At Bellingham Covenant, we spend quite a bit of time creating a visually engaging worship space for our congregation. We’ve found that visual media is an unexpected language of our congregation. Unlike music, which has the ability to divide a congregation over style, visual media seems to be a unifying element for our church. For our Hope event, we wanted to create an atmosphere that would immediately draw people into the ongoing narrative in the DR Congo.
In our foyer, we built a large industrial awning over the child sponsorship area and installed peg boards in our windows with sponsorship packets and images of Congolese children hanging from them. This was a new look to our foyer, so people immediately noticed that something different was about to happen. We also created three string art projects with the words PRAY, HOPE, ACT and hung these in the foyer.
In our sanctuary, we have three projectors that are dedicated to architectural projection. What is architectural projection? Simply put, it’s using video projectors to project images and videos onto the walls of the sanctuary. It works great for us because our space has no natural light, and we have huge walls. We projected images of children on the side walls and created an altar presentation that brought visual focus to the front of the room.
All of these things became a simple backdrop for what the morning was all about…giving our congregation an opportunity to respond to the need in DR Congo.
