We Have This Ministry by the Friends of Westminster

Westminster United Church in Medicine Hat, Alberta, undertook an ambitious project to make use of the logo from the Season After Epiphany (Unit 4), 1998.  The theme "We Have This Ministry" explored ways in which the light of Christ is manifested through the life and work of the Christian community.  The logo illustrated this as an unfinished quilt.  Each piece of the quilt showed some aspect of life related to Christian ministry.  There were people singing, dancing, celebrating, communicating with the reaching out to one another.  Because many hands work together to create a quilt, it serves as an effective symbol for Christian ministry.

Westminster United Church used many hands to create a painted mural of the quilt.  Here is what happened as told by Reverend James Farrell:

In February 0f 1999 I approached the board of Westminster United Church with the idea of "cleaning up" our rather uninviting brick stairwell/entrance (the entrance to our office area) with a mural.  My hope was that it could be the work of the whole congregation and that it would truly be a community-building event that would end up being "our mural."

The board was encouraging and then the image needed to be found and the idea of many images, a quilt, came to mind.  It was about then that I re-encountered the image from The Whole People of God curriculum and approached [Wood Lake Books] for permission to use the idea but to modify it.  Those who remember the unit "We Have This Ministry" will recognize the differences.  I worked with an art teacher to modify the original piece for our purposes and then layout began.

We used left over bits of latex house paint and some acrylic craft paint and some magic marker.  The board authorized the purchase of materials but many materials and paints were donated.  We thought the colours of the original The Whole People of God art piece provided our best option for the squares and the other colours came form what was available. 

The youngest contributor was abut 10 and the oldest nearly 80 years of age.  The project took much longer than I had anticipated because of the location (scaffolding had to be erected) and some folks were afraid to be working that high up.  Other challenges included the difficulty of getting the outline image onto the brick wall.  I traced the art onto paper and cut and outlined the pattern onto the wall in preparation for painting, but only after the wall itself had received a coat of white paint. 

The texture of the wall meant that progress was really slow as paint had to be coaxed into every nook and cranny of each brick to be covered.  To speed up this story, you need to know that it took a total of 18 months from conception to completion.  Completion, by the way was during the week prior to our Christmas Eve services when a friend of the congregation offered to do some airbrush work to complete the clouds and add shadow to the figures. 

It was a wonderful Christmas gift to the congregation as folks left the Sunday before Christmas Eve with scaffolding up and returned to the Christmas Eve services with mural complete, scaffolding removed and our centre entrance transformed. 

From a simply made banner to a mural painted on a wall, adding artwork to worship enriches the experience for everyone.  Visual images, whether they are line drawings, full colour paintings, or 3-D sculptures bring the scriptures to life and have a lasting impact on those who view them.  The logos in The Whole People of God can be used in a wide variety of ways.  Look ahead at the logos and themes for the upcoming seasons and consider ways to use them to tie together education and worship.