ow does an artist share his faith in a genuine way? How can a singer use her talent as a communicator rather than a performer? Two key elements are a strategic vision and a servant’s heart. First, a strategic vision develops from the artist’s clear idea of the goal that he or she wants to achieve, an idea which then organizes and informs every step toward that goal.
The first area of expertise for the “artist” involves craftsmanship. The term craftsman seems the best biblical expression for what people today think of as an artist. Certainly there are numbers of different kinds of crafts, industries, and trades noted in the Scripture. There are at least nineteen different artistic crafts[1] mentioned in the Bible. But craftsman seems to be one of those wide-ranging terms, a class term, that serves as an umbrella under which exist many more specific craft areas. Craftsman is very similar to two other wide-ranging, umbrella class terms: one being musician, where there certainly exist more specific kinds of musicians—for example harp players, flute players, trumpet (shofar) players, and cymbal players—each having a technical name. The other class term is singers. The term craftsman means “someone unusually wise at imaginative design and expression.”