because we just typically buy print ads in certain magazines and we found that that didn't really do much.  It was blog sites linking to other blog sites and links popping up.  And also being on artist's sites of people who are going to be at this festival and then it just kind of spreads around, exponentially so.  We're noticing that most registrations are happening because of stuff they found on the web.

So what then is the overall goal of the event?

Our real goal is to...The festival flows out of Calvin College so you kind of know a little bit about Calvin as a peculiar school with a Christian higher Ed.

Right.

Calvin College is Calvinist, no surprise there, but a certain kind of Calvinist.  It's Dutch Calvinist, who immigrated to the United States in the 19^th century and they brought with them some ideas that are quite a bit different than the other Calvinists who immigrated here from England and Scotland.  Because Anglo-Calvinism is more theology driven and also more kind of interested in piety.  Not so much say as the Wesleyans when they came but...That strand of Calvinism that came to the U.S., it came through people like Jonathan Edwards and even the Pilgrims.  That kind of Calvinism, the Anglo-Calvinism, is the kind we're more familiar with in the U.S.  And I'm not Dutch myself so it's something I had to come to.  But the Dutch Calvinists, it's more of European Calvinism.  And it's more worldview driven, meaning that instead of it being about the renewal of the Church, although it is about that, it's more about the renewal of all things.  So that culture is held in very high regard...and there's a long legacy of evangelicalism with its hostility to culture because, I would argue, we've misplaced evil.  We think that the problem with evil is in culture and so therefore the answer is to resist culture.  This college would argue more historically (that) yes, evil is in culture but it's in everything else too.  And so you can't get away from it, you can't quarantine it.  It's not like certain activities that you shouldn't do, i.e. secular activities, and then the good part of life is the sacred activities.  So the theological legacy of this institution has been to reject what would be a sacred/secular split or dualism and has said that's just not what historical Christianity is about.  It doesn't help you understand how sin works a little bit better or about comprehensive redemption.  I'm giving you all of this theological stuff so you kind of know why we're doing what we're doing.

No problem.  I'm totally with you.

So the mission statement of this college is which is a kind of more comprehensive that Christianity is not about certain things you do but about how you do all things shapes the way we do scholarship.  Scholarship, wrestling with the world of ideas, is a way to love God.  But wrapped up in it is going to be good and evil.  It's never like there are good parts of life and bad parts of life but there's life, and culture, and human activity, through which good and evil are always wrapped up in them because good and evil is wrapped up in us.  And so because we are the one's who make culture; the other institutions kind of inform what's going on inside of us as well.  So evil kind of goes everywhere.  It doesn't have certain domains.  Now, fast forward a little bit and consider if we were to take that and apply it to how you do pop culture criticism.  That means you can't work from assumption, which much of America has, which is that the good music, which is pure and altogether righteous, is the music made by Christians.  Because Christians are a part of the problem too.  What I'm meaning by that is that we're still sinners.

Sure.

So the problem, in a certain sense, is solved in an apocalyptic sense.  We know it's ultimately solved but the problem of good and evil doesn't go away when you become a Christian.  And so Christian artifacts, even though they're attempting to try and glorify God, only ever do so in part.  And the other kind of flip side of it is that there is a strong tradition here in this college, and in other places, not just here, of common grace.  That God is at work renewing the face of the earth, sometimes working through his covenant people, sometimes working through whomever he wants to work.  And so therefore you should expect to see signs of that in culture at large, not just in the work that Christians do.  So those two theological ideas shape then how we approach pop culture.  And we find that, in general, the way the contemporary Christian music industry has tried to solve this problem has been inadequate.  Because it assumes that the good stuff is being put out by Nashville and the bad stuff is coming out of New York and L.A.  Or the secular stuff is the bad stuff and the Christian stuff is the good stuff.  Or the worship stuff is the good stuff.  We would argue that it's not even safe to assume that worship music is good because the struggle goes on there too.  In other words, the real answer is, "How do you tell the difference between a theme of God and a theme of death and recognizing that it shows up everywhere?  You can't predetermine that by looking at the record label or who they're signed to or even who the artist is.  You have to gauge with that or kind of sort that out.  That's a kind of continuing enterprise that we do here at Calvin all the time and shapes the way we do our Student Activities office, the kind of concert series we put together...So we mix it up with our students.  We do a lot of concerts, we do one every week and we do big one's.  We bring in all kinds of people, some of whom are Christians, like Jars of Clay, and some of whom are not, like David Byrne.  And we bring in some who are Christians but who are not part of the Christian music world like Sujfan Stevens.  And we mix it all up and what we're saying to our students is, "You cannot assume that the one's who are Christians are the good ones."  You can assume that there's going to be something good there but also something that's not.  You have to be able to tell the difference between the two and we'll help you do that but we're not going to do it for you.  And the same thing...last year Sigor Ros was here and did two concerts and they make no pretense of being Christians but the music just drips with it.  And so that was an example of students having an experience of common grace and seeing that somehow God's at work in their work even though they don't acknowledge it. 

That is so beautiful to hear that that is taking place in the Christian college realm...

Well, we've been doing this for fourteen years now, just doing that kind of approach.  Half of our job here is not putting on the concerts, although that's a lot of work, but it's putting together all the resources like the website, teaching and mentoring students, et cetera.

So how did this become a festival?

It became a festival because the college has a longer history with a festival on faith and writing, the English department does.  And the English department is working from the same mission statement; the same model I just described to you earlier and they're applying it to literary criticism.  And what they do is instead of bringing in all the big names in the contemporary Christian publishing world, they bring in great writers, most of whom are Christians, but who don't write for a Christian subculture.  The Annie Dillard's, the Luci Shaw's in poetry, and the Madeline L'Engle's, all of whom have spoken at the writer's conference.  And then we also bring in people who aren't Christians at all but for whom religious faith has shaped their writing.  So Salmon Rushdie was here last year to speak.

Wow.

He went on a long rant about why he thinks Christianity is wrong, which was fine with us, because your writing just drips of it.  Because you talk about faith all the time as something that's worth writing about which is ironic. (Laughs)

(Laughs)

So the writer's conference has set this kind of great precedent.  It's become a nationally known conference and they get over two thousand people to come and they have these big lectures at night and dozens and dozens of workshops.  And what they're trying to do is celebrate and kind of create a place of encouragement for writers who would call themselves Christians but who would not find a home in the Christian publishing group.  Who are instead people who have gotten merited book awards, Pulitzer Prizes, et cetera.  The woman who wrote Gilead, the Pulitzer Prize winner, was one of our last keynote speakers. 

Now, what we started to do with my office is we began to kind of tag onto that kind of conference and started doing a music part to it where there would be concerts on both nights of the writer's festival.  And then we'd have a track of musicians; and we were treating music as a kind of writing form.  So therefore it could be a subset within the writer's conference.  We did that for several years.  And Sufjan Stevens, for example, is somebody who has spoken at and also performed in that version.  Then in '03, we decided to spin off and do our own.  And so we are on the odd years.  We're the odd years; they're the even years.  And so we do it every other year and it's meant to be kind of our illustration of how this would look like just as theirs is an illustration of what it looks like in the area of writing.  So this thing has tried to be a way to encourage...I mean, one of our primary goals would be, to be a conference that could encourage people whom are not content with the separatist model I think CCM creates.  And instead have an engagement model.  And so we're bringing in those kinds of artists.  Because one of the things we've found...we're always on the hunt for Christian artists who are working in the large music world.  We go looking for them and then we invite them to come play here and then we have a conversation with them.  One of the things we do at almost every concert we do is the student's get to have an hour to talk with the artists. 

Did you even do that with Sufjan?

We do that with Sufjan; we do that with everybody.

Did you get to do that with Sigor Ros too?

We did that with Sigor Ros.  It's actually up on our website.  And we do that a lot.  The conversation goes both ways.  They're learning stuff about us.  Our students are learning all kinds of stuff about their musicians and learning more makes them a better audience and we're learning things about them.  And one of the things, particularly with some of the Christians, we find that they don't quite know what they're doing.  Let's put it this way: They know intuitively what they're doing but there's really no support network for them.  Even Sufjan, in his early years.  When he was beginning to figure this out, we created a context in which he could come and see some musicians and he could perform here when he was in a garage band when he was a student at Hope College.  He's just one example but there's lots of people who have, by finding out about this, realizing "oh, so you mean I'm not the only one?  You mean there's some other people doing this kind of stuff?"  Yeah, there are.  You're not the only one and there's some other people.  And here's some ideas that we can help you with or maybe we can give you a book and there's also some things that you can help us with because we're not quite sure how to do this ourselves.  One of the reasons we formed this conference was to create a kind of place, a home even if it's just for two days, for artists who are Christians who aren't going to go to Gospel Music Association or they're not going to go to Estes Park and the big thing out in the Rockies.  There isn't any place for them.  They're not going to go to Creation Festival.  They're not even going to go to Cornerstone, even though Cornerstone is quite good.  Because they don't live in that world, they don't work in there.  So that's why we kind of started this.  So when it started it was quite small.  There was only 150 or 175 people with workshops and keynotes...We did it again in '05.  Again it was quite small and then decided for this time, the committee said, "Do we want to keep going at this rate?  It's okay.  We could serve a function doing this or do we need to go bigger?  Do we need to take this conversation more national?"  Now I think part of the reason we've blown up this year is because we've go the right lineup and also because we did the marketing.  But I also think it's finally scratching an itch.  I think there is a pretty widespread discomfort with the way things are.

Yes!

It's spreading within the Christian music world.  I mean, lots and lots of CCM artists are so fed up with the way that industry works and feel strained as artists.  They feel like they're just basically commodities.  And they're looking for an answer.  And I think it's not just musicians.  It's also critics and people who listen to music and who are more interested in Patty Griffin than they are in Nichole Nordeman.  And maybe it's because Patty Griffin, and this is not a bash on Nichole, but maybe because Patty maybe tells the truth better than Nichole does.  Even though she wasn't intending to.  So those kind of people are now coming.  And of course we're getting a huge number of Sufjan Stevens fans. 

Sure.

Because there's a national shortage of tickets for him so we're getting a lot of people just because of that.  But we're also sensing that the timing is right.  We were sensing kind of early on when we had created it that we had jumped the gun a little bit.  This discomfort, which I'm also finding in Christian higher education, a lot of the other (Christian) schools I go and speak with.  I've spoken at a dozen of them.  And we have communication with one another and I'm finding that there's some discontent there, that this model of the way we do student activities at a Christian college where we bring in CCM artists or classical and that solves the problem.  Or that we only show PG-13 movies.  Just doesn't work.  And it's not getting at the problem.  And what do we do?  And so I think they wanted to see something different.  So we're getting a lot of colleges who are coming, their student activity offices are coming or their student life offices, are sending a bunch of their students and some of their staff.  So Wheaton's sending people, Messiah, Taylor, Gordon; a lot of colleges are sending people.  And that's because I think there's a discontent there as well. 

Now, I notice you have three tracks of workshops: Criticism, Theology, and Artistry?  What is the purpose behind that?  I mean, do you feel like these are the three essential pieces to the puzzle?

No, it's also pragmatic.  It's a combination of what we like to do and what we can get.  Our hope is that this festival will grow in terms of breadth, not necessarily that we'll get more people in the future but that we can tackle a broader range of topics.  But in order to do that, unfortunately you need resources.  You need the money to pay for the people to come and do it.  And so we've grown enough this year that we were able to add some of that breadth this year.  It was a late edition but as our registrations kind of piled in we realized that we don't have to wait until next time and could start doing it now.  So we've really kind of blown up this year and then we're hoping to do even more in '09.  Because our sense is that the range of things that need to be talked about is pretty wide.  And we also need to make this break out of the indie world.  This can't just be an indie phenomenon, which is part of why we invited Emmylou Harris to be here this year, to kind of break out of that stereotype that this thing that we're talking about only has to do with independent music.  It's about all music.

Are you looking into hip-hop as well?

We're going to want to do more with hip-hop.  We've got...coming this year who is one of the best we think on hip-hop criticism.  But we're going to want to do more of that next time.  We're going to want to do something perhaps in classical and jazz, maybe.  So we're going to want to broaden it...We feel a kind of desire to create a setting in which music critics particularly, we're back to the indie thing, where some of the indie music critics could come to this thing.  Because we're finding that the independent music world doesn't know what to do with Christianity.  And Sujfan Stevens has really messed that up.  And so we'd like to be able to help get a conversation going.  Let's sit down and talk together instead of you throwing barbs and then we act defensive because that's what we Christians always do; we always feel like we're oppressed.  So we'd like to have an actual conversation.

Calvin College Festival of Faith & Music

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