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Vital Worship
Feature Stories ... for inspiration, learning, and group discussion
 Worshipers get the link between hospitality and communion when they see this stained glass at St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church in Holland, Michigan. |
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How to Plan Art Used in Church Worship
Is your church commissioning liturgical art…creating art for cross cultural worship…or designing a new building? Get tips from worship and arts leaders who’ve learned how to involve more people in planning and creating art for worship.
As the church year moves toward Easter and Pentecost, your congregation may be eager to deepen and renew worship.
Many churches find that adding—or improving—an arts planning process reveals God’s grace in startling ways. Creating art for worship can sink Scripture into people’s lives, connect people from different cultures, and build bridges into the community.
Working Scripture into kids
While teaching music at Christian schools in Anchorage, Alaska, Jan VanKooten developed a method for helping any child write a Scripture song.
Now choir director at Shawnee Park Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, VanKooten trained four adults. They helped high school, middle school, and fourth/fifth grade classes add rhythm, melody, and harmony to Bible verses. “This opportunity is for everyone. It’s not only for ‘musicians,’ ” VanKooten says.
Each class went through the process in six weeks. “We have only 45 minutes for church school. We offered snacks so kids showed up without dallying,” she says.
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First kids chose and wrote out a favorite Bible passage. “Speak it. Underline the words or syllables you find yourself stressing. That’s how the meter shows itself. The stressed syllable will be the start of a measure or a secondary beat,” she told them.
Listening to familiar hymns helped students see how good melodies match theology in song texts. Identical opening notes in “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” convey constancy. Outside class, one girl noticed on her own how the melody goes down for the words “joy to the world” and up for “let earth receive her king.”
“By the end of this process, you know something about the kids, their hearts, their personal theology, and their emotional makeup. It builds bonds with different ages,” VanKooten said.
After each six-week session, the congregation sang new songs in an evening service. High schoolers planned and led their service. Middle schoolers served as readers. In the fourth and fifth grade service, children introduced their songs.
Robyn Stegink explained, “Psalm 8 helps me picture God and how high he is above us. It makes me feel grateful that he would do everything he did for us. I chose this verse with my mom—and it is also very special to me because it is my dad’s favorite psalm.”
Song service bulletins included words and notes for each song. Instrumentalists would play a song, then someone would sing it, and then the congregation would sing. “By the time you repeat it three or four times, you have the Scripture in your hearts,” VanKooten says.
Having kids write Scripture songs helps ease contemporary music into worship. As one elderly woman said, “I sang them all even though I didn’t like them all.” Shawnee Park CRC now sings at least one student song each month.
 Father Charlie Brown, now priest at St. Francis de Sales, says the visuals and arts planning process help worshipers appreciate cultural differences. |
Unity without uniformity
St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church in Holland, Michigan, was built in the late 1960s. When a 1995 fire destroyed the sanctuary, the congregation decided its new worship space would reflect their growing diversity.
“We wanted to design something that would show unity without uniformity. And we wanted to give voice to the formerly silent,” says Father Stephen Dudek.
He came up with a building planning process that included “three reactor groups, designed along linguistic lines. You can’t just ask one English speaker, one Spanish speaker, and one Vietnamese speaker to represent a whole group.”
Dudek, now pastor at Holy Name of Jesus Parish in Wyoming, Michigan, says the St. Francis process was “not art by committee but sensitivity to culture.”
Father Charlie Brown, who came on staff after the new building was completed, says that the arts are still helping parishioners “appreciate differences and celebrate gifts we all can share.
“When you enter our church, you notice two art pieces on the back wall. One is of Our Lady of Guadalupe, so very important to Hispanics, and the other represents the 117 Vietnamese martyrs. In our day chapel, there’s also a wood carving of Our Lady of La Vang.
“In normal weekend worship, these images aren’t used. But when Hispanic or Vietnamese people come in to mass, they feel more welcome, like this is their church too,” Brown says.
Stained glass windows and carvings in liturgical furniture include common Christian symbols, such as grapes and wheat for communion. Visuals also include plants special to particular cultures, such as corn, prickly pear cactus, shamrock, tuberose, and tulip.
On Good Friday, Hispanic members of St. Francis do a costumed procession through the neighborhood, ending with a crucifixion reenactment inside the church. “It’s bilingual and every year, more non-Hispanics join in. They find it very meaningful because of the ritual, drama, and prayer—even though it’s outside their culture.
“We all share ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism.’ When we enter into someone else’s celebration, we connect with something that maybe our culture forgot. After all, corpus Christi celebrations used to be part of European culture,” Brown says.
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Making community connections
“Wealthy self-made people here can be difficult to access. However, there’s a lot of depth and interest in community arts,” says Katie Adelman, associate minister for faith formation, worship, and music at Ascension Lutheran Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
That’s why, when Ascension decided to commission art for lectionary gospel readings, they looked for artists outside their congregation. “We saw it as a way to share the gospel with folks we wouldn’t normally meet,” Adelman explains.
The church’s arts and faith team chose passages with visual potential and decided which art medium would best express them. They interviewed and appointed local artists and recruited teams of six to ten people to discuss a gospel text with an artist.
“We asked, ‘Now if you couldn’t say that with words, how would you communicate it? What did that gospel reading speak to you personally…intellectually…emotionally?’
“Teams talked with artists about what they envisioned. They had to trust the artist. The artists did a fabulous job of listening and returned with art incredibly beyond what teams had been thinking,” Adelman says.
The project gave some Ascension members their first chance ever to talk with artists who describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. A post-project reception introduced artists to each other. Each will also have a solo show at the church.
Now moms wear a glass beaded necklace when their babies are baptized. A three-generation family that lost its matriarch, a grandma, found comfort in a photo series that symbolizes passing on faith from one generation to the next. A painted triptych has become the congregation vision statement.
“The arts help our congregation see themselves in new ways and with new communities. Art helps people get out of the literal intellectual pattern of reading Scripture and into imagination.
“Art in our midst surprises us. It changes us, if only minutely to begin with. It’s wonderful to let it roll and bubble up, to pay attention to how a piece of art work comes into worship and matches someone’s life,” Adelman says.
Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photography by Steve Huyser-Honig
 Art honoring the 117 Vietnamese martyrs makes Southeast Asian refugees and immigrants feel at home in St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church. |
Don’t miss the bonus story on creating a culturally sensitive church building.
Jan VanKooten and her team used Encore and Sibelius music notation software to format church school students’ songs, such as these by Robyn Stegink and Kirk Groenenboom. They set some songs in four-part harmony so the choir could sing them. Contact Jan VanKooten to come and train your church in her Scripture songwriting method.
If your congregation is multicultural, Stephen Dudek advises hiring a liturgical design consultant who has cross-cultural experience and understands the main ways that culture and faith interact. St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church hired Mark Joseph Costello, a Capuchin priest from Chicago.
Read Facets articles by Katie Adelman on God’s part in creative ministries and opening ourselves to renewal.
See more photos of how Covenant Life and other churches use visual arts in worship throughout the Christian year. Check Calvin Worship Symposium programs and archives for worship arts presentations by Steve Caton, Lisa De Boer, and William Dyrness.
Read a Reformed Worship story about Steve Caton. Arts in worship was the theme for this issue of Theology, News and Notes.
Join other churches in observing National Migration Week. Glean Catholic insights into various cultural groups new to your congregation or neighborhood.
Browse related stories about digital media in worship, musical theology, and successful multicultural churches.
Feel free to print and distribute these stories at your staff, council, worship, hospitality, or education committee meeting. These questions will get members talking about the arts planning process in your church:
- What do you appreciate and find challenging about the arts planning process in your church? Discuss the type of art, how it fits worship, preacher input, breadth and depth of people who plan and lead worship arts.
- Jan VanKooten’s Scripture songwriting project was open to and worked well for all kinds of kids, not just those who see themselves as musicians. In what ways might your church be missing out on creative gifts of people who don’t put themselves forth as “artsy” or “talented”?
- What do you think of Katie Adelman’s insight that art can change and surprise us—and push us to let the Spirit work through our imaginations?
- Which voices are silent or overlooked in your church arts planning process? What first steps might you take to learn from them?
What is the best way you’ve found to help your congregation improve the arts planning process in your church? Please write to us so we can identify trends and share your great ideas. Whether you do these or any other things, we’d love to learn what works for you:
- Did you design an arts project that reached out to new segments of your church?
- If you came up with a participatory idea that helped worshipers use a new art form in worship—something that involved several senses—will you share your experience with us?
- Have you developed checklists or templates to smooth and speed your arts planning process?
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This article was first published by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, http://www.calvin.edu/worship/stories/