I live next door to L'Abri Fellowship, the work founded by Francis and Edith Schaeffer in Switzerland and now active throughout the world; a number of L'Abri staff have contributed to the pages of Evangelicals Now over the years. Recently, L'Abri invited a professional artist, Janice Harding, to be artist-in-residence for most of a year.
For L'Abri, which has for decades been a place where the arts and the whole of modern culture have always been brought within the ambit of Christian experience and biblical apologetics, it was a logical extension of its ministry. And of course the presence of a real live artist on the premises led to a variety of teaching and discussion opportunities, and also the opportunity for visitors to L'Abri to get some hands-on acquaintance with art.
But the value of having an artist-in-residence proved to be much more extensive than that, as people who had come to L'Abri with all sorts of spiritual needs and problems found that art was a means of being ministered to. You can sometimes think through problems more deeply when you have a paintbrush in your hands than you can when you have a volume of systematic theology in them.
