Why Every Christian Should Study Photography

I am becoming more and more convinced that if someone professes faith in Jesus, it would do them well to learn the art of photography. If Jesus is the Light of the world, and we are called to bear His light, then understanding the physical properties of light — how it behaves, reveals, and transforms — is not optional. It’s discipleship.

What happens in a darkroom is almost a commentary on Genesis 1.

Before anything beautiful emerges, there is:

• darkness,

• formlessness,

• chemical chaos,

• and the stink of silver and mercury.

• 
  

Yet the photographer steps into that darkness, hovering over the trays, watching for the image to appear.This is exactly what Genesis describes:the Spirit of God hovering over the waters of chaos before the world was formed.

Light enters.Boundaries appear.Form takes shape.Life fills the frame. And in the end, the Artist steps back and declares, “It is very good.”

The parallels between the darkroom, the chemistry, the image, and the final piece hanging in the gallery of Eden are too incredible to ignore.This light story must be taught.

Seeing the Bi

ble through the lens of a master photographer changes everything. It teaches us to step into our own darkness — our chaos, our toxicity, our unformed places — trusting that the Spirit still hovers.And that He is capable of developing a masterpiece from what looks like nothing.

I can only show you what the light is revealing.You must decide what to do with the truth.

Here is what the “light” reveals: When you step back and observe Christianity in this era with an unclouded mind, you may begin to see something uncomfortable:

Much of it resembles a photographer in a darkroom with no film… and no light .Motion without meaning. Activity without exposure.Hands moving through chemicals that can never develop an image.

The tragedy is not the darkness. The tragedy is the absence of anything that could ever be transformed by the light.

As for me… my deepest fear is not the darkness. My fear is what may happen when I allow the divine light to radiate fully through me exposing my darkness and in a world of governed by dark forces. Because I know what that kind of light does:

It exposes.It reveals.It calls. It changes everything it touches.

To walk in that light is to walk on beams of sunshine straight into a sea of Babylonian chaos.

But perhaps that is the only pathwhere an image worthy of Eden can finally be formed. To create and eternal iconic image the darkness must be exposed.