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Visitors here don't expect to be challenged, diverted, distracted, and exhilarated when they walk into a missions building," says Jonathan Bonk. But when they enter the Overseas Ministries Study Center (OMSC), whose walls are lined with contemporary paintings, Bonk says, "The sheer beauty of the art causes people to light up. As visitors walk around, they are reminded of the gospel."

Bonk is the director of OMSC, which has an established reputation for studying and strategizing world missions. The 160 paintings highlight one of its newer roles: patron of the visual arts.

With funding from the Foundation for Theological Education in South East Asia and a special fund in honor of Paul T. Lauby, in 2001 OMSC began hosting foreign (usually Asian) Christian artists for a fully funded sabbatical year. In a nondescript, utilitarian building on OMSC's New Haven campus, seven artists have each spent a year creating a body of work in answer to the question, "What is the best missional art in a globalized world?"

"It is hot for the church to use arts now," says Hollywood art maven Barbara Nicolosi. The trend seems to be less ephemeral than the statement may suggest: besides OMSC, many other experienced missions organizations are seeing art as a way to convey the message of the gospel.

In 1990, New York City-based artist Makoto Fujimura became one of the first to start a program along those lines. He organized the International Arts Movement, which has sponsored artist missionary trips to China, Japan, and England.

Within a few years, the International Arts Movement was followed by church-sponsored arts festivals, such as the International Festival of the Arts. Schools began programs, such as Wheaton College's Community Art and Missions Program and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's Center for Theology and the Arts. Evangelistic groups like InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Youth With a Mission, Operation Mobilization, and Campus Crusade for Christ also started missions-oriented arts initiatives, symposia, centers, and other arts forums.

OMSC is unique for concentrating on Christian artists from the booming developing-world art scene and mixing them into American missions. This fall, the center welcomed Soichi Watanabe from Japan. In 2009, an artist from South Korea will come.

Scholars, missionaries, and international church leaders cycle through OMSC, which has a slightly Mennonite, neighborhood feel. Scholars and staff gather sometimes for communal meals, twice a week for worship, and weekly for lectures.

OMSC acts as a facilitator for the artists. It supplies them with the materials they need and sets up public showings at Yale Divinity School, churches, and a retirement community. Bonk told CT, "In some strange way, showing their art here seems to legitimize and enhance their art back home . . . giving it a kind of international cachet."

After each artist's year in residence, OMSC publishes a book of the artist's work. Bonk says he dreams of starting up a permanent gallery.

Mostly, Bonk says, the center is a peaceful and supportive rest for developing-world church leaders and missionaries. For Chris- tian artists, such as OMSC alumnus He Qi (pronounced huh-chee), working in their homelands often means isolation from other artists, difficulty supporting their families, trouble reaching a wide audience, having one's art rejected by the local Christian community, and even endangerment.

Chinese artist He Qi, 59, is the program's poster child. Bonk says that He Qi's route to faith made him conscious of the power of art to introduce Christ to others. No one, he says, better represents the role of art in missions than He Qi, who became a Christian because of a painting—Raphael's Madonna.

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November 2008, Vol. 52, No. 11