What does it mean to be an artist-disciple?

What does it mean to be an artist-disciple? Hello. My name is Rachel, and I'm a professional artist and disciple of Jesus Christ. An artist-disciple is someone who is fully committed to Christ and His mission, and who expresses that practically through their vocation as an artist.

Discipleship is the process of becoming more like Christ. I consider the primary means of that to be being filled with the Word of God, being filled with the Holy Spirit, and being in communion with the body of Christ. What discipleship looks like for me on a practical level is every day choosing to give my life to the Lord, waking up early and spending time or reading God's Word, the Bible. I make space to pray, both listening and speaking to God. It also involves participating weekly in a service centering around communion, which we typically call “church.” In my daily decisions, I seek to do what God tells me to do and not to do the things he's telling me not to do, especially as identified in His Word.

My vocation as an artist is an outworking of who I am as a disciple. I knew from a young age that I was an artist and that was what I was going to be when I grew up. It has always been important to me to pursue excellence. When I was a teenager, I took private art lessons from a friend of my parents, who is a professional artist. He challenged me to do drawing exercises, sometimes ones that I didn't want to do or that were outside of my comfort zone. This prepared me well for pursuing art in college and beyond.

I create, exhibit, and sell my artwork, which makes me a professional artist. I also teach, write and curate content as additional aspects of my vocation. In all of these things that I do, I'm committed to doing them God's way and not the world's way. This is true on both a micro and a macro level.

At times I do teach and work in secular settings. When I do this, my faith still informs what I do, the way that I teach and what I teach. I choose to show love to my students and to pursue excellence. There are some secular settings that I choose not to teach in because I know that there would be expectations from the administration to teach content that directly contradicted my values. I have more often worked in settings where my Christian faith was specifically part of my job, and what I did. This has involved teaching in Christian schools. Right now, I work part time for a Christian art gallery where I'm sharing faith through artwork, both mine and that of others. I'm also working on this blog, creating content to promote high quality Christian based art education.

Every artist-disciple’s vocation is going to look a little different. You're a different person with different skills in a different location and a different calling than mine, but the core principles of being a disciple remain the same.

The world, the flesh, and the devil try to make us their disciples, rather than disciples of Jesus. I believe that this battle is particularly pointed right now over children, youth and young adults. Young artists are especially a target, because the enemy knows that they can use their imagination to influence people for good. My goal here is to help shape godly imagination, helping young artists to become committed disciples of Jesus Christ.

If you are a young artist who's looking to follow Jesus, or you have one in your life, your child or your student, I encourage you to subscribe to this website, artist-disciple.com for upcoming videos, PDFs and other resources that are meant to help you to raise up young artists to be committed disciples of Jesus. I hope that you'll join me on this exciting journey and that someday we will get to see each other face to face as we create with and for Jesus.