Modern Ark of the Covenant

Our interactive, intergenerational worship service spends 2 weeks with each module, and the second week is an arts/crafts/creative response of some sort.  I often don't volunteer to lead a module unless I'm sure of the lesson, sure that I can come up with a project for week 2.  But I volunteered for our latest module without knowing anything about it.

We've been working our way through Exodus, and we're up to the Ark of the Covenant.  We've talked about the incident with the golden calf.  We talked about how the Ark is different than the calf.  We talked about the decorations on the outside of the Ark and what went inside.

For our craft project, I brought in shoe boxes and magazines.  We cut out pictures that reminded us of God, pictures that reminded us of God's goodness and love. 

We also used words:

We started gluing them to boxes, but ran out of time.  My vision was to have a beautifully decorated box filled with words and images of what reminds us of God's love.

But the process was fun and interesting, and that's what's important.  It was also interesting to look at magazine to see how much space was devoted to which subjects.  I expected no mention of spirituality, so I was happily surprised to see 10-20% of each commercial magazine that pointed our attention that way.

For more on the possibilities of collage, see this post.