In the Park Avenue Baptist Church sermon series called “Love Is…” we explored the biblical lessons of how to love. We wanted to look deeper at this important and pervasive concept in the Bible.
The lessons from the sermon and especially about love are so important. Art in the Image believes that art has the capacity to hold many meanings and this necessary in theological and spiritual development. So creating a collaborative project can work to illustrate important aspects of the lesson in different ways for people that comprehend and input information differently. So we designed a project to look at the different themes artistically.
As a creative project we shaped and reshaped the pervasive symbol for love – the heart- We dug deeper into the meaning of love; we broadened and deepened our symbols for love as well. At the end of this short series, just four weeks in February of 2017, we have created 4 new images for love! And what is so wonderful is that we have done it together. Each piece involved an image of hands, as we are the hands and feet of God.
Hence the title- “Reconstructing Hearts.” We made hearts into new symbols of love.
Each week for service we made a video explaining the project for that week. Here is a brief explanation of each week.
Sunday, February 5 – Pastor Henra preached about community love. The new symbol for love is hands reaching and helping each other in what looks like a handshake. We took hearts and tore them up to make the new symbol.
On Sunday, February 12 we created another “Reconstructing Hearts” communal art project. Pastor Trey preached about covenant love and we constructed more collaged hands, but this time with overlaying fabric hearts.
On Sunday, February 19 PABC heard Pastor Lanta preach the 3rd part of the “Love is…” sermon series. Our creative art piece – illustrating our broadening vocabulary for images of love was the praying hands. We wrote our prayers on heart sticky notes and formed an image of praying hands.
On Sunday, February 26 Pastor Jen preached the final sermon in the “Love Is…” series and we made our final reconstructed heart communal art piece. I received an image for the final piece from one of the especially artistic young people! She drew this image on the right and this week we filled in the heart hands with hearts – we drew with chalk!