Towards an Understanding of the Spontaneous Prophetic Artist in the Pentecostal Church

Abstract

Art is an enduring witness, and prophetic art is the visual form of prophecy. This article considers the role of the Holy Spirit in creative prophetic inspiration in Pentecostal liturgical and ecclesial settings. While theologians have addressed the changes of attitude toward the role of the arts in service to the Church, it has been with an emphasis on articulating the viewers’ experience of art rather than the artmakers. By beginning to explore a distinctively Pentecostal pneumatological approach to divinely inspired unpremeditated and unrehearsed visual artmaking, this article contributes to Pentecostal aesthetics by articulating the emerging identity of the prophetic artist in Pentecostalism. Prophetic artists are predominately women. Women are pioneering visual arts as an integrated part of the great commission. Presented through an autoethnographical framework, this study draws on auto-hermeneutics, systematic self-observation, and interpretative phenomenological analysis to describe and interpret the phenomenon of spontaneous prophetic art in the Pentecostal worship sanctuary. By communicating the lived experience of the prophetic artist as an authentic in-context narrative, this article sets comparisons for further research study and serves as an accessible way of deepening the reader’s understanding of spontaneous prophetic art experiences, bearing witness to the role of the Holy Spirit in arts ministries.