Building the Walls of Jerusalem-One Brick At A Time

This post is part of Creative Chaos over on Carlos Whitakers site, RAGAMUFFINSOUL. Com where every Thursday creative ideas are shared, stolen and unashamedley passed off as ones own individual work to a waiting public (hey--imitation is flattery).

This idea wasn't original to me. When I was at Willow Creek in 2003 they had just launched the campaign for their new worship center. At the Prevailing Church conference (no longer held--but it has morphed into the Ancient Future Conference I think) they had a room full of these styrofoam bricks.

Walls were built around the old auditorium as each weekend for 3 or 4 weeks each attendee received a brick (faux) to pray over and ultimately put in place to represent the lives that

would be attending services in the new center. Hint--FILE AWAY ALL GOOD IDEAS--You'll use them again.

So, when we decided to do a series last fall on NEHEMIAH, we wanted to give each of our attendees a brick--but not a real one. I searched high and low for just the right styrofoam. I didn't want to have to cut it, score it or break it. I found the right place--a styrofoam place out of Arizona. You can visit their site here . We ordered the 2X8X16 and cut them in half for an almost perfect brick size (2X8X9).

I had 1000 bricks to paint and knew that I couldn't do it by myself. I learned last year at the Creative Conference at Daybreak Church in Grand Rapids to use small groups to help put these ideas in place. I enlisted the help of a young adult sunday school class and bought them pizza (and put the Monday Night Football game on the big projector). We used leftover paints from our paint closet (browns, red, black, cream). Setting up three stations ( a base coat, an accent coat and them a finishing coat), we got after it and completed the task in about 3 hours. Each person added their own style to painting-which in the ended made the bricks look realistic. You'll see that in the pictures above.

The bricks were all secured to the base using floral pins (u shaped). Our elders were down front helping put them in place ( a visual significance to the moment).

We had people come up and place these bricks at the end of the series in November, and allowed them the following week to pick up one to take home with them. I still go into homes and offices here in our town and see these "faux" bricks displayed on shelves as reminders to our folks about the HAND ME ANOTHER BRICK series that we did.

What creative things have you done in worship that have included the congregation? I'm always interested to learn.