Published in the South Carolina Lutheran magazine
A military standoff took place on the outskirts of
Charleston in late March, although neither the nearby Naval Weapons Station nor
the adjacent Air Force Base was involved. A contingent of Roman soldiers –
well, two, from the local youth group – brandished swords, barring entrance to
a makeshift tomb that had been fashioned from a church sanctuary.
The professionally designed set is part of the
efforts at St. Timothy Lutheran Church in Goose Creek to make the Word
three-dimensional for the people in the community. "I'm always looking at
ministry in the context of how to reach people and make it exciting and really
celebrate what's going on," says the Rev. Stephen Johnson, pastor of St.
Timothy. "And it seemed that we needed something to transition from
tenebrae to lilies and lights."
Transitioning between Good Friday and Easter took
the form of a reinactment of the visit to the tomb, one of Pr. Johnson's
brainstorms. "This idea formed in my head one day: Instead of having a
sunrise service, why don't we build a set, make the doorway to the church look
like a tomb entrance and put Roman guards in front?"
According to Cathy Almquist, who helped design and
build the set, the tomb consists of 3/8" plywood, 200' of chicken wire,
four gallons of paint, newspaper, muslin fabric, wallpaper paste, duct tape and
hinges. Creating the set the first time took "forever and a day," she
says, but setup now takes about four hours. Following the service, the set is
taken down and stored in a space donated by a local storage facility.
In the three years since Pr. Johnson proposed the
idea, attendance at that service has grown from 25-30 the first year to 50-60
the second year to more than 130 this year. Besides the tomb reinactment, St.
Timothy holds three other worship services on Easter, one of them the evening
Pathways service, a "basics" gathering for those new to liturgical
worship.
"We're looking at creative ways of doing the
Word here," says Pr. Johnson. "It's contextual evangelism. You have
to catch people's attention before they'll hear what you have to say. What
we're doing now is getting their attention."
The reinactment caught Almquist's attention even
before she designed the set. "Every Easter I hear the same thing: imagine
what it must have been like, picture yourself there. Now, with this
reinactment, we don't have to imagine. We can see it."
Pr. Johnson attributes part of the success of St.
Timothy's evangelism efforts to the good fortune of living in an area that is
"church-friendly." In this area, he says, the people generally still
look to the church for leadership and for life's answers. "In this part of
the country, church has more of a potential to have an active role in the life
of the community in terms of being relevant in people's lives."
Part of St. Timothy's evangelism efforts included
the engagement of Marketing Director Diane Crawford to handle public relations
matters, including articles in the local paper. "We don't have a lot of
money for print advertising," explains Pr. Johnson, "but writeups in
the local paper help get the word out about what we're doing." Even
compensation for Crawford is handled creatively. Part of her fee is traded for
daycare for her children at St. Timothy's Child Care Center.
Pr. Johnson admits the concept of marketing for a
church has historically had a bad connotation, one that he works to overcome.
"When people hear the term 'marketing' they think it's a business term and
shouldn't be used in conjunction with the church," he says. "But
marketing is nothing more than effectively presenting your message, and of all
the messages out there, we feel this is the most important one to get out. We
don't have to become the world to learn from it and to utilize what's
out there. The commercial world is far more adept at getting a message out, and
we would do well to learn from that."