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History
Contact
Information:
Sean Taylor,
Creative Director
staylor104
@aol.com
404.429.7663
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 The
kernel idea for HeathenWare
began in 2003 when its founder,
Sean Taylor, was asked to resign
from the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist
Convention for his willingness to write PG, PG-13, and R rated
short stories and comic books.
"I want to be the kind of writer who engages culture," he said
in his defense, "the kind who writes the next Matrix trilogy and
has everybody talking about a Christ figure, not just those
inside the church who read so-called Christian fiction and watch
second-rate Christian films."
"We can't take those kind of risks," he was told, and then asked
to choose between doing just that and keeping a well paying,
comfortable benefits kind of job. So, like any visionary artist
who believed God was calling him into a life of enteracting with
culture rather than hiding from it -- i.e., the kind of
visionary artist without sense enough to have an overriding
drive for practical matters such as having a regular job that
supports your living budget -- he became unemployed with a
purpose.
Well, all that got Sean thinking about the sad state of affairs
in contemporary Christendom -- with it's focus on enforcing
morality in its adherents rather than dispensing grace to
adherents and nonbelievers alike with equal gusto. He pondered
this for several months, then grew to understand that the church
should get out of the morality business (morality being the
act of people trying to earn God's approval like the Pharisees)
and get back in the holiness lifestyle (holiness being the
act of trying to live a Christ-like life and exercise his love
for others, his irritation at religious hypocrisy, and his
spiritual fruits).
So he created the first HeathenWare
design -- Screw Morality (#TS00001) -- thus earning
disapproving gawks and odd glances from conservative,
church-going folks all over North Fulton.
However, the shirt seemed to connect with those outside the
church, who consistently asked what it meant and appreciated the
message of God's holiness being imputed to us rather than us
having to be as perfect as the Christian Smiths and Joneses
pretend to be. Armed with a target audience, Sean got to work
creating more designs -- all focused on speaking truth to both
those in the club and those outside of it and exposing the
judgmental habits and misunderstandings that get passed off as
tradition in the church today in hope of calling people to
Christ alone and him crucified.
(And along the way, if a few church-going and
non-church-going heathens -- heathen being a descriptor Sean
gracefully accepts for himself -- find something welcoming and
comforting and burden-lifting about that message, then, hey,
that just proves that God really is a bigger God than any of us
thought possible.)
And the rest, as the cliché goes, will hopefully become history.
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