Here is a encouraging story that I received. Artists in Christian Testimony is a ministry that is dedicated to binding Arts and Missions together.

Artists in Christian Testimony actually exists to facilitate the important role of the artist in ministry. But many of the church leaders still wonder what that is. In talking with Byron Spradlin recently he pointed out the following realities:

One, the best word in the Bible for what we know today as artist is the term "craftsman" (e.g. exodus 31, exodus 35) the word in Hebrew simply means "someone unusually wise at imaginative design and expression." This term craftsman really can include all Bible of the various categories of the arts we know today (including music, storytelling, drama, dance, and even film and technology, and literary arts). Every time you see these people in the operation in scripture you see them involved in creating environments where finite people are stepping into environments (designed by artists) wherein they meet with the transcendent God. Spradlin underscored the purpose of the arts as laid out in scripture: "to lead the human community and individual into touching the transcendent realities of life and God." From that we can see that God intended the artistically enabled person to actually be the facilitator for all of human community in putting handles on non-material but real transcendent things like beauty and goodness and love and kindness and appreciation and honor and reverence and worship.

Also he points out that when you take a hard look at the scriptures you will realize that really what the arts are is the imaginative rearrangement of human metaphors, symbols and expressions. Spradlin pointed out, "Isn’t that exactly what a worship service is made of?" We basically take human symbols and metaphors loaded with biblical truths and we enter into practices of activities that in themselves are not transcendent but in participating in them with faith focused on God, God actually comes to us and interacts with us and our lives are changed. That is also what we do when we pray by our self or have devotions by our self or sing a song by our self.

The artist is absolutely essential to human flourishing because the artist puts handles on realities that are not material but are absolutely essential for our life. So really the artist is much more than an entertainer, much more than some kind of solo critic commenting on culture. The artist actually reflects the heart of the people and creates those contexts – songs, poems, pictures, stories, films dances – that literally create envelopes wherein we hold these transcendent realities and interact with them.

These reasons lay out some of the expressions of why artistically capacity people are absolutely essential in church leadership, in missions leadership and in the Christian community engaging the mainstream community and the cultures in which we all live.

Artistic expression and artistic specialists "human expression specialists or imagination specialists” were designed by God. This is not something the church or others even have the option to vote on. God intended these specialized people to help facilitate the rest of humanity in first of all interacting with him and then secondly embracing and interacting with the transcendent realities that make our lives more fully human.