Chapel Hill News article on grant recipient
From a Chapel Hill News article on grant recipient Orange United Methodist Church, and its stained glass window it commissioned as a way of learning the meaning of the Lord’s Supper:
”Holy communion is very real but filled with mystery,” Keck said. “There is kind of awkward balance. You might lose the mystery if you try too hard to understand. In thinking about this initially I thought that the arts would be helpful in trying to enter into that mystery to a deeper extent.”
The church applied for the grant and received it, whereupon a committee came up with the idea of commissioning a stained glass window, creating a hymn competition and having the entire congregation making a special study of the Holy Communion.
The Calvin Institute (www.calvin.edu/worship) doesn’t give grants simply to fund a commission, but the coordinators were happy to fund the piece of stained glass as one part of a project.
“For visual arts to be a fitting part of worship, our attention needs to move beyond just its form or style or the mechanics of how it was created to our focus on God,” said Elizabeth Steel Halstead, the resource development specialist for Visual Arts at The Calvin Institute. “In and through ‘seeing’ our awareness and participation in worship deepens. Nor is art just for decorative purposes. Visuals can communicate knowledge, stimulate our memory, evoke a sense of hope, complement the elements of liturgy, or even challenge us with the demands of the gospel.”
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