Salons
We love to raise people up in their gifts
The creative stuff that you love to do is where you hang out with Jesus and where you connect with others! So let’s use those gifts!
We ask:
Who are we? What do we love to do? What are our gifts? - Who has God brought together? What are the art forms or forms of creativity that you already love and are doing? How has God already met you in your place of pain?
What is the language of the community around us? What do they love to do? Where is their place of pain? Where are they grieving?
Where is the overlap? Is there any overlap? Where can we build a bridge?
These are a sample of salons we empowered others to do. They always connected their creativity to the death-to-life pattern of becoming a Christian and also of growing in Jesus’ grace. Creativity carries the Gospel message!
We held a salon about “the art of fermentation” because a congregant (and ordinand) loved to brew beer and saw the Gospel of Jesus’ death-and-resurrection in the fermentation process. We held it in a t-shirt printing factory. It was an industrial, cool space. Other salons included
“Artists confronting evil,” a look at the horror film (because it spoke to our yearning for resurrection – we were scared to death yet lived) that one was hosted in a Tiki bar oddly enough. We used this again in a secular neighborhood in Charleston with good fruit.
Johannes Brahms, her favorite composer, and how the arresting nature of his music, which sometimes sounds quite ugly, was a way of acknowledging the suffering people were going through. This was in another congregant’s tattoo shop, where people were still actively getting tattoos while we hosted the salon. One customer heard the talk and shared how much she loved Brahms...an instant connection was made for her and our congregant who shared.
Our congregant hosted this salon in his own tattoo parlor. He talked about tattoos as a secular rite of passage connected to the Christian rite of passage baptism...where we celebrate a passage from death to life in Jesus.
In Charleston, there was a huge bee-keeping community. We hosted a house party where a congregant invited his neighbors and told how he cared for bees, harvested honey, and saw the Lord in his hobby. He was so moved that guardian bees will so quickly sacrifice their lives to save the queen. He saw Jesus through those little brave bees, hardwired for self-sacrifice to save another.
