[Book] Creating Local Arts Together

A Manual To Help Communities Reach Their Kingdom Goals (Revised and Updated in 2025).

by Brian Schrag

Creating Local Arts Together is a manual that offers a transformative approach to integrating local arts with kingdom work. The practical text reduces experience-based scholarly insights into a flexible seven-step process. The purpose of this manual is to guide your involvement in working toward a new reality, one in which all communities are using all their gifts to worship, obey, and enjoy God. 

In this revised edition, Brian Schrag has incorporated user feedback, lessons learned, and additional real-life stories of these principles over the last decade. This book includes an added index; periodic reflection questions; case studies from people applying CLAT in various contexts; updated references; and more content devoted to multicultural contexts. Drawing on historically robust discoveries and methods of academic disciplines—ethnomusicology, folklore, performance studies, anthropology, biblical studies, missiology, and ethnodoxology—Creating Local Arts Together teaches about artistic communication within communities, whether cultures close to home or far afield. (c) Text Credits: Amazon (order here).

Recommended by Dr. Jill Ford DWS of ARTS+ and Lecturer and Programme Leader for Arts, All Nations Christian College (UK):

"The Creating Local Arts Together (CLAT) model has been a great creative research tool for both our undergraduate and postgraduate students at All Nations Christian College in the UK. Students have been able to develop meaningful creative projects for a wide range of communities and differeing contexts. in particular, through teaching and hosting the Arts for a Better Future course each summer, we have been able to adopt CLAT for use in interncultural churches and communities in the UK, which has helped foster culturally con scious worship, diversity of creative expression, and deeper unity within the church."

About the Author Brian Schrag, PhD:

Brian serves as Senior Ethnomusicology and Arts Consultant with SIL Global, and Professor Emeritus at Dallas International University (DIU). He lived and worked in Central Africa, headed the integration of ethnoarts into SIL for thirteen years, and founded DIU's Center for Excellence in World Arts. Brian has Huntingtons's Disease, spurring him to create artistry and tools to encourage others also affected. More broadly, he promotes community-led, artsenergized activities resulting in more signs of the New Creation.