Creating Local Arts Together (Revised Edition) 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 life in the creation that Jesus will re-make: one in which all communities use all their gifts to worship, obey, and enjoy God, and where justice, health, and growth mark our lives forever.
In this revised edition, Brian Schrag has incorporated user feedback, lessons learned, and additional real-life stories of these principles applied over the last decade. This book includes an added index; periodic reflection questions; case studies from people applying CLAT in various contexts; updated references; a stronger focus on local agency; 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.
We highly recommend that readers download the free CLAT Companion, and explore the Digital Library. These resources augment the revised and updated CLAT Manual (2025) in vital ways. Most noticeably, we have moved the vast majority of research tools for features connected to music, drama, dance, oral verbal arts, and visual arts from the Manual into the Companion. This means that the deep dives into such features originally contained in Conversation 4B in the 2013 Manual are now in the CLAT Companion. The Companion also provides three diverse case studies of CLAT applications and two new streamlined artistic genre research guides.
Finally, we quickly recognized the impossibility of capturing all of the growing number of important CLAT-related stories, articles, and tools in just two volumes. We thus designed an ever-expanding Digital Library for you to check out at the link below.