Dallas ? Chad and Rosanne Brinkman may be dreamers, but their vision may be the future for some religious institutions.

The married couple, who celebrated their first anniversary last month, want to create a network of urban art centers worldwide where artists can live, learn and showcase the gifts that they believe God bestowed on them.

Chad and Rosanne Brinkman, Dallas, want to create a network of urban art centers worldwide where artists can live and showcase the gifts they believe God bestowed upon them.

“We don’t have dreams of going on being Broadway stars, so much as we want people to know Jesus,” said Chad Brinkman, a 2002 graduate of Southern Methodist University. “The reason we went to college was because we wanted to have that background.”

The 23-year-olds said that, through creating the centers, they hope to raise the standards of religious art to a professional level and to train young artists. They also want to use art as an evangelistic tool to reach out to searchers and non-churchgoers.

“Art can bring people to a place (where there’s) a merging of the Holy Spirit,” Chad said.

To lay the groundwork, the Brinkmans are completing a two-year internship program as senior lay pastors at Higher Grounds. Hillcrest Church, a 5,000-member interdenominational church in North Dallas, started the group (then called Students for Spiritual Renewal) at SMU five years ago.

A vision for the future

The couple grew up miles apart in Texas she in Harlingen, he in Alvin and they share passions for Jesus Christ and the arts.

Both graduated from SMU’s acclaimed Meadows School of the Arts. He earned a degree in theater studies, she in violin performance.

Though both have participated in mission projects worldwide, neither has much experience planning the expeditions. They’ll oversee seven mission trips to eight countries over the next year, starting with trips to Sri Lanka and Turkey in the next two months.

The couple recently traveled to northern India and worked as apprentice project directors.

Rather than further Americanize the world, the couple wants to help people develop art inside their own cultures and communities that fit their lifestyles.

“The reason art speaks is because it comes from human experience,” Chad said. “If you empower someone who’s already in a place then they’re going to be able to reach people much more effectively.”

Friends say their dream is a glimpse of the future.

“This conception of the art centers is unique in that it’s collaborative,” said Eric Neubauer, pastor of college and career ministries at Hillcrest Church. “We may not recognize it now, but these are the churches of the 21st century. An urban art center like they’re describing is really going to be a doorway into the community of Jesus Christ.”

Justin Coleman, a close friend of the Brinkmans and a graduate student at SMU, said using the fine arts as an evangelistic tool could help establish religious communities outside the traditional church-synagogue-mosque frame of thinking. He’s currently working toward a master of divinity degree at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology.

“People connect with art, whether it’s music, drama, something that is on-screen or painted,” he said. “People respond very well to it. So if the church can minister through these different artistic mediums, then they will begin to touch these groups of people in a different way.”

Open to new ideas

Merging the arts and worship isn’t a new idea, but it has been gaining ground as churches nationwide begin moving toward more interactive, visually appealing worship services to attract young people.

For instance, Celebration United Methodist Church of Fort Worth, which considers itself a church for Generation X, has an in-house band that performs music by recording artists such as Creed and Lenny Kravitz.

What the Brinkmans don’t want is for their vision to become a be-all, end-all idea. They want the centers to become self-supporting and free to evolve with the times.

“Reality is, people aren’t interested in 1950s tent revivals anymore,” Chad Brinkman said. “The very nature of the postmodern world is people who are searching. They want to know truth, in whatever form they can find it.”

The Brinkmans said they were originally attracted to Hillcrest Church because it promotes using the fine arts as a way to glorify God.

In early September 2001, the church opened a new 1,800-seat worship center and transformed its old sanctuary into a performing arts center. Since then, the church’s fine arts ministry has staged theater performances, concerts and dance recitals several times a month.

“They’re so open to new ideas,” Neubauer said. “They’re not stuck in the ‘We only do it the Hillcrest way.”‘