| By
John M. De Marco
FT. PIERCE — A crucial element of each year’s
Florida Annual Conference Event is worship, but for many it can become
lost in the stream of reports, proclamations and official business
that spans the massive gathering of United Methodists. For Martha
Cross, worship is the highlight of the week and the experience she
longs to share with others.
Cross, a three-time Florida Annual Conference
delegate, is a life-long artist who teaches high school students and
owns a screen printing business with her husband, Wayne. She is also
the program director at First United Methodist Church of Ft. Pierce.
For the past two years she has lugged her sketchpad with her to the
conference event. The result has been a unique illustration of her
worship experiences, temporarily displayed in the church’s
fellowship hall for others to appreciate.
“I love listening, and I love language and the
words that people use to express their faith and share the gospel,”
Cross told the “Review.” “I am a visually oriented person, so I
usually take notes because I need to have something written down. My
sketches are usually a combination of illustrations and note taking.”
Cross said she regularly uses her Sunday worship
bulletin to sketch and jot down ideas in order to remind herself of
what she experienced during worship.
Cross was busy sketching during the 2002 Florida
Annual Conference Event’s Service of Reconciliation, which featured
Bishop Jonathon D. Keaton of the East Ohio Area of the United
Methodist Church. As she drew the bishop she jotted in large letters
the phrase, “Joy comes in the morning,” which Keaton reiterated
several times during his message. The sketch also includes some key
words regarding the history of Methodism in relation to American
slavery.
“I’ve been a United Methodist my whole life,
and I’ve never been confronted with…the things that were brought
before me,” she said. “He [Keaton] would rise to such an emotional
level, almost a bewilderment, then he would repeat, ‘But joy comes
in the morning.’ ”
When Cross began drawing the seven-person panel
that led delegates in a discussion on church transformation, she said
she didn’t have any preconceived ideas about what to draw. When she
pulled the drawings out more than a month later to talk about them,
she was struck by how much the panel looks like Leonardo DaVinci’s
painting of the Last Supper.
“I was really taken,” she said. “That
whole discussion and the notes that are around there—that’s very
telling. It was a discussion of where we’ll go from here. And Jesus
[in the Last Supper] was telling his disciples he would no longer be
with them and where he goes from there depends largely on them.”
Sometimes, Cross would draw what was projected
on the large video screen in the main auditorium at The Lakeland
Center. She sketched the video display of Dr. Howard Snyder and a
lamb; Snyder spoke during his evening message of Jesus as the
unblemished lamb who was without sin.
One of her favorite images was a slide projected
during the presentation on the Bishop Cornelius L. and Dorothye
Henderson Secondary School in Muxungue, Mozambique, Africa. The image
is of the Rev. David Beers standing behind a hand-made wooden altar
under a cashew tree in Africa.
“Here we were worshipping in this huge
building,” Cross said. “And this hand-made altar was just as
powerful where it was as the lavish altar we made.”
Cross earned a bachelor’s degree in visual
arts at The University of South Florida. She said she did not use her
artistic gifts in the church a great deal, however, until the
congregation’s centennial celebration 10 years ago when each
ministry group designed its own processional banner. Cross designed
the choir’s banner and has made several more since then.
“It’s a way I feel I can express what the
Word of God is saying to me,” Cross said. “The church really has
given me permission to explore my way of expressing my faith. I think
it’s brought—not just for me, I hope—another dimension for
people who learn differently. There are lots of different ways of
expressing the things we feel and know.” |
