inprint/presbytery of the twin cities area/ fall 2013

Print In Fall 2013Fall 2013 a publication of the presbytery of the twin cities area

You Gotta

Have Art Art and the

Christian Faith

PRESBYTERY BUDGET CHALLENGES

ANDREW-RIVERSIDE COMES HOME

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Words from the Editor

Print In

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Print

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“What is the future of the Presbytery of the Twin Cities area?”

Minnesota is extremely diverse. 1 in

5 Minnesotans today is a person of

color. And the diversity of our foreign

-born populations are now coming

from Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

The percent of persons of color in

Minnesota has grown approximately

7% from 10% to 17%. (source: Min-

nesota State Demographers Office).

The percent of persons of color in the

Presbytery has grown by approxi-

mately 1% from 6% to 7%. (source:

PTCA).

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The Offering will be collected in most churches on October 6.

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YOU GOTTA HAVE

ART

FOCUS

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Worshipping God Through

the Arts “Presbyterians believe that painting, sculp-ture and other art forms are gifts of God, who inspires people with the ability to create artistic designs and to teach these skills. We read in the Bible of artisans who were called by God (see Exodus 31), and we know it still happens today. Throughout the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) faithful artist-members gath-er together at conferences and retreats, cele-brating God’s gifts of creativity and exploring together with heart and hands and voices what it means to be made in the image of a creating God. “ -P.Lynn Miller, Presbyterians Today, April 2006.

The connection between

faith and the arts has always been conten-tious, at least in the Western Church. In some periods in the history of the church, artists were welcomed and produced works that resonate today. In other periods though, people saw art as taking away from worshipping God. In-deed, some Christians saw the arts as sin-ners, making idol images to worship in-stead of God. We don’t live in age where art is banned in churches. But Christians in general don’t always see how the arts can express the kyrgma or proclamation of the gospel. How does a play or painting or piece of music tells others about the good news in Christ? In this issue of InPrint, we will explore the connection between faith and art and we will answer how the artist is just as im-portant in proclaiming Christ as the preacher. Join us as we talk to musicians, painters, actors, playwrights and others in our Pres-bytery who serve God through pianos, or-gans, paintbrushes and pencils.

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You’ve seen her art before. Maybe it was at your local church or at Lu-ther Seminary. You might have seen her art in a PC(USA) publication. Kirsten Malcolm Berry has created paintings that combine the visual with the written word. A member of Hope Presbyterian in Richfield, Kirsten did an email interview with InPrint.

How did you get started? In the late eighties, my husband and I attended a concert at the Basili-ca of St. Mary in Minneapolis. Of all the Basilica’s ornamentation, I was most taken with the Alpha and Omega, carved in stone on either side of the chancel. I had recently been incorporating indigenous pat-terns into my artwork. After the concert, I used these kinds of shapes to create a painting of the Alpha and Omega letters. My college Greek classes then came into play in a second painting as I included the full Greek text of one of the Alpha and Omega verses in Revela-tion. I was stopped short seeing the Greek in a visual context and began searching for other Biblical symbols to paint in this way. I dis-covered three or four. Soon after, rotating art exhibits began at my church (Hope/Richfield) and I was asked if I could create ten of these paintings for a show. I remember wondering if I could find that many symbols. Somehow I managed and finished with “I Am the Vine”. I thought surely now I had exhausted the supply. To my surprise, I then continued to come across Biblical images to paint – and other exhibition opportunities started coming my way. Since that Basilica concert, by God’s grace, I have painted 250+ New Testament images. Your parents were missionaries and you were born abroad. How did that background influence your art? How does it still do so today? Yes, my parents were in the Philippines as Presbyterian missionaries, called “fraternal workers” by the denomination in those days. I was

actually born in the US but was three years old when we moved there. Except for periodic “furloughs”, the Philippines was our home for fifteen years. That influ-ence is evident in my use of patterns, prevalent on Filipino baskets and woven mats – and on the batiks particular to the area where we lived in the southern part of the country. In your Artist’s statement, you said that you paint specific passages from the Bible in order to make the abstract tangible. Is art in its many forms a way to contextualize faith, to make it un-derstandable in a way that reason or words might fail? Yes, certain art forms can express faith in ways words alone cannot. But words too have the capacity to be transcendent: Je-sus’ parables are elegant forms of verbal art. Conversely, much visual art is not transcendent – especially when drearily didactic or marked by gratuitous hope-lessness. But the latent power in any art form is its potential to point us to beauty. Beauty’s significance lies in its link to the wholeness of New Creation – or the new heaven and earth of Revelation 21. Some may counter that beauty is superfluous when many around us lack even basic ne-cessities. Indeed, when a woman anoint-ed Jesus with costly perfume, his disciples also wondered: “Why this waste? … This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.” But Jesus defended her: “She has done a beautiful thing to me.” Matt. 26:8-10, NIV (“A beautiful thing” has also been prosai-cally translated “a good service” or “good deed”, but the Greek word has an aesthet-ic connotation, as much as it has an ethi-cal one, making “beautiful thing” accurate for this context.) Jesus was indeed acutely sensitive to the suffering around him. At the same time, his response to the woman says that the kind of act she performed for him is pivotal to the purposes of his king-dom. In fact, could it not be that such en-counters with beauty are those very mo-ments when New Creation breaks into our present world?

...evil is not the final word. The Art of Kirsten Malcolm Berry, where

word and vision come together to cre-ate an inspiring message.

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Have you ever done any art focusing on the Old Tes-tament?

No, because I haven’t studied the Hebrew of the Old Testament. Also, there are already gifted Jewish artists who are incorporating Hebrew into their work, but I have not found much art doing the same with the Greek of the New Testament. So I am thankful for a niche creating my particular combination of New Testa-ment text and image. Your art always has a Biblical passage in Greek. Did you take any courses in Greek? If so, what have you learned in reading Scripture in its original lan-guage? Yes, I took four classes of Koine Greek in college, but I am not a Greek scholar. For me, the value of seeing beloved and familiar passages in a language and script so unlike my own is in keeping me humbly mindful that the Bible did not come out of my particular people-group. Indeed, Scripture’s Greek and Hebrew origins – and subsequent world-wide translations, pull us into a much bigger story: that of God’s claim on “every tribe and language”. In an interview you did, you talked about how the words and images found in the Bible tend to wash over us and that we need something to snap us back to attention. How do you think your art does this? It is a great gift to have grown up in the church and to have heard and read the Scriptures since childhood. But the flip side of such a background is that the vibran-cy of Scripture can erode over time. But when we en-counter a familiar passage portrayed in a new way in song, image or dramatic reading, etc., it is as if we are

seeing or hearing for the first time. This is my hope for my art – that fresh visual contexts will bring well-known texts back into focus. Historically, Protestantism and especially, the Re-formed Tradition was not always keen on the use of visual art. What do you think has brought about that change? How does your art reflect your Re-formed background? The Reformation’s emphasis on the spoken and written word was a necessary corrective. That tradition of word-centeredness is reflected in my art – each painting in-corporates a specific New Testament verse, written in Greek. But the Reformation also tore us from of a lega-cy of visual faith-symbols. Searching behind the Refor-mation, I have found other mentors – among them the creators of monastic illustrated manuscripts and Byzan-tine mosaics, for example. What advice would you give a young artist that wants to fuse their faith and their art? A well-intentioned desire to authentically engage the diffuculties of life sometimes fosters contemporary art that is anywhere from bleak to darkly ironic to absur-dist. What Christian artists can offer in this landscape is work informed by our conviction that evil is not the final word. Can our art somehow exhibit this good news in its very rendering of color, shape and form?

What Christian artists can offer in this landscape is work informed by our conviction that evil is not the final word. Can our art somehow exhibit this good news in its very ren-dering of color, shape and form?

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From Pulpit….to Stage Presbyterian Pastor Kristine Holmgren has gone from writing sermons to writing plays.

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Provoking the Gospel

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Lydia is Still at Work

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A Year With “Up With People”

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Forgiveness of Our Debts

Forgiveness on the Small Screen

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“Glory to God!

The new Presbyterian Church (USA) Hymnal arrives in your pews this fall.

One church musician talks about the first new hymnal since 1990.

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Hymnal FAQs

To order or for more information, please go to the new hymnal web-

site: presbyterterianhymnal.org.

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In:Volve-Missional Stories

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NEWSLETTER TITLE • Spring/Fall 20XX

Praying Twice

InPrint asked several church musicians in the PTCA to respond to the

following question:

How does music help proclaim the

Gospel?

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What does it mean

to be created in the

image of a creating

God?

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NEWSLETTER TITLE • Spring/Fall 20XX

PTCA Pix

1. At May Stated Meeting: Ruling Elder and Moderator Barbara Lutter con-gratulates Teaching Elder Betty Raitt for five years of perfect Presbytery Meet-ing attendance. 2. Also during the meeting, PCUSA Mission Worker Kurt Ess-linger speaks to the Presbytery about mission, the Young Adult Volunteer pro-

gram and his up coming move with his family to South Korea. 3. Teaching

Elder Paul Moore participates in Ice Cream eating contest. 4. At the May Stated Meeting, Ruling Elder Barbara Van Loenen looks on while Ruling Elder Barbara Lutter speaks to the Presbytery. 5. Participants converse at Wired

1

2

3

6

4

5

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“Once we were no people, now

we are God’s people.” An update from PTCA Teaching Elder Josh Heikkila on his work with West African

Presbyterians.

MISSION

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Living Water in

Ghana

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Dismantling the Prison

Pipeline

Kwanzaa Presbyterian in Minneapolis launches a new program to help

Middle School children in Minnesota’s Largest City and aims to end the

state’s Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline.

By Anthony Jermaine Ross Allam

MISSION

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NEWSLETTER TITLE • Spring/Fall 20XX

In their 2012 biennial review on

African-American boys in educa-

tion, the Schott Foundation for

Public Education reports that in

Minnesota only 65% of African-

American males and 59% of Lati-

no males leave high school with

regular diplomas in four years. The

rate for White students in the

same period stands at 89%.

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Perspectives on the 2014 PTCA Budget As the PTCA plans its budget for 2014, news spread about the impending

budget deficit that the Presbytery faces. InPrint shares two perspectives

The State of the Presbytery’s Finances

PERSPECTIVES

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NEWSLETTER TITLE • Spring/Fall 20XX

Faith the size of a mustard seed--the Presbytery budget deficit

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After a decade, a church returns home

Andrew-Riverside Presbyterian Church has returned to Marcy-Holmes

in a luxury apartment complex.

CONGREGATIONAL SPOTLIGHT

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Mission offerings from congregations and individuals

go towards supporting New Church Developments,

the training of future pastors, offering aid to those in

need after a disaster through Presbyterian Disaster

Assistance and several other important functions of

the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Give your tax-deductible donation today!

www.presbyterytwincities.org/support-ptca-mission/

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Around the presbytery

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Transitions

In:Form-News and Resources 5-Year Ordination Anniversaries

Kansas City, MO

To register go to: synodma.org/oasis/

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." Mat-thew 11:28

OASIS is an annual conference held in Kansas City, offering high-quality work-shops and speakers and the promotion of sabbath time among its participants.

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September Presbytery Meeting Highlights

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Calendar

Connect w/PTCA

Become a GA Commissioner!

June 14-21, 2014

Learn more: www.presbyterytwincities.org

In the Resource Center DVDs Books

Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area 122 W. Franklin Ave. Suite 508 Minneapolis, MN 55404