Art Life Faith Podcast

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. We are recording live from the JCAMM conference in downtown Tokyo with the theme of “The Beauty of Japan・The Beauty of Heaven.” It’s a week-long conference from Friday, May 22 to Wednesday, May 27, 2026, where we are talking about the arts of Japan, the beauty of Japan, and how that helps us worship God. We&#8217...

Next week, May 22-27, 2026, is our worship and arts conference “The Beauty of Japan・The Beauty of Heaven” . This five-day event is the biggest we have ever put on. Hundreds will join us here in downtown Tokyo with easy access to all the beautiful art and culture of our city. We will have over 30 presenters with short talks, testimonies, music, films, discussions, networking, prayer walks and acti...

Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Let me take a moment to invite you to our upcoming conference, May 22-27, 2026, just one month away, here in downtown Tokyo with easy access to all the beautiful art and culture of our city. During our time together, we will offer many short presentations, talks, and performances to lead us in worship through the hear...

Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. This week on March 11, 2026, we remember the 15th anniversary of that terrible earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that struck the northeast coast of Japan. In memory of that event, last month, we had a big gathering within JEMA, which is the Japan Evangelical Missionary Alliance, the organization that represent...

Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith podcast. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Well, Happy New Year everyone! It’s good to be with you in 2026. I hope you’ve had a good year so far. Two of my boys are in college now but were able to be back with us over the winter break, and we got to have some fun in the snowy mountains of Japan, including an overnight snowshoe camping trip up one o...

Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Today, I’m excited to share with you a project that our team has been working on for quite some time now. Our new children’s book, The Tsunami Violin , comes out on November 24, 2025. Back in 2020, I wrote my first children’s book called “Pippy the Piano and the Very Big Wave” . Based on...

Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith podcast. I’m your host, Roger Lowther. I have an exciting announcement to make. Our next book, “The Tsunami Violin,” comes out next month, November 2025. We’ve been working on this project for some time now, and we are so excited to finally be able to share it with all of you. This book is based on real-life events that happened after a tsunami hit the n...

Hello and welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast. I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Every year, we have interns come work alongside us in what God is doing here in Japan through the arts. This summer, one of our interns was a phenomenal dancer named Anna Gardner Herren, with a huge heart for missions around the world. This was her third summer with us here in Japan, and she also made trips to Tai...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Well, before we get this episode’s interview, I want to share a couple of updates with you. A couple of weeks ago, we launched the Japanese edition of Third Culture Kids , which is designed to help Japanese families living overseas with the challenges that come from raising kids in a foreign context. We know it’s...

Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Well, a lot’s been happening since our last podcast, so let me catch you up a bit. First, our church, Grace City Church Tokyo, celebrated its 15th anniversary this past Sunday on Pentecost Sunday, June 8, 2025. We started weekly worship exactly 15 years ago, and it’s been quite a journey since, which became real...

Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. This episode, I have the privilege of talking with Mike Nawrocki, co-creator of VeggieTales and the beloved voice of Larry the Cucumber. Mike teaches at Lipscomb University, Nashville, Tennessee, and he came over to Japan with his family, a group of students, and another teacher on a mission trip during spring break....

Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. This is the third in a series of conversations I’ve shared with you from Lausanne Congress 4, which took place September 22–28, 2024 in Seoul, South Korea. Because it was the 50th anniversary of the Lausanne Movement, it was the largest gathering yet, with over 5,000 people in person and another 2,000 online, pl...

Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. I’d like to continue in this episode what we began in the last, reflecting on the Lausanne Fourth Congress that happened at the end of September 2024, which I had the honor of attending. Now, these events don’t happen very often. The previous one was in 2010, 14 years ago. This one was by far the biggest,...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. In September, I had the honor of attending the 4th Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism in Seoul or Incheon, South Korea. The Lausanne movement celebrated its 50th anniversary with 5,000 people from over 200 nations. There were so many people! The Lausanne Movement has significantly shaped Christianity since it was sta...

Are you a college student? If you are, have you ever considered doing an internship somewhere in the world with a missions team? In this episode, we’re going to talk a little bit with two interns who spent some time with us this summer. Internships are a great way to see what God is doing around the world. But I do have to warn you, they can be a bit dangerous. And I don’t mean in the...

My family and I live on an island that’s part of the reclaimed land of Tokyo Bay. It’s at the mouth of the Sumida River, which flows down from the heart of Tokyo. And this is a very interesting place, one reason why we chose to live here. This island is where the fishermen used to live that went out into the bay to catch the fish. And when they brought it back, they would give the best...

When you walk out of an airport and enter a country that’s foreign to you for the first time, one of the things you might notice is the different smell in the air. And, you know, often these differences come from the food. Food is so closely tied to the identity of a nation which plants you in that place. And cultures are practically defined by their food. Think of spaghetti: Italy. Fish and...

Well, it’s here! The day has finally come. The launch of my next book “A Taste of Grace” is right around the corner, coming this Monday, May 27, on Memorial Day Weekend. I’m so excited to finally be able to share this book with all of you. Now, this book has really been a long time in coming. I began writing it in 2020 during the lockdown as part of a series of finding beauty in broken...

Just the other day we hosted a Zoom call for our friend Satomi Suzuki to help raise money for her upcoming artist residency. She’s a visual artist and a writer here in Tokyo, but she’s about to head to Ocean Springs, Mississippi. And so in advance of her departure, I asked if she wouldn’t be willing to have a conversation with us. Roger I’m sitting here with Satomi Suzuki, and this person ....

I want to give a brief report from our relief trip to Ishikawa Prefecture last weekend, responding to the needs from that enormous 7.6 magnitude earthquake that struck the region on January 1, 2024. I led a youth team of 3 adults and 7 junior high, high school, and college students from my church, Grace City Church in Tokyo. It was basically a mini-missions trip, which for many of them was their f...

A little update about the situation in Ishikawa since that magnitude 7.6 earthquake on January 1, 2024. What a way to start the year! I talked to some people on the ground today and got the latest news. It’s still a very hard situation. The whole peninsula of Noto, that northern part of Ishikawa, only has a few roads, but they’re still broken. So, it’s making travel really diffic...

Many of you have been writing me about this earthquake that hit Japan just a couple of weeks ago on January 1st. Wow, what a way to begin the new year, right? As you know, it was a pretty big one. In Tokyo, it wasn’t that big, definitely felt, but mostly just a lot of big swaying. But actually, I wasn’t in Tokyo at the time when the earthquake hit. I was in Nagano, not far from the epi...

Welcome back to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast, and I’m your host Roger Lowther. This really has been fun for me, sharing conversations in the past two episodes recorded at the GCAMM Conference, the Global Consultation on Arts and Music in Missions, as it helps me remember what I learned and also the people I befriended there. In this third and last episode, let’s do this just one more time, and con...

Welcome back to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast. I’m your host Roger Lowther, and I’m excited to continue our discussion from the last episode, giving a little peek into some of the conversations and relationships that were happening at the GCAMM Conference this past September in Ft. Worth, Texas, the Global Consultation on Arts and Music in Missions. Let’s pick up where I left off last time and cont...

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. This episode, I am honored to introduce you to some of the people I met at the GCAMM Conference in Fort Worth, Texas, the Global Consultation on Arts and Music in Missions. It took place September 11-14, 2023 at Southwestern Baptist University. This conference doesn’t happen very often, only once every few years....