what does an arts consultant do, exactly?

feeding souls, walking borders, and seeking an abundant life

It occurs to me that I frequently mention my work as an arts consultant. What does an arts consultant do, exactly?

Well… sometimes I think it would be better to say what an arts consultant doesn’t do. Like any person in ministry, sometimes your official job description and what you find yourself doing can vary widely. For instance, most people imagine their pastors’ or priests’ job description includes things like preparing sermons, visiting the sick, being holy… but what their pastor or priest actually does in the week may include more of answering emails/texts, moving furniture, and unclogging toilets.

So, here’s a little bit about what an ordinary and beginning arts consultant actually does…

two schools of thought

Within arts consultancy, there are two main groups I have run across. They overlap some, and they share ideas, so they are in no way in competition. But they do have different purposes…

The first is the one I shall call ‘arts focused.’ These are the incredibly gifted people you see coming out of Fuller Theological Seminary, or the Fujimura institute. They’d be at home within New York’s elite art scene. They know gallery owners intimately. They often work full time at a large church (as the Arts Pastor/Priest or the Minister to Artists in Residence, etc.). Think about books like Fujimuro’s Art and Making and Culture Care. These people are the sort that write the books that will change and shape culture. They work with leading theologians like N. T. Wright. They do wonderful work.

Then there is a second group, doing what I would call ‘community focused’ arts consultancy. This is where I have received my training. Community focused arts consultants certainly pull upon the theology and training of our arts focused friends, but our focus is more on the needs immediately present in a community. My training comes largely from missionaries like Brian Schrag and Robin Harris and Mary Beth and Todd Saurmen, pioneers in approaching missions through a culture’s art. These people, and others besides, formed the Global Ethnodoxology Network (GEN). Likewise, some of these pioneers and others were instrumental in creating arts-based trauma-informed works, a large focus of my own training and further studies. We tend to be the wildflowers in the world of arts consultants. Almost none of us will end up on the staff of a large church. Most of us are more comfortable doing anthropological research, including learning a new dance form from a local troupe of street performers than touring a New York art gallery. Not that we don’t appreciate the gallery, but we’re more comfortable in the field itself. We all tend to go a little crazy, have random passions for obscure languages and arts, and will talk your ear off about the theology of art and its global application.

(Little Man and I recently took advantage of free late night admission to an art museum to gaze on the wonders of Monet.)

a mission statement

A mission statement. Fujimura, in Culture Care, opens his work with a powerful story.¹ He was a young struggling artist, in graduate school, and newly married. He didn’t know how he was going to pay his bills over the weekend. His wife came home with a bouquet of flowers. His reaction was… well… it was very practical. He questioned her use of their resources, demanding how they were going to feed themselves. Her response? “We have to feed our souls, too.”

As an arts consultant, my work is to help “feed people’s souls, too.” I have learned that for most people, right theology is not enough. They must experience God to have their faith grow, especially during difficult circumstances. They must experience the beauty and goodness of God. So, my job, then, is to learn where a community already experiences God’s beauty and goodness, and also where they long to experience more of it. Then I come along and help them get there. It looks widely very different in different contexts and circumstances, but my goal is the same - to make God’s beauty, goodness, and truth more tangible, more real.

Schrag expresses similar sentiments in his workshop/class Arts for a Better Future and his textbook Creating Local Arts Together: A Manual to Help Communities Reach Their Kingdom Goals.² He presents the case that all art is ultimately a means of communication, and a powerful one at that. And what, as Christians and arts consultants, should we be helping people communicate about? The kingdom of heaven. It is through the arts that we can make heaven seem more real, more tactile, more tangible. As an arts consultant, my work should help bring the kingdom of heaven closer, and anything that does that falls within my domain of work.

what does it looks like: my own field stories

field story 1: a little one’s lament

One of my projects was to work within my special area of passion: trauma healing. I was invited to work as an arts consultant for a trauma-informed VBS being hosted at an inner city school in an urban context. I knew the local community and some of the teachers already, and I spent the weeks leading up to the camp working as a go-between (border-stalker, as Fujimura would call me) between the school community and the outside team that was leading the camp. I worked with the head facilitator to design arts activities that would promote healing WITHOUT being triggering for our students. As one might imagine, this involved preparing curriculum, making and organizing a list of supplies, and facilitating one of the groups of children myself. It did… AND… it involved turning my bathroom into a drying station for hand-stamped t-shirts, creating model kintsugi pots, and painting a mural where the kids would place a flower they would make the first day. It also involved praying for each student as I painted a stem for their name on the mural.

The arts activities had tremendous impact on the students. They were able to process trauma and build resiliency through the activities.³

One moment was especially precious to me. Along with the arts consultancy work, which was largely behind the scenes, I facilitated the first graders. I had one student, this sweet little boy, who suffered with chronic health issues. He was shy and resistant to participating in the group for the first few days. Then - I taught the lesson on lament. This sweet little boy, oh, this sweet little boy, he lamented. He drew a picture of himself, a tiny figure, arms wrapped around his tummy. God, he drew, was off in the far corner, tears coming out of his eyes like raindrops, huge and dark. They were so, far apart, barely on the same page. He had written exactly one sentence - “Dear God, it’s not fair that my tummy hurts all the time…” He showed me his work and cried. I sat and held him, saying nothing, just rocking him for a moment.

He became a different boy after that. He participated in every game, sang during opening and closing sessions. Some of his fear, some of his pain, slipped away in that moment. He realized that God was with him, not far off. I wish I could say that God miraculously cured that little boy, but last I heard, that wasn’t too be. It will probably never be. But through lament, through that week, he was able to find some healing.

He left camp that week knowing that God cared for him. The kingdom of God came a little closer to him.

field story 2: creating community with chamomile

Schrag often says, “it’s all about relationships.” His point is that most of arts consultancy is getting to know a community. It means getting to know their joys and sorrows, it means grieving and celebrating with them.

For one project, I worked with a community within my graduate school. Within the wider student body, there was a smaller group of chronically ill students. We managed to find each other through shared experiences of too many doctors, too many pills, too many moments of prayer through gritted teeth and agony. It was a tight knit group. Indeed, only the nearest and dearest ‘outsider’ students were privy to the struggles. The chronically ill don’t enjoy advertising their conditions, at least not in this group.

I sensed that there were some deep wounds within this group. There were some areas where these souls needed to be fed, so I worked through the Arts for A Better Future process with them, which involved anthropological research of the arts and the community.

And this is where I am grateful for older and wiser arts consultants. As consultants, we often see an area in a community and think “THIS! This! This would be so good for them! They should use this art! To accomplish this goal!” But… that’s not my job. My job is to ask questions, and listen, and pray. It’s to help the community come to realize what they need, and then help them come up with a plan to get there. It is NEVER to impose my own vision of what I think God wants for the community. I facilitate the conversations and prayers that allow the Holy Spirit to lead them. And then I help them follow the Holy Spirit’s leading by doing a wide variety of things - mentoring artists, being mentored by an artist, mediating conversations between disagreeing factions, securing funding, and providing a framework for them to reason through the theology of their making.

I say this to say that this experience was humbling for me. I heard the stories of this community and immediately thought that designing a trauma healing group specifically to address the trauma of chronic illness and using the local arts of the chronically ill on campus to facilitate it. (As a side note - it is AMAZING how similarly chronic illness and living with ongoing trauma pattern. One of my research projects is to explore this phenomena and work to create curriculum to address it.)

BUT - this wasn’t the immediate felt need of the community. No, they expressed a sense of deep isolation. Most events on campus revolved around having energy! The events were made for healthy people. They often happened after dark, or took place off campus, making it difficult for them to attend. Even when the community attended the wider events, they sometimes felt like they were burdens or in the way. After much discussion, the community explained that they wanted to create an event where they could connect with the wider community, but in a way that instilled them with a sense of dignity and giving back. I helped them create a “Chamomile and Crochet” event that happened weekly over the course of a semester. Nearly every Friday night, these students would invite other students to come and spend time with them, learning how to crochet/knit/embroider. The chronically ill students loved being the teachers! The ones giving back. All the participants made squares for a blanket, which was then blessed and installed in the student center. It served as reminder of what everyone had accomplished together, and it fostered relationships among these ‘factions’ of students.

Souls were fed. Beauty was created. Loneliness lessoned.

The kingdom of God came a little nearer.

field story 3: a meaningful conversation

I have referenced my capstone project, the joy of working within my own church back in the metroplex. I have described the beautiful art installations that came out of working as a border-stalker, conversing with a professional local artist and the elementary students of the church. Over the course of Lent, I worked with the elementary students in my church to design a Scripture meditation video, an arts night, and finally two completed installations - one for Easter and one for Lent, that hang proudly in the children’s classrooms.

One aspect I haven’t touched on - is how the facilitation itself shaped the community, at least in little ways. As part of getting to know a community, I often use appreciative inquiry or other participatory research methods. I love it. You never know what gems the community will discover through these conversations, and getting to help them make the discovery is incredible. Since one of my groups of artists were elementary students, and the desired audience was this self-same group, I knew I needed to go out into their field. I went to the homes of various families, and facilitated a modified appreciative inquiry session with their children.

I approached one family, and the mom cautioned me that her son had been going through a difficult season. He was often disrespectful and sarcastic.

With a prayer, I began the interview. True to his mom’s prediction, the boy began with snark, commenting negatively about church. As I am trained, I listened to his remarks, I wrote them down. Then I invited him to share what he would want out of church. I asked about his dreams for the children’s area. A startling change came about! When he realized that I was taking him, even his snark, seriously and that I genuinely cared about his thoughts, his behavior changed. He still had negative things to say, but he also shared positive things. He let me know what his desires were for church, and for the space the children’s wing had recently remodeled.

His mom stopped me on the way out, marveling that that was the most meaningful conversation she had seen her son have with anyone about anything in a long time.

field story 4: can we try it?

One of the reasons that Fujimura calls artists, and by extension arts consultants, “border-stalkers,” is that our aim is to facilitate conversations between different groups within or between communities. We listen and we learn from these groups, and we help them share their dreams with other groups. It is a strange balance of peace-making and prodding.

I think I was almost meant to be a border-stalker. I have a MA in Linguistics, with a dual focus in Bible Translation and World Arts. This meant that I was able to take classes in both the Linguistics and World Arts departments. These departments do support one another, but traditionally, there has been differing ideologies when it comes to areas of overlap. How does one translate poetry, for instance? Are we allowed to set the Psalms to local music and still call them translations? At what point does the art we make become a Scripture product rather than a translation?

Sometimes, these conversations are challenging. There isn’t always a clear cut answer. For my capstone translation project, I was assigned to translate Matthew 12:1-8. I thought about a community, and decided to do a bit of “border-stalking.” My audience? Gen Z Poetry Slam Artists, the kind you can find at most coffee shops in urban settings during open mic nights.

My head translator was a very sweet young man that had been deeply wounded by churches in his past. Even so, over cups of tea and several weeks, we prepared a translation.

At one translation check, my professor, who functioned as my translation consultant, questioned a choice the translator and I had made. He expressed hesitancy about one line in particular. In verse 3, ESV renders it as “He said to them,” and the NIV renders it as “He answered.” The translator and I had rendered it as “Jesus popped back at them and said…” (Or something like that. I don’t remember the exact phrase.) My professor cautioned that this made it sound very adversarial to him. It sounded disrespectful. I knew that my professor came from a very different generation and culture than my target audience. I explained my exegesis, showing how the particles and verb tenses suggest high tension. He agreed. “Can we try it?” I asked. “Can we try it and see what the community thinks?” He came to our next community check. He found that this line, of all the lines in the translation, was the one that the community appreciated most. They loved the idea of Jesus defending his disciples, of speaking boldly. They did not find that it conveyed disrespect the way my professor feared. After the community check, my professor supported our translation choices.

So… as an arts consultant, one of the things I do is ask, “can we try it?” I walk the border between factions, and I ask the powers that be, “can we try this?” I ask humbly, because there are so many possible outcomes. Sometimes a community or stakeholder is not ready to try it, at which point, I acquiescence to their wishes. I trust the Holy Spirit will lead them to try what they ought at the right time. At other times, I get permission to try something and it flops. But there are a few examples, the above being one, where trying it worked.

The translation we presented of Matthew 12:1-8 made quite a few outside of this particular community mildly uncomfortable. To be fair - even I at one point wondered if I was becoming a heretic. However, to those inside the community it displayed the character of Christ, as one who loves mercy.

As a border-stalker, I listened to the good wisdom of the translation consultant, a man who has been translating the Bible longer than I have been alive, but I also worked closely with the community of Gen Z poetry slam artists, and I was able to help them find a middle group and prepare a meaningful translation for the community.

Border-stalking has its drawbacks. For instance, I have found myself caught in the in-between where two entities were accusing me of belonging to the opposing ideological camp. And the truth? I didn’t fit into either camp, at least not very well. It was simply that I was trying to see the heart of both, the desires and dreams of both.

This doesn’t mean an arts consultant doesn’t have her own convictions. I often express a willingness to work with almost any denomination, church, school, or non-profit, which makes some people wary. But what I mean to say is that I believe foremost in Christ. If a community has a genuine desire to draw the kingdom of heaven near, or in the case of working with a secular community, a desire to make their world better in a way that isn’t antithetical to the Gospel, then I see it as something that God must be doing. My job is to join in this work then. I do have projects that I would gently decline to facilitate due to my personal convictions, but these are the sorts of projects where someone is trying to push an ideology rather than the kingdom of God. You won’t see me organizing an arts event for the current political powers that be, and you won’t see me commissioning an artist to complete a piece about marriage for a mainstream Methodist church.

Some practical applications on general arts consulting

I am not a list person, not really. I have never figured out how to use Excel properly, and I don’t foresee a future where I do. But - there are people out there who are, so in as much as I can manage, here’s a list of some things an arts consultant can do…

1. Encourage artists in a church or community

   1. helping them find a spiritual mentor, or filling in that gap

   2. helping them verbalize their theology of making, and getting that out to the wider community

   3. advocating for them to receive respect or resources

   4. commissioning them to create new art, especially art based on Scripture

2. Working to Promote the Arts through Events

   1. designing events that are arts-based, such as church sponsored galleries or concerts

   2. designing on-going arts experiences for particular liturgical seasons

3. Border-Stalking

   1. facilitating appreciative inquiry sessions or other guided conversations to help various groups and individuals within a community express their desires and help them make an action plan for how to achieve these goals

   2. introducing arts and artists into an uninitiated community in a way that reduces fear and promotes peace

4. Meeting Needs

   1. facilitating the Arts for a Better Future process with a community that longs to bring the kingdom of heaven nearer, but is uncertain where to start

   2. hosting discussions about where the community longs to see the arts grow, especially in regard to worship

5. Working with Ministry Leaders, Teachers, etc.

   1. helping leaders create art-infused/informed events, curriculums, sermons, etc.

   2. helping ministry leaders communicate with artists

In short - it’s a little bit of everything, and a little bit of nothing. It’s about feeding people’s souls.

a word about trauma informed arts consulting

I am currently in training to be specialized in Arts Infused Trauma Healing work. I enjoy the general arts consultancy work I have done, and I will continue to look for opportunities to grow in this area.

However, my passion is especially for how God, in his great mercy and love, gave us the arts as way to speak the unspeakable. I have both been the voice of and the witness to people admitting to things that would otherwise force them to cower in shame through the arts. I have seen, just as one of my field stories illustrates, the incredible healing that comes through bringing one’s heart wounds to God through art.

With this training, I’ll be specialized to do things like

1. Lead Corporate Lament Workshops for Communities that Have Experienced a Collective Trauma

2. Lead Individual Lament Workshops

   1. I recently was able to lead a short session on Lament! I enjoyed it thoroughly, and the stories that came out of it affirmed my call

3. Facilitating Trauma Healing Groups, small Bible study like groups aimed to help people process the wounds of their heart by bringing them to God through art, inside of a loving community

4. Work with community leaders to help them minister to the traumatized in their community

5. Help a community or individuals with on-going trauma develop resiliency

an abundance

In conclusion, an arts consultant does a lot of little things. It is, as Schrag remarks, “all about relationships.” It is also, as Fujimura says about the quest to feed others’ souls.

The arts are not a means to an end. They are an end themselves. To create something beautiful is to say that God’s beauty exists and endures. To create something good is to say that God is himself good, for all goodness comes from him. Every act of creation, whether it is a toddler scribbling on a wall, or a master painter preparing a canvas, is a testimony that God made us for something so much more than we could ever imagine or hope. We are his masterpieces, and he wants nothing so much as us to image this reality by creating our own masterpieces. He didn’t come to give us a useful life, or an efficient life, or even a productive life, he came to give us an abundant life. He wants to give us a life overflowing with goodness and beauty, not as ephemeral joys, but as testimonies to the good creation he made at the beginning, and the new creation he is working to bring about even now.

So - as an arts consultant - my passion is to work to bring the kingdom of God, in its abundance and beauty, closer.

This means working with the traumatized, helping them hold paintbrushes as their hands shake, listening to words from fall from their poems that might strangle them in prose…

This means taking my toddler to an art museum and kneeling before a Monet almost as reverently as kneeling before the 1500s stained glass window depicting the Eucharist…

This means seeming by turns to be outlandishly idealistic, or nearly heretical, or just wildly impractical…

That’s what being an arts consultant is.

1. Fujimura, Makoto. 2014. Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life. and Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, 2021.

2. Schrag, Brian. 2013. Creating Local Arts Together: A Manual to Help Communities Reach Their Kingdom Goals.

3. I was invited to work on another such camp this summer, but alas, the dates correspond with a certain little lady’s due date.