The Illuminators

Alabaster Co. was launched by the simple question: “what is beautiful?” From this place, founders Bryan Ye-Chung and Brian Chung began to pursue and explore the intersections between faith and creativity through the lens of business. While Bryan Ye-Chung grew up Christian, it wasn’t until college that Brian Chung converted to Christianity after being raised Buddhist. It was at this point at university in Southern California where they met—their spiritual interests and creative backgrounds colliding in friendship and faith, ultimately leading them to create Alabaster Co.

Initially, the two launched the company with each of the four gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John—as starting points in their mission to combine art and design with the beauty of scripture. Now, they continue to ask what is beautiful as they expand their work to visually refresh other books of the Bible, create short films, compose music, write articles, and seek out new ways where faith and spirituality can collide to make something beautiful.

Selah Clothing Co. aims to step outside the box on two fronts, bringing a positive message to streetwear culture and creating a new aesthetic for the Saints. Creator Philip Bowles has rooted the brand in the good news of the gospel while growing beyond the limitations of what might be expected of a faith-based apparel line. His designs do not possess explicit references to Scripture, but Bowles sees the artistic and creative process behind Selah Clothing Co. as an expression of his identity in Christ. He is convinced that,“God is the ultimate creative and so it’s in our being, it’s in us, to create and be creative.”

With a commitment to artistic integrity and individuality, Bowles is eager to further the growth of Selah Clothing Co. as a competitive brand in the streetwear market. In doing so, he is taking hold of a missional opportunity to introduce a message of hope and truth to secular culture.

At its core, Starfish Project is a family, the members of which are the survivors of sexual exploitation in Asia. The Starfish Project family was first brought together when Jenny McGee and a friend decided to reach out to the young women and girls they had seen working in brothels and massage parlors. When she heard the women’s stories in the brothels, it broke her heart and she knew she had to do something more to help them. Through the compassion and love demonstrated in those relationships, five women made the bold decision to leave their lives in the sex industry behind. Their next decision was to start a jewelry business together.

Jenny saw life-giving transformation in the team as they worked together to create beautifully vibrant pieces of jewelry while building all aspects of the business (including developing skills in graphic design, photography and accounting). She explains, “…there’s something very healing, about having a job with dignity and coming into a safe environment where you are making something that people value.” 15 years later, Starfish Project is a social enterprise that invests 100% of their sales in providing opportunities for exploited women and girls to experience freedom and independence while developing career and life skills. Each stunning piece of jewelry the women create is representative of the resilient survivors behind the business.

What began with a lunch-hour brainstorming session between Lukas and Suzy VanDyke, married photographers eager to use their time for greater gospel impact, grew eventually into Wild & Free Supply, a business empowering local ministry leaders in Honduras. It was a mission trip that acted as the bridge connecting those initial brainstormed ideas and the business that now produces high quality leather goods. While getting a feel for the culture and ministry in Honduras, Lukas and Suzy noticed a need among seminary students for good paying work with the flexibility to accommodate their studies and ministry involvement. After connecting with a local leather tannery, Lukas was inspired to respond to that need.

Wild & Free Supply’s impact is three-fold. The business invests in the local economy using leather sourced from Honduras, provides dignified work for ministry leaders to support themselves and their families, and offers consumers an opportunity to double up the value of their spending for a gospel impact. Wild & Free Supply’s timeless leather pieces are the vehicles of the business’s fruit, but the gospel-centered mission is the fuel that keeps them going.

Eric Ordway was trained and currently teaches as a ceramic artist, focused on making ceramic vessels that allow themselves to partake in the intimate moments of every day—such as a slowly enjoyed morning coffee. Lately, however, he has been rethinking the way we see these objects as purely functional and profitable. As Eric has developed his thinking—and even an MFA thesis—on the work of clay artistry as an expression of contemplative communion with Christ, the pottery has moved outside a purely functional realm.

Through new technique and intention, Eric allows the vessels to inhabit a presence of their own. He thinks of these ceramic works as “incarnate prayer”: physical creation birthed out of slow, thoughtful communion with Christ. The work of the spinning wheel and the flames from the kiln offer unique resonance with the reality that God is our potter and we are his clay. By focusing on the craft of ceramic artistry, Eric tends to the quiet parts of the soul that are bombarded all day long, offering creations that are prayer-breathed and invite us into unity with incarnation—both in our own bodies and in Christ’s.

Kaitlyn Rose knew that her artistic calling wouldn’t follow a conventional track. While teachers and gallerists around her offered a vision of “the ideal artist’s life” as tiny New York apartments, all night painting sessions, part-time day jobs and a slow attempt to make something of yourself, Kaitlyn saw glimpses of a different way forward. After a time of crisis in 2018, right after registering her own LLC, Kaitlyn knew that the wall between her art and her faith had to come crumbling down.

By learning to share both pain and redemption between the walls of both church and studio, Kaitlyn found a new way to live in the fullness of what God had for her as a creator and person redeemed by Christ. By doubling down on her painterly skills in creating expansive and vibrant abstract work, paired with a sacred attention to her writing, Kaitlyn’s work has blossomed into a sustainable way to share the wonder of Christ profoundly, spilling forth from the canvas and onto the screen of digital media.

Since 2016, Bonny Cheung has been creating a space with her work where one can experience what she hopes to be the presence of God. It makes sense that she would choose to share her work collectively as The Ark. Cheung’s hand-poured soy candles reinterpret a room’s limited space with the wideness of the natural world. Her warm, watercolor landscapes on rugged hand-pressed paper hanging banners, and floral oil paintings reinterpret walls as windows where the Beautiful Man’s hand may reach through. Cheung is a re-interpreter of the world, framing its center around beauty.

As a mother to a newborn, she shared a reinterpretation of herself as also being a kind of newborn—a newborn mother. It’s this never-ending centering of beauty in her work that showcases how The Ark transforms the interpretation of a space and objects. “If it’s not beautiful, ” she says on her website, “it’s not the end.”

Nathan Yoder uses hand-carved wooden blocks, pens, and inks to create still moments from beavers, seagulls, ducks, and deer in their natural habitat. This unique skill set gives Yoder’s work the quiet tonality and focus of a Mary Oliver poem. Since 2014, Yoder’s multidisciplinary design and illustration studio based in Seattle, Yondr Studio, has exchanged convenient digital tools for traditional tools. Yoder’s move away from a computer-dependent process prevents the computer’s synthetic lens from mediating his understanding of nature or being his muse. Instead, Yoder invites a different lens to be mediator and muse—one made of Spirit.

Keeping this thread since the beginning, Yoder went from hand drawing screen printed t-shirt designs in 8th grade to hand drawing a refreshed crest for the iconic brand Stetson. Yoder wants to be connected to tools and materials that are made from the very landscapes he is drawing. For Yoder, it’s through the artist’s work of devotion that the viewer can be connected in a very tangible way to creation and furthermore, to the Creator.