Last year I created a painting that I called "Dying Church". Three months in the making, it is the most time-consuming piece of visual art that I have made. I meant to share it here with all of you a long time ago, but life gets busy, and to be honest I was a bit nervous about sharing it. "Dying Church" is meant to be thought-provoking and challenging - not a feel-good piece of art. And that's a bit intimidating! But I also think it is important to raise difficult questions, because that is a part of how we learn and grow. So with that preamble out of the way, I'd love to tell you more about my painting!
"Dying Church" was created as a multi-staged painting, with each stage accompanied by a short poem. To see all the stages and read the accompanying poetry, you can visit my website: leanewinger.com.
I created this painting as I wrestled with the question - Can a church die? How does that happen? And why would God let that happen?
This is the most evident in the walls of the church in the painting. They are literally crumbling and falling down, but no one seems to be noticing or doing anything about it.
The stained-glass windows tell us a little bit about this church. The righthand window symbolizes money, and the window beside it represents safety and security. While neither of these things are inherently bad, they become very problematic when they are idols being worshipped in the church. The centre window has itself been broken. Once, it represented social justice, but a social justice that obscured Christ, and neglected the centrality of what he did on the cross. It is a stark reminder that even good and important things can become idols that turn our hearts away from the One True God.
The accompanying poem ends in a very dark place:
dust rises
choking out the light
lost and empty, staring
into nothing
It reflects that hopelessness that I feel when I see just how broken and apathetic the church can be. But even in this ending, there is a glimmer of hope; a hope that can be seen if we return to the beginning of the poem:
out of nothing
everything
brilliant light
a voice
Because, you see, God can work with nothing. He's done it before. Even if we fail, and all our efforts and good intentions crumble away, that is not the end for God. He can do far more with our nothingness than we could ever imagine. Christ came so that we may have life, and sometimes before we can truly accept that we need to realize how dead we are, how helpless we are without him.
The theme of death and rebirth is found in the second stage of the painting - Nebula. Both the graveyard of dying stars, and the nursery of new stars, Nebulae are hauntingly beautiful, and a reminder that we do not need to fear death, because we know the maker of new beginnings.
Christ's sacrifice reaches even us. No matter how much we have failed, or how much we or our churches are falling apart. That is why we still have hope, because our hope is not in ourselves. Our hope is in our Creator God, who can make something out of our nothingness. Our hope is in Christ our Saviour, who died to give us life.
As a complete work, "Dying Church" is a sobering call for the people of God to wake up, to put away our idols, and to reach out to the hurting and disillusioned world that we have left outside our crumbling walls. It is a call to not turn our backs on the saving work of Christ, but to find our identity and hope in the one who gave himself for us and who can make us new.
