Hospitality has always been a part of the way that Jane and Tyler view the ministry of their marriage. Hosting Porchlight gatherings with Renew the Arts has allowed them to expand that hospitality to include the arts and taught them more about what it means to tangibly support artists in their community.
Fr. Tyler Kerley, Anthony Quails, and Jane Kerley at the Create & Gather Night in August 2026.
Braving Connection
When they filled out the host interest form for Porchlight, Jane received the initial email about setting up a Zoom call to onboard them, and she was surprised when Katy followed up personally. “This is someone who’s personally wanting to connect with us to get us put in,” she realized, “and it’s not just getting signups through emails and stuff.” That personal touch was something that’s continued to be true of their experience hosting with Porchlight.
After they onboarded, Jane and Tyler started going through the list of the Porchlight artists and listening to their discography. If nothing else, they thought it was “a great way to learn about other artists we wouldn’t find on our own”.
Anthony Quails was an early favorite, and Jane recalled telling Tyler “wouldn’t it be amazing if we could get Anthony Quails to come play a show?” And the next day she received an email from the Porchlight portal saying that Anthony was looking to play a concert in their area. She described it as “a divine encounter.”
They set up a call with Anthony to talk about the upcoming concert, and Jane said that’s when she got the most nervous about hosting:
Getting an email from Anthony saying ‘hey, do you want to set up a phone call’ is when it hit me: I’m going to talk to this person about doing a concert. And that’s when I got nervous thinking, “what am I going to say?” We’ve never done this. But I really did appreciate [the phone call], because after I talked to him on the phone, I definitely felt way more at ease, just knowing he’s a real person and getting to connect with him one-on-one.
Embracing Limitations
The Kerley’s found Porchlight’s Hosting Guide very helpful in preparing for their first gathering. They embraced their limitations and simply opened up their backyard for the concert, since there wasn’t enough space indoors.
Anthony Quails sharing his music in Jane & Tyler’s backyard.
We just realized that either we do it or we don’t. Because if we wait until we have the perfect space and the perfect life season, that’s never going to happen. So we just had to work with what we have.
This is a lesson that Jane said she learned early in their marriage, when Tyler would invite ten people over for dinner to their 850-square-foot apartment. “I didn’t feel like we had the space for that,” she said, “but we just kept inviting people over, and I think I got more used to it. That set the stage for feeling more comfortable just inviting whoever to our house. Because we did it when we didn’t have a house.”
Being used to hosting certainly made their first Porchlight gathering easier to plan, but Jane acknowledged that there was still a little bit of apprehension about whether or not their community would be engaged in this kind of event:
There’s always the fear of failure, too. Maybe we try this out, but what if no one shows up? But 20 or 25 people came to our house for the Anthony Quails concert. And what we found is that almost everyone is longing for that connection, to share a concert together and have that experience. Everyone who came was deeply appreciative and loved it.
Hosting a Porchlight concert also allowed the Kerley’s to connect with some neighbors they hadn’t met before when they went around inviting people to the concert.
Connecting Over Food and Music
Jane and Tyler asked the audience to bring three things with them to the gathering: a dish to share for a meal before the concert, a lawn chair, and a suggested donation. The Kerley’s feel strongly about sharing a meal before the concert because of the way that food helps bring people together. Tyler said, “So much of Jesus’ own ministry was done around a table, so we wanted to do that in our own lives.”
This pairing of music and food is especially effective, as they both serve to help people let their guard down and connect with those around them. Tyler described it this way:
Just like food, music helps people to feel more comfortable and connected. Just how food is just something that we all need to eat to be physically nourished. There’s just something that God has written into the human heart, that we all need music to nourish us spiritually and emotionally.
They said that sharing food beforehand, in addition to sending their favorite song of Anthony’s with the invitations, helped people connect more quickly with him and his art than they would have otherwise.
People really enjoyed meeting Anthony before the show. There were a lot of people who were going up to him wanting to meet him and hear more of his story and stuff, even before he had played music. And then afterwards, there was a line of people wanting to go back up to him now that they had heard him, to connect more.
They found this to be true in the story of an elderly man and his wife who came to the Kerley’s second Porchlight gathering where they hosted James Koan III. The husband has dementia and has lost most of his conversational capabilities. But even though he couldn’t use his words to express that he had a nice time at the concert, his wife told Jane that he was tapping his foot to the beat the whole time, something that she thought “shows how music touches the human soul.”
Providing Tangible Support
One of Jane and Tyler’s biggest takeaways from being a Porchlight host is learning what it really means to support artists.
Tyler is the Rector at Resurrection Anglican Church in Woodstock, GA, where Jane is also on staff. Resurrection has an active arts ministry, so Jane and Tyler thought that they knew what it means to be an arts partner but said that “Porchlight has better enabled us to support artists and more creatively think about how we go about doing that.”
James Koan III performing at Resurrection Anglican Church in Woodstock, GA.
One of the things they learned when hosting Anthony Quails was how artists are missing out on income streams they used to make by selling CDs due to streaming.
[The financial side of being an artist] is something that maybe doesn’t get talked about a lot, because we don’t want to talk about money. But part of supporting artists is financial, not just giving them opportunities to play. We say we’ve been supporting artists, but how have we actually been supporting artists? How do they feel supported by us? It makes me want to support them in tangible ways.
Deepening their arts partnership to practice intentional investment in artists over time for the good of a community has also made Jane and Tyler realize their own agency in effecting change they want to see in Christian art:
I have done this, but so many people, especially like Christians, complain about Christian art and like how bad it is. And like it is, we do nothing about it. We just complain about it. Like, wow, there’s not any good Christian music. Wow, there’s not any good Christian movies. Wow, there’s not any good Christian, you know. But then that’s it. We don’t do anything. I feel like supporting artists like this is actually doing something about it.
The Kerley’s have been pleasantly surprised by how hosting Porchlight gatherings has multiplied and more artists in the network are now wanting to play concerts in their area. Now, Jane says that she doesn’t get nervous like she did setting up that first phone call with Anthony Quails, because being a host has taken away her notion that artists are “almost like a celebrity” and are unreachable:
No, this is someone who lives a couple of hours away from us. They’re trying to make a living doing this, and they’re just as eager to come and play a show as we are to have them. Both Anthony [Quails] and James [Koan III] are relatively close to us, and it was a cool added bonus that they’ve been kind of in our backyard, and we would never have met them or heard of them otherwise.
Becoming a Porchlight host has helped Jane and Tyler Kerley deepen their understanding of arts partnership as they bring their community together for fellowship and food. They look forward to continuing to host artists and creatively consider ways to support artists in their local community.
Fr. Tyler Kerley handing off the mic to Anthony Quails at Resurrection Anglican Church.
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