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Keith Dow reflects on a conversation with Betty J.B. Brouwer of Shalem Mental Health Network, exploring how art can open space for connection, belonging, and theological insight. Drawing on Betty’s work in art therapy and community practice, the piece considers how creativity can bypass purely intellectual approaches to faith, making room for beauty, dignity, and new possibilities in how we understand ourselves, one another, and God.
A few years into leading the Images of God project, I’ve had a number of conversations with Christians with intellectual and developmental disabilities about how they understand and represent God. One of the things I keep returning to is the role of art in making that question not only accessible, but meaningful. The people who participated in the project came alive when they were working with images, taking photos, and assembling collages. Those creative acts seemed to unlock theological insight that a more conventional interview might have missed entirely.
So when I had the chance to sit down with Betty Brouwer, I was looking forward to the conversation.
Betty is the Director of Attachment Services at Shalem Mental Health Network, a registered art therapist, and the founder and Artistic Director of RE-create Outreach Art Studio in Hamilton. She started RE-create in 2003, and it is now a drop-in studio open three times a week for youth ages 16 to 24 who are navigating poverty, mental health challenges, homelessness, and other barriers. The studio, located in the Gasworks arts hub in downtown Hamilton, received the Spirit of Hope Award in 2024. Betty also carries a clinical caseload focused on attachment, developmental trauma, and children in adoptive and foster care. In her work, art and therapy are not two separate things.
I came to the conversation as a theologian who is still learning my way around psychological approaches and insights. Betty came as someone who had long held the two together. We found a good deal of common ground.
At the Same Table
One of the things Betty described about RE-create is the way the art studio flattens hierarchies that are otherwise stubborn.
“Recreate is about the art, and it’s not about the art. It’s about building connections, having community.”
She described the studio as a place without gatekeeping. Youth come regardless of where they are on any spectrum of “functioning” or diagnosis, because the table is genuinely open. If someone shows up, they belong there.
This maps directly onto the principle of universal design, which came up in our conversation. A ramp does not just help people in wheelchairs. It helps parents with strollers, kids who love running up inclines, and people carrying heavy loads. Design something for the person facing the most barriers to access and you improve the space for everyone.
Betty sees art the same way. When you create a space where verbal articulateness is not the primary currency, where what matters is showing up and making something, you lower the floor in a way that benefits everyone at the table. “There are people that are going to be at the table that are more artistically talented than I am,” she said. “And we can all learn from one another.”
What Art Can Hold
Betty’s clinical background at Shalem shapes how she thinks about what art actually does in a person. She pointed out that the world we inhabit tends to reward left-brain, rational, verbal intelligence. Art draws on something different. That shift matters especially when someone is carrying something that does not fit neatly into words. She described an exchange from her art therapy practice with someone who had experienced a traumatic event, a person struggling to locate any sense of worth in herself.
Betty took a blank piece of paper and put a mark on it. “If this is you and it’s a blank piece of paper, now there’s this blot on it. What do we do with the paper? Do we throw it out or can we work with it?” They worked with it. They made something from it. “It could have beauty in it,” she said, “even though it had had this blot put on it.”
This is not so much a technique as it is theology: nothing is so marked that it cannot be worked with, that beauty is not the absence of damage but something that can live alongside it.
The Images of God project kept returning me to the same territory, though by a different route.
A Different Kind of Knowing
The dominant modes of theological reflection we have inherited in the church, sermons, Bible studies, structured discussion groups, tend to reward a particular kind of cognitive and verbal fluency. In that sense, they are designed for a narrow range of human capability. When I used Photovoice with participants in the Images of God project, asking people to photograph what reminded them of God and then reflect on those images, something shifted. One participant, Raee, put it this way: “I see God in making art. I never really thought of it that way before I did the Image of God project, but God is in everything. And I feel like that’s super cool that in art, we truly get to express what we see God do as well.”
Another participant, Ryan, was looking at his photos of creation and nature when he asked me: why did God make all of this? I turned the question back to him. He said:
“I think he created all this because he wants people to enjoy life.”
That is not a theologically naive answer. Some of us who have spent a long time in religious systems need to be reminded to receive the joy of God’s creation, to get out of our heads and into the beauty of God’s love made manifest.
Betty put it plainly: the participants’ phrases “bypassed the intellectualized cognitive understanding of spirituality and just got to the heart of it.” That is what art makes room for.
Art as Possibility
Both RE-create and the Images of God project operate from a related conviction: that people often viewed only as recipients also have something to give. Images of God participants described active involvement in their faith communities, acts of service, and practices of generosity. The project itself was designed, as much as possible, to be something participants experienced as meaningful rather than extractive. Betty’s studio reflects a similar instinct, including a youth artist-in-residence program that has become, for some young people, their first experience of paid employment.
When I prompted her for a summary, Betty said:
“Art and creativity help us to reimagine new possibilities with our understandings of ourselves, our world, and our God.”
I think she is right. And I think the church still has a great deal to learn from artistic spaces that build accessibility into their foundations rather than trying to tack it on afterward.
About the Author:
Keith Dow:
Keith Dow lives near Ottawa, serving as Manager of Organizational and Spiritual Life with Karis Disability Services. He holds his PhD in caregiving ethics from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of Formed Together: Mystery, Narrative, and Virtue in Christian Caregiving (Baylor, 2021). Keith Dow is a credentialed Pastor with BIC Canada for his role with Karis Disability Services, where he supports the spiritual health of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and equips churches to be more accessible and hospitable.
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Keith Dow reflects on a conversation with Betty J.B. Brouwer of Shalem Mental Health Network, exploring how art can open space for connection, belonging, and theological insight. Drawing on Betty’s work in art therapy and community practice, the piece considers how creativity can bypass purely intellectual approaches to faith, making room for beauty, dignity, and new possibilities in how we understand ourselves, one another, and God.
A few years into leading the Images of God project, I’ve had a number of conversations with Christians with intellectual and developmental disabilities about how they understand and represent God. One of the things I keep returning to is the role of art in making that question not only accessible, but meaningful. The people who participated in the project came alive when they were working with images, taking photos, and assembling collages. Those creative acts seemed to unlock theological insight that a more conventional interview might have missed entirely.
So when I had the chance to sit down with Betty Brouwer, I was looking forward to the conversation.
Betty is the Director of Attachment Services at Shalem Mental Health Network, a registered art therapist, and the founder and Artistic Director of RE-create Outreach Art Studio in Hamilton. She started RE-create in 2003, and it is now a drop-in studio open three times a week for youth ages 16 to 24 who are navigating poverty, mental health challenges, homelessness, and other barriers. The studio, located in the Gasworks arts hub in downtown Hamilton, received the Spirit of Hope Award in 2024. Betty also carries a clinical caseload focused on attachment, developmental trauma, and children in adoptive and foster care. In her work, art and therapy are not two separate things.
I came to the conversation as a theologian who is still learning my way around psychological approaches and insights. Betty came as someone who had long held the two together. We found a good deal of common ground.
At the Same Table
One of the things Betty described about RE-create is the way the art studio flattens hierarchies that are otherwise stubborn.
“Recreate is about the art, and it’s not about the art. It’s about building connections, having community.”
She described the studio as a place without gatekeeping. Youth come regardless of where they are on any spectrum of “functioning” or diagnosis, because the table is genuinely open. If someone shows up, they belong there.
This maps directly onto the principle of universal design, which came up in our conversation. A ramp does not just help people in wheelchairs. It helps parents with strollers, kids who love running up inclines, and people carrying heavy loads. Design something for the person facing the most barriers to access and you improve the space for everyone.
Betty sees art the same way. When you create a space where verbal articulateness is not the primary currency, where what matters is showing up and making something, you lower the floor in a way that benefits everyone at the table. “There are people that are going to be at the table that are more artistically talented than I am,” she said. “And we can all learn from one another.”
What Art Can Hold
Betty’s clinical background at Shalem shapes how she thinks about what art actually does in a person. She pointed out that the world we inhabit tends to reward left-brain, rational, verbal intelligence. Art draws on something different. That shift matters especially when someone is carrying something that does not fit neatly into words. She described an exchange from her art therapy practice with someone who had experienced a traumatic event, a person struggling to locate any sense of worth in herself.
Betty took a blank piece of paper and put a mark on it. “If this is you and it’s a blank piece of paper, now there’s this blot on it. What do we do with the paper? Do we throw it out or can we work with it?” They worked with it. They made something from it. “It could have beauty in it,” she said, “even though it had had this blot put on it.”
This is not so much a technique as it is theology: nothing is so marked that it cannot be worked with, that beauty is not the absence of damage but something that can live alongside it.
The Images of God project kept returning me to the same territory, though by a different route.
A Different Kind of Knowing
The dominant modes of theological reflection we have inherited in the church, sermons, Bible studies, structured discussion groups, tend to reward a particular kind of cognitive and verbal fluency. In that sense, they are designed for a narrow range of human capability. When I used Photovoice with participants in the Images of God project, asking people to photograph what reminded them of God and then reflect on those images, something shifted. One participant, Raee, put it this way: “I see God in making art. I never really thought of it that way before I did the Image of God project, but God is in everything. And I feel like that’s super cool that in art, we truly get to express what we see God do as well.”
Another participant, Ryan, was looking at his photos of creation and nature when he asked me: why did God make all of this? I turned the question back to him. He said:
“I think he created all this because he wants people to enjoy life.”
That is not a theologically naive answer. Some of us who have spent a long time in religious systems need to be reminded to receive the joy of God’s creation, to get out of our heads and into the beauty of God’s love made manifest.
Betty put it plainly: the participants’ phrases “bypassed the intellectualized cognitive understanding of spirituality and just got to the heart of it.” That is what art makes room for.
Art as Possibility
Both RE-create and the Images of God project operate from a related conviction: that people often viewed only as recipients also have something to give. Images of God participants described active involvement in their faith communities, acts of service, and practices of generosity. The project itself was designed, as much as possible, to be something participants experienced as meaningful rather than extractive. Betty’s studio reflects a similar instinct, including a youth artist-in-residence program that has become, for some young people, their first experience of paid employment.
When I prompted her for a summary, Betty said:
“Art and creativity help us to reimagine new possibilities with our understandings of ourselves, our world, and our God.”
I think she is right. And I think the church still has a great deal to learn from artistic spaces that build accessibility into their foundations rather than trying to tack it on afterward.
