Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.  The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.

James 5:16

We are placed on this earth to have an intimate relationship with the living Christ.  Our goal in life is to love and see Him holistically in every area of our lives.  An obstacle often found in believers is our idea of limiting God by refusing to see Him in places, people and things we are either not accustomed to or are uncomfortable with.  As a result, God and "religious" things become compartmentalized in our minds and souls. Come church time, we retreat to the familiar spaces of prayer, worship, teaching, etc.  We fail to search the deeper, sometimes darker parts of our soul. Yet, David's Psalms summon us to worship the Lord with our entire lives, to come before Him in honesty with broken and contrite spirits. The Psalms are packed with this raw emotion. David's prayers scream anger, doubt, fear, joy, and thankfulness.

During Artworship participants are asked to reconsider worship. They are asked to forget what they have known and think about the fundamentals of worship, of expressing love and reverent devotion to God.  What makes the God of Christianity different from the deities of other faiths is His extremely personal interest in knowing us. Our response to this should be worship which allows this personal God to search us out, to test us and to know our thoughts.  Many times we don't give ourselves this freedom or we are scared to delve into these areas and thoughts.  Artworship is a place where we can come before this Holy and Loving God.  We can express though creative means our love, devotion and the truth of who we are.

People are asked to create.  And they are not given a formula.  This can be a frightening experience for some.  For this reason, we walk people through this experience and assure them that being created in the Image of God, we all have a creative capacity within us. The hope is not an end result of beautiful paintings. The hope is that through this experience Christ will be allowed to touch what has been hidden away and the process of healing and forgiveness can begin.

The Christian journey is to be walked out in community.  Many experiences (and surprises) that take place during Artworship are planned to emphasize this fact and to show how much we need each other. God has given each of us gifts - not just for ourselves, but for the body. When we step back from the canvas, we don't see small isolated and individual paintings.  We see a corporate mural of lives woven together through worship. There is no formula for Artworship and the outcome is never predictable. We are simply "setting the table for redemption" and allowing each person his or her capacity to feast and be filled.

"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy. "Safe?  Who said anything about safe?

'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King I tell you." - C. S.

Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia