Sermon Series Artwork • Park Church • May 2019
Every summer at Park Church since 2012, 10–12 weeks are spent in the Psalms. They’ve gone Psalm-by-Psalm, week-by-week, and this summer (2020) will see week 100 of the series, that is, Psalm 100.
In all 100 weeks of this series, there have been only three artwork projects that have represented Christ in the Psalms through what has been two years’ worth of Sundays. This has been an intentional rhythm: coming back each year to the same artwork and the same rhythm, seeing the same mini-liturgy for Ordinary Time. When Park decided to retire the beautiful, simple Meagan Tidwell calligraphy that represented 2014–2018, it felt like a really big deal. We knew that the new artwork could be displayed for as many as 50 Sundays.
I’m no small fan of Jacob Boyles. You may know him from the diverse and ongoing artwork initiatives of Elevation Worship, but he’s left his mark as far as Denver, where the immortal Steuben’s restaurant even has a logo of his. In particular, his album artwork for Hallelujah, Here Below is a mind-blowing monoline piece that pulls from several places in Scripture and challenges the eyes with pleasing riddles. It’s a dreamboat of an art piece.
We reached out to Jacob for Christ in the Psalms, and directing this project alongside his work was truly a career highlight for us:
The Process
We started in a conference room in Denver with a gargantuan list of images from the Psalms that represent or illustrate Jesus. After deliberation, several failed attempts at categorization, and no small amount of reading, we gave Jacob a list of 15 images, from which to choose 10 to illustrate for the main piece (see above).
From there, Jacob also illustrated two large banners, one for Psalm 1, and another for Psalm 150. These bookend banners hang along the sides of the front of the sanctuary, framing the stage all summer. They illustrate both the grand arc of the Psalms and the grand arc of Scripture itself:
