The Rev Roddy Hamilton describes how an idea involving art and Holy Week drew a community to church.

IT was a long time ago when I was at Greenbelt, the Christian Arts Festival, where I heard a New Zealand pastor called Mark Pierson who now lived in Australia.

He was pastor to a small community where they never asked for financial support.

Instead they commissioned a number of artists to each create an original work for Holy Week that they exhibited that week for the whole community, then sold. They lived off the proceeds.

As far as I can remember the purpose was to engage folk in the story of Holy Week visually, letting the art offer the worship of that week without sermons that were too verbose and denominational for their community.

We stole/borrowed that idea a number of years ago (without selling anything). We invited a dozen local artists, not all involved in the church, to each create a piece for one of the days in Holy Week. Each piece was set up in the church on the day their piece was exploring and left there for the rest of the week.

I say we started with 12 artists, but by the end of the week, we had over 50 involved. Other than the initial 12, this was completely unplanned. Each day we had to reprint the brochure to include the new pieces as folk, who had visited early in the week, went away and created pieces for later in the week.

All were displayed in the sanctuary and among them each service took place throughout the week. Our worship space expanded in unexpectedly emotional ways as the story grew through the hands of these artists.

We had offered a scripture passage for each day and left the artists to choose and interpret it in whatever way they wished. We had oils and watercolours, installations, pieces hanging from the gallery, statues, paper cutting, embroidery, stations big enough to sit in, video: a whole plethora of ideas we could never have imagined.

One was an invitation for each visitor to stretch a piece of raw, dyed wool over a framework and to tuck in a wee slip of paper with a verse or prayer written on in. That became the communion table on Maundy Thursday.

We found people paused and sat before some of the pieces in reflection, quiet prayer and thoughtfulness, and as the space changed each day, worship became an invitation from the artists to enter an ever-changing story with new expectations. Within this evolving story our communal worship took place.

Given we are a much more visual generation, it offered a safe and creative space for people to linger in the story, but we also found a significant number of folk who visited, and artists who offered a piece of work, were not engaged with the church. However, the story was still part of our DNA as a community that people responded with insight and imagination. We didn’t control it and in turn it stretched.

“ Our worship space expanded in unexpectedly emotional ways as the story grew through the hands of these artists.

We are organising another version later this year, perhaps around Pentecost or Harvest. These are not such well known festivals but the experience of inviting others beyond our walls to tell God’s story through their eyes invites a worship space that is democratic, raw and bigger than our traditions. ¤

Mark Pierson’s book is called The Art of Curating Worship.

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick.