Dear Friends:
Over the last couple months, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to fulfill our mission of encouraging and equipping our community to live imaginative, meaningful lives. There is no doubt that our monthly pub gathering, the Art House Exchange, continues to encourage (friends and attendees) by connecting them to new friends and encouraging casual conversations about their creative interests. I am also confident that last months’ Dinner with Friends series kick-off served as an important equipping moment for musicians to learn how they can more effectively market themselves. As event after event fills up, we become more and more aware of the thirst within Dallas artists to connect with others pursuing a God glorifying, creative life. This thirst is for more than casual conversation; they long for True community.
I consistently have conversations with and receive emails from people who are so encouraged to hear about Art House because they have felt isolated. Occasionally, they tell me it’s lonely because of the solitary nature of their creative process, but most of the time it’s the fact that they rarely connect with other Christians within their craft. I think that many of these people would agree with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s feeling that “the physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.”
Art House Dallas hopes our community would be a group who inspires creativity AND strengthens each other to be the kind of people that Jesus calls us to be in this world. In an effort to pursue this model of community, we are pleased to present you with a new opportunity to get involved at a deeper level through Art House Local.
After six months of casual conversations at our Art House Exchange, we realized that it was time to create an additional time and space throughout the year for more intentional gatherings where folks can come together to explore the intersection of faith and vocation. Art House Local will provide a more intimate environment to explore deeper conversations, while connecting with people who are pursuing the “Artful Life”-- in your area of DFW and beyond. In light of the reality that you all lead very busy lives and are not looking for an additional weekly small group, Art House Local will be held quarterly with room for each group to create additional gatherings as they see fit. Each Local group will be facilitated by two co-hosts who will help guide the discussion around brief excerpts from classical essays foundational to Art House America’s core values. We’ll kick off the first Art House Local with discussions about Francis Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible and an introduction by Charlie Peacock.
I am thrilled at the idea of groups meeting together all over DFW on August 16th for our first Art House Local. It's going be beautiful to watch how God uses diverse groups of individuals with various vocations and gifts meeting under one roof to grow together. We hope that Art House Local will be an avenue for unity of purpose similar to Bonhoeffer’s description of community in Life Together: “the more genuine and the deeper of community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us.”
We would love for you to join us in this endeavor and also pray with us that this next step for Art House Dallas would bring about new relationships, fresh creativity and a place to know Jesus more deeply.