by Douglas R. Anthony

What if the uniqueness of the gospel emerged as if coming from local culture instead of coming to it from the outside? The practice of ethnodoxology makes that a reality. Ethnodoxology, or ethnoarts, is the practice of facilitating the creation of local arts that are culturally relevant, biblically sound, and emotionally resonant for use in the Body of Christ for worship, discipleship, evangelism, and other extensions of God’s love in the world.

Ethnoarts workers use their unique training, gifts, interests, and missional passions to share Christ in their communities. They use poetry to combat domestic violence, culinary arts for church planting, and songwriting workshops for peacemaking. Not only are these outcomes possible, but Alliance ethnoarts workers are seeing them happen—blessing local communities and multiplying Kingdom impact!

Christ in Culture

When Jesus was sent to a unique cultural time and place, He wore the local clothes, ate and drank the local food and wine, danced the dances, learned the proverbs and wisdom sayings, attended the community celebrations and funerals, and understood how to tell an entertaining story—and even a good joke! He knew that every culture has its own beauty, wonder, and distinctive and fascinating ways of communicating and expressing joy, sorrow, anger, and fear.

Likewise, as ethnoarts workers, we immerse ourselves and engage with the deeply embedded, intuitive expressions of local culture in ways that establish trust and build relationships. We don’t create our own art for others to experience, although we celebrate artists who do and who leverage that space for Kingdom purposes. Instead, we facilitate the strategic creation of local arts by local people for community blessing and Kingdom impact. We don’t pretend to know what choices of genre, form, or style are best, so we respect the agency of local communities to make their own artistic decisions. Our work often takes the form of workshops in which the intuitive, gut-level cultural knowledge of local people becomes cognitive understanding. This understanding then enables participants to make strategic choices, which generate deep resonance in Christian messaging while guarding against syncretism in Christian practice.

God made culture to be our quickest and most intuitive means of connection. An God made artists to be our most gifted intuitive communicators. The arts matter for ministry and mission!

Here are a few examples of what God is doing through skilled Alliance ethnoarts workers (also called ethnodoxologists) who are engaging local arts to meet local needs. These projects are also designed to advance the objectives of their respective local ministry teams.

Serving Communities

Poetry for Anti-domestic Abuse
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” These were the words my husband and I heard as we drove Sarah* home from a poetry performance late one evening. Over the previous couple of weeks, we had led 10 young women, followers of the local religion, through an arts creation workshop with the goal of addressing a need of their choice—in this case, domestic abuse—in their community. Although Sarah had written the poem during our workshop, she had not recited it that evening. “I should have been the one to read that poem,” she said, struggling to keep back the tears that were forming in her eyes. “It was my story.” The poem was about a young girl who had been abused by a family member. Sarah had never shared her grief and pain with anyone before. As we bumped along down the road to her village listening to her story, we knew that the Father was opening her heart to share with us her grief and pain so that we could introduce her to the One who is truly “acquainted with grief” and offer her hope.

—Ryan* and Isla*, Alliance workers serving in central Asia

Arts to Care for an Unreached Community
Due to a cultural stigma, Deaf children in our central Asian country are usually kept at home, unable to learn even basic sign language. Our team started a project that hires local Deaf adults as sign language teachers for these precious children. In our art classes, these usually quiet students were laughing until they cried as they watched one another act. These arts modules created space for the marginalized to have a voice, to share their hearts with one another, and—perhaps for the first time—to imagine what they could be when they grow up. We are still waiting for out sign language teachers to come to faith in Christ, but when they do, they will have a captive audience with whom they can share the love of Jesus, and they’ll have the arts to help them do it.

—Ryan and Isla

Multiplying Church Networks

Culinary Arts for Church Planting
In Bogota, Colombia, a soup kitchen in a community experiencing forced displacement, violence, and generational poverty was transformed when they moved from sharing coup to training people in the culinary arts. That soup kitchen grew to become Santa Cecelia Alliance Church. Santa Cecelia’s 80 members now serve others through after-school programs, a sewing workshop, and a bakery, in addition to aerial dance classes, puppetry, circus, tailoring, and muralism. Many, like the youth leader, Danny, came from drug use; and most, like Lorena, imagined they would never escape poverty. Lorena now has a degree in social work!

—Jhonny Nieto and Ninoshka Gelpi, mission mobilizers in Puerto Rico and directors of the Latin America Association of Ethnoarts (ALDEA)

Drama in Evangelism and Church Planting
“Why didn’t Jesus heal them all?” the women lamented after dramatizing the story of Jesus at the pool of Bethesda from John 5. Most of these women have buried babies. Sickness and death are never far. Yet, Jesus was drawing them to Himself in beautiful ways through the very stories they were reenacting from Injil (the Gospel of Jesus), recognized as a holy book in their community.

These 78 women, including only a few Jesus followers, attended a drama workshop in which we worked on non-verbal communication, character development, and staging. The women’s questions about the stories opened opportunities to share Jesus in powerful ways.

Earlier that year, a local religious teacher was brought in to scope out what was being taught to the women. He was sent to disrupt events like the drama workshop, but instead, he ended up intervening to protect the workshop from others who tried to create trouble. Despite these challenges, over 1,500 people saw Bible characters become real in drama presentations. And on Christmas Eve, over 40 new believers were baptized—including the religious teacher sent to bring disruption! The gospel is beautiful, and the arts matter for ministry and mission.

—Mary Lu Anthony, ethnodoxologist with Walk in Two Worlds

Heart-Language Music for Worship
When we first met the Kunda people in Zambia in 2019, the local churches weren’t using any Kunda songs, instruments, or dances in their gatherings—not even their own language. The Christians also refused to attend the annual Kunda cultural festival. This was seen as nothing less than cultural betrayal by the broader Kunda community. During our workshops in 2019 and 2022, Kunda believers decided to take the Scriptures given to them by Bible translators and set them to strategically selected traditional tunes. The results were transformational. Through our study of Scripture and culture, the Christians felt equipped to communicate the gospel effectively—even in rural villages. Attending the annual cultural festival for the first time, the choirs sang their new Scripture songs (using traditional music) and offered to pray with individuals. Over 140 people chose to follow Christ in those three days!

—Douglas Anthony, ethnomusicologist with Walk in Two Worlds

Developing People

Building Peace through Song
The local churches in our central Asian country have struggled with unity. Not many people have come to faith, and there is often a spirit of competition between these churches that is instigated when people change churches during conflict situations. As international workers in this setting, we have sought to become agents of peace, reconciliation, and unity. Over 30 local believers from 14 different churches attended our songwriting conference last spring. Three women, all worship leaders and all from different nationalities, had been previously estranged from one another by conflict and a relocation. One afternoon, we directed people to spread out and spend a few hours writing new songs to address needs in their communities. As the Holy Spirit moved in these ladies’ hearts, they gathered together during the afternoon songwriting session, reconciled with one another, and wrote a song together in their shared language about unity in the Body of Christ. As they played their song for us that evening, we saw clearly how Jesus’ words are true for the church in our country: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35, CSB).

—Ryan and Isla

Arts for Trauma Healing
In the heart of Hong Kong’s tumultuous era, economic hardship, social unrest, and protests have led to the incarceration of many young souls, prompting Christian psychologist Diane Langberg to declare, “Trauma is perhaps the greatest mission field of the 21st century.”

When trauma shuts down logical and verbal centers, artistic creativity can uncover pathways to healing by reintegrating the heart, mind, and body. And so, amid the exodus of families and friends seeking refuge, a shared hope emerged—that churches could do something to help people heal with God through the use of arts. Hence, Bible-based training in arts and trauma healing was introduced at Alliance Bible Seminary in Hong Kong.

Drawing from theology, neurology, and expressive arts theories, participants learn that God has equipped us with a healing mechanism. They actively listen, share experiences, and engage in creation for expression, lamentation, and worship with the Bible. God’s healing power among us and through us to others left me amazed, making “Christ our Healer” not just a belief but a reality. Over 40 individuals are progressing toward certification, and there is a newfound confidence and hope for our suffering communities.

—Hoiling Poon, member of the Global Advisory Council of the Global Ethnodoxology NEtwork and a researcher and adjunct teacher at Alliance Bible Seminary in Hong Kong

Beauty in Culture

While ethnoarts (and ethnodoxology) may seem like a new thing, this idea of contextualizing the gospel and the growing church is central to the heart and history of Alliance work. Examples of heart-language worship projects abound among ethnoarts workers because, despite our best intentions, those who carry the gospel have often left behind an unintentional footprint—including our own preferred styles and songs for worship. It is always a joy to be invited to help local Christian communities rediscover the beauty of their own culture.

Ethnoarts workers share a practiced belief that when local arts are valued by communities, and when people are empowered to worship God in their own cultural expression, humans thrive and communities of faith flourish. We believe that God is calling us to send more workers who understand the beauty and power of local culture and arts to bless local communities and multiply Kingdom impact.

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Interested in learning more? Already working in ethnoarts and want to get connected? Click here to access more stories and videos, discover additional resources, and get connected to Alliance ethnoarts workers. 

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