Painting During the Church Service As Worship

Painting during a church service is something fairly new to the church these days, and I am honored to be part of it. I can understand how it can also be controversial, and I personally hate church services that are too performance like. However, one of my pet peeves is when "worship time" is always assumed to be musical. There are hundreds of ways of worshiping God together, and music is just one of them. I don't want to be a performance, but watching the process can be just as illustrative as a whiteboard note.

Here are the paintings I did during church services. I did all of them in the service, so none of them took me over 45 min to do.

The River Church 

Bride of Christ, 30"x40"

This service was talking about "trash to treasure" in terms of God's grace. That's all I knew about the sermon before I painted. So I wanted to make that quite literal. I had people gather trash before the service and used it in my painting. Her bouquet is made of torn pages of flowers from magazine, the stained glass is melted crayon (melt with a glue gun) and lots of her dress are sheets of old homework. Her veil is a plastic bag I found in the parking lot.
I don't have a very good picture of it, but the bottom is all metallic gold. One of my favorite memories about making this is about the beginning (no pun intended). Pastor Rob started off his sermon by quoting the verse "1In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.…" and just as he was saying that, I was painting drippy black on to white, a huge canvas, that spread out and filled the background. That was rather dramatic, and I liked it. Someone offered to buy it from me, but I felt it was the church's. I also paint vigorously, I needed a bath afterwards. Don't worry, I always put down lots of drop cloths.

The Bridge  Church

Ezekiel, 2010, Clay

I don't remember the sermon for this one, but I do know that I modeled it after Ezekiel 37 (Zombies!) and Pastor Dan mentioned that same story when I was half way done with it. I don't know what they did with it afterwards.

The theme of the day was Pentecost, fire, and the Holy Spirit. This was a worship focused service with no sermon. It was almost all music playing, prayer, and a time to share.

Rain Down, 2014, Acrylic

it's a big one, not sure of the size. At least 20"x something. I prepared the canvas for a particular song that was full of energy. This one I wanted to be dramatic.   Song: Rain Down

Invitation, 2014, 24"x36" ?

There was also a dancer for the song Oceans. 
 I had prepared the background for the beginning of the service, and added the dancer as she started to dance, and the dove last, by finger painting. It was given to the dancer.



The grass is just grass...

Hands On You

I had something else planned, but God put this image in my heart and told me how to do it, even down to when to stop dripping paint, or how far down the sky should go, etc. I love collaborative
art with God. It is a message for the Bridge. And yes, the wings are hands. Pastor Jeff grabbed it mid service to show it and talk about it, and I wasn't finished yet! I'm not sure I even had the dove motif, but mostly I was afraid of it getting all over the non-drop-clothed area, it was very goopey and drippy. I teared up a bit when painting it.











Here are a few links about painting and doing art during worship:

http://manuelluz.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/why-paint-during-worship/

Another really big painting done during the service that I'm proud of:


 http://dabblebag.blogspot.com/2014/09/art-and-painting-for-church-story-on.html