“Let all creation praise,” a phrase inspired by Psalm 147, will be repeated often at Rainbow. That’s because one of our current worship projects is experimenting with how to impart more meaning to outdoor spaces. A guiding question will be: How might we see and experience outdoor spaces as their own sanctuaries of sorts, calling us into greater contemplation, and stronger community? We are grateful for the $15,000 Vital Worship grant* we recently received from Calvin Institute of Worship to help us toward that end.
Perhaps this helps explain why we are having an outdoor-oriented Sunday school option this month, and why we held a Remembrance Garden Gathering on Sunday, June 5.
These efforts are part of a larger vision to experience outdoor spaces in different, hopefully more worshipful ways over the next year. By the way, here is an aerial photo of our Rainbow green spaces (the stars mark property owned by the church).
What follows is a slideshow from the June 5 outdoor photography activity. People were encouraged to pay deeper attention to the sights, sounds, people, and structures around Whitmore Park. We were encouraged to look up, down, sideways, and upside down. Some people looked for beauty in unexpected places and others looked for visual themes or patterns. Others looked for certain shapes, the play of light and shadow, or various colors of the Rainbow. As one of our photo participants Sara Mwagura said, “I decided to search for circles from (a higher) vantage point… I honestly think I could have stayed up there all day, I was having so much fun with it. And yes, just felt challenged to pay deeper attention to the nature around.”
over and around the rainbow 