A Bridge Between Faith and Art Meet UMHEF Scholar Ben Townsend

Ben Townsend has spent a lifetime making music—twenty years on the road as a touring musician, countless recordings, film scores, and a deep, restless love for the kind of experimental, progressive art that most people never encounter at church. Now, supported by United Methodist Higher Education Foundation (UMHEF) scholarships, he’s at Wesley Theological Seminary pursuing a Master of Divinity and doing something he believes the church desperately needs.

As one of Wesley’s Artists in Residence, Ben has a studio in which to work on a calling. His goal, as he puts it plainly: to become an artist in residence for the United Methodist Church. Not to reinvent praise and worship music. Not to lead a choir. But to be a bridge.

“I find that Christianity in general is underrepresented in the creative art world,” Ben says. “There’s hardly any Christianity in the far progressive experimental art world—or the art world in general. And in the Methodist Church, I find almost no representation of the progressive experimental art that I love. It’s where I find prayer, and where I find my faith.”

That gap is what drives him. Ben came to his faith renewed through the grief and trauma of West Virginia’s opioid epidemic, finding that music could process what words alone couldn’t. He now runs an interfaith nonprofit in North River Mills, WV where monthly gatherings draw people traveling up to four hours to sit together, explore a lectionary text, and experience music as something meditative and sacred. He dreams of taking that model to churches across the country, and eventually the world.

At Wesley, he’s putting it into practice—scoring the soundtrack for a documentary about a fresco installation in a beloved campus tunnel and pushing himself to grow beyond the roles he already knows.

None of this happens without support. UMHEF scholarships aren’t just financial help—they are what makes the work possible. It’s what allows a West Virginia musician with a lifetime of art and hard-won faith to step into a seminary studio and start building something the church has been missing.

“I want to be the bridge between those two things,” Ben says. His scholarships are helping him get there.

This feature appears in the UMHEF 2025 Annual Review.