Last night I had the privilege of working with a very creative and passionate group of people at Christ the King Lutheran Church in New Brighton, MN. We collaboratively created a piece of art that recast the parable of the Good Samaritan, from Luke 10:25-37, in our context.
This all started when Pastor Deb visited our Good Friday Service where I drew the stations of the cross live while the congregation prayed through the stations. Christ the King does a Church-Wide, creative event every January, so she thought I would be a good match for them this year. I started communicating with Pastor Pete Christ back in the fall, met with the staff twice (a very creative group, BTW), and, together we came up with the following idea…
A Collaborative Art and Scripture Experience
(Check out Christ the King’s Facebook album of the event. Awesome pictures!)
Over 200 people gathered around 24 tables. Each table had a square piece of paper that looked like this…
…along with a pile of colored construction paper. They were instructed to tear the construction paper into small pieces and then paste them to the square until all the color sections were filled in.
Here are some pictures of the people working on this…
All of the generations were represented in the crowd. That was cool.
Pastor Peter and Pastor Pete presented the parable of the Good Samaritan through speaking and showing a video from YouTube. Then we posed these questions to the tables. “Who are these people today?”
Then we cut the people loose to create their mosaic panels, discuss the questions, and feed ideas to me.
Then I started drawing an image on my iPad while it was projected on the wall. Here’s shot of that.

That’s Pastor Pete on the left. I’m drawing on my iPad on the right. The image at the top is the projection of what I’m drawing.
People came up and fed me ideas.
After about 30 minutes, the image was complete. Here’s what we came up with to show the wounded, the avoiders, the helpers, and the barriers that stand between us.

This is the image directly from my iPad that was projected on the wall.
The question was then posed, “How do we overcome these barriers?”
Each table was asked to bring their squares to Pastor Pete and he attached them to the wall…
to create this…

These are the panels taped to the gym wall. This is a mosaic of torn up pieces of construction paper.
We are the hands of God in the world today.
I took a picture of it on my iPad and then brought it into the mural for the final reveal of our collaborative art piece…

I took a photo of the mosaic and superimposed it over the image. Jesus overcomes the barriers.
There was also music and singing sprinkled throughout the evening to round out the artistic event.
It was a true privilege to be able to brainstorm and implement this idea. Thanks be to God!
Also, thanks to my beautiful wife, Lona, for taking these pictures!