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Church Directory
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Worship through art carries on an ancient tradition |
Pastors, congregants in Newberg are finding
alternative ways to worship |
By Laurent
Bonczijk, Newberg Graphic reporter
E-mail Laurent at
lbonczijk@eaglenewspapers.com
|
The recently opened City House
of Prayer on Blaine St. offers, among other things, the opportunity
to worship through art. Pastors in town see nothing new there,
saying it’s an ancient tradition that went dormant for a few hundred
years.
“Most alternate forms of worship take place in conjunction with
music and preaching,” said Eric Stearn, worship pastor at Grace
Baptist Church. What activities parishioners engage in besides
traditional service is varied and often driven by demographics.
“Certainly you will see a lot of the younger generation going for
the nontraditional worship.”
He recalls a Christian and Missionary Alliance conference seminar
where an artist drew on stage and video as art was created during
worship.
Ron Thomason, pastor of GodSong Community Church and president of
the Newberg Ministerial Association, said that his church has had
dance performances during regular worship time as well as artists
who would paint or draw.
In Stearn’s experience this is additional worship that people
engage in besides attending Sunday services. Stearn, who lived in
New York for several years, said that he witnessed it there but has
yet to witness it in the Northwest.
Cindy Corum is a member of Ascent, a group of women who meet every
Friday in the early afternoon to worship through dance. “Sunday
church is complementary to what we do here,” she said.
“This is where we charge up,” Becky Headrick said of the
traditional Hebrew dances her group performs.
Stearns said that the Old Testament mentions the Israelites
responding to God through dance, but admits that it has “probably
fallen out of favor in several hundred years.” All forms of worship
are part of the healthy growth of the church, he added.
“All those forms of worship are great and needed,” Thomason said.
“People in some aspect are rediscovering the importance and value of
the arts in the church”
Thomason said that God created all things for his pleasure and that
it includes all the different expressions of worship. He considers
God to be the epitome of the artist, as he created everything around
us.
Thomason describes worship as not being linked to a person or place
but to “the heart you bring to God. I think that he just loves to
see the creativity. It’s not alternative but where your heart is and
how God created you.”
He said he thinks that for many years churches only saw the bad in
dancing and the arts and not the good that could come of it in
peoples’ relationships with God.
“Worship is what we bring to God and is between you and God,” he
said. “To me it is a rediscovering of the creativity he has placed
in each and everyone of us.” |
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From
Sept. 15, 2007, Newberg Graphic
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