A gospel outpost for the renewal of Christian art.
Telex Recording is a nonprofit recording studio in Seattle's University District, built to form artists in the church and to draw the wider culture toward beauty that points to God. The studio is built. We're raising what it takes to open the doors.
A ministry of Cross+Crown · University District, Seattle
Hi, we're Telex Recording.
Watch why Telex exists, what it's for, and how your church can be part of it.
The Conviction
The church used to make the culture's best work.
For much of its history, the church produced the culture's best work. Painters, composers, poets, and builders worked inside the life of the church and set the terms the wider world followed. Somewhere along the way, the church stepped back, treated the arts as decoration or as a message with a tune, and handed the culture-shaping ground to everyone else.
Telex exists to take some of that ground back. Human creativity reflects the image of a creative God, and the church is called to form its artists rather than merely use them. Beauty made well, by people being shaped by Christ, still moves a watching world.
As evangelical Christians, we have tended to relegate art to the very fringe of life. Despite our constant talk about the lordship of Christ, we have narrowed its scope to a very small area of reality.
- Francis A. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible
What Telex is
A studio built to carry work across distance.
Telex is a purpose-built recording studio operating as a gospel outpost of Cross+Crown Church in Seattle's University District. The name comes from the telex network, the machines that once carried typed messages across the world. The machines are gone, but the ideas worked out running them outlasted the hardware and shaped the networks we still use. That is the hope for the work made here: that it outlasts the moment and the means that made it, and takes its part in a renewal of beautiful art made for the glory of God and the good of his people.
Cross+Crown built and funded the space itself; the construction and the infrastructure are complete. What remains is the gear to open the next chapter.
The Vision
A gospel partnership with like-minded churches
A network of churches who share one conviction: that the church should again be a place where objectively beautiful art is made, and who join together to see it happen. Partner churches send their artists to record at Telex and take full ownership of everything made. At regular intervals, we open Telex as a training hub, gathering creatives from across our churches to grow both as relational evangelists and in the practical craft of music production. By partnering together, we reach further into the culture than any of us could apart.
A gospel outpost in the city
Telex provides a context to exercise relational evangelism, a forum to invite those who do not yet know Christ to make music alongside believers doing the same, experience the intrinsic bond between spirituality and creativity, and to taste and see the goodness of God in the process. When shared affinity is taken seriously, Telex becomes a “side door” into the life of the church for people who would never walk through it otherwise.
A CREATIVE home base for C+C
Going forward, Telex will be the future home of all of Cross+Crown Church's creative endeavors. C+C has a rich history of cultivating the arts and releasing original music. In addition, Telex will support the production of additional training resources we have planned for churches in the coming year.