The New Testament envisions the fully realized global Church as a spotless Bride prepared for her returning Bridegroom, Christ. Standing on the New Jerusalem, this Bride is subtly depicted with her planetary scale feet standing on the literal holy land, holding the flame of the gospel in her hand, while this orange fiery light is carried by diverse believers into every corner of the world. As God’s Word does not return void, the Bride’s gown subsumes untold sparkling blue and white figures of every tribe, tongue, and nation streaming in to comprise her fully realized expression. May our passion to see the “whole Church” fully healed, unified, purified, and restored to her identity as the spotless Bride of Christ compel us to carry the whole gospel to the whole world with humility tempered zeal.
Here is Pillar 2 being handed off at the 2019 to go from the Philippines to its new host in Africa.
More than any other of the four pillars of Lausanne, the central image of the Bride of Christ has haunted dozens of my paintings for the last decade. It began just before I was introduced to the movement when I was finishing my Haiti “Beyond The Ruins” Series of 12 images as a prophetic prayer over the nation of Haiti. One of the culminating images from that set was the embodied Bride, both as the nation of Haiti personified, but also as a glimpse of the global Church unified. She was the fulfillment summation of the entire series with fractals of equilateral triangles containing repeated glimpses of the other 11 paintings in the series.
It was actually in painting that work that my multi-year assignment to paint for an entire nation (who would have the audacity to do something that large?!?), that had always felt outlandishly massive in scope in my heart… suddenly felt too small. I didn’t want to just paint for Haiti any longer, I wanted to paint for the world. I didn’t want to paint just for the living saints… but for those who had already lived and died, and for the countless generations still to be born. The Bride of Christ is ALL of us, together across time and space, unified and presented to our groom Jesus. “I want to paint THAT image!” was the compulsion as I finished my Haiti series, and low and behold, within a year or so, the Lausanne Movement (that I didn’t even know existed) reached out and asked me to paint these images. Sometimes God gives us the oak tree in the form of an acorn.
“Lausanne Pillar 2 Prequel: The Bride To Be”. 32x20” acrylic and gold on birch panel. Burned. June 2022.
In the summer of 2022, the leaders of the Lausanne Movement from each region on earth and representing each interest group assembled in NYC to begin planning for the Lausanne 4 global conference in Seoul, Korea 2024. I attended and painted live throughout the sessions of that gathering, and arrived having just painted a broken version of the Bride, and then physically and metaphorically “burned” the surface around the edges as well as entirely through the birch surface in several places. Standing in the watery ruins of her filth and unfaithfulness, the German 23 karat flakes of her golden beauty were surrounded by her charred reality.
In 2020 I was commissioned to repaint the Lausanne Pillar 2 for a ministry that was an outreach to the female muslim community. What began as a “simple repainting”, soon morphed into a much more involved project, and was now more than twice as large as the original 32x20” at 48x30”. This same “Bride” now took on the visual language of the near east and the visual tradition of tessellations: the mathematical, infinitely repeated patterns that are intended to convey divine beauty and eternal order. Click here to read the full article about “Beloved”.