Home Moravian Comes Face to Face

Recently, my youth group at Home Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, completed an eleven-week Lenten project. We made clay faces, wrote poems and monologues, and worked on music and grew much closer as a group while exploring who we are as a creation of God. We worked with three artistic professionals: Laura Hummingbird, Nathan Freeman, and Kevin Watson. On March 28th our journey culminated with a production for our 11 am worship service. This opportunity for our youth group came at a terrific time as our youth pastor joined us last fall and this was a great chance to understand one another on a much deeper level.

The first time we met together, Laura Hummingbird, the artist, helped us make plaster molds of our faces. She demonstrated on our youth director, Rev. Carl Southerland first. Then we were paired to work together. A person would cover their partner’s whole face with Vaseline™; then apply layers of plaster over it and let it harden. I have to admit that we teased Carl a lot while they were making his mold. We also learned to trust the partner who was covering our face. For me, God helped bring my friend, Sarah Atwood, and me closer together through this fun and personal growth experience. The next Sunday, Laura gave us back the molds and we pushed clay into them. The first face was made of red clay. When we made the second face, we could use red, black, or white clay to make and decorate a face that symbolized Lent in someway meaningful to each of us. The next lesson we talked about were places to hang our faces, which had been kiln-fired, in the church.

Over a few Sundays, we started to work with Nathan Freeman, the poet and playwright. First, he asked us to write five poems relating to Lenten Scripture taken from the Daily Texts. Then we made revisions to make sure that our audience would get full meaning. At Nathan’s instruction, we named one face our Truth Face and the other our Honesty Face. We were to “interview” our “faces” about certain topics such as tests and found different responses from the two faces, because truth is telling only part of the truth, but honesty is telling the full, complete truth. We wrote two monologues, at least two pages long. Nathan took these monologues and created our 29-page script. The script was separated into sections by the Holy days of the Easter Season starting with Ash Wednesday and ending with Easter Sunday.

Rehearsals began in earnest now that we had our faces and scripts in hand. We started meeting on Wednesday nights as well as Sunday nights to practice. Kevin Watson worked with us on music and used some of our monologues as lyrics. Our musicians were Kevin Watson: lead guitar; Andrew Sorenson: guitar; Justin Bennett: bass; Laura Gamble: flute; Chris Gamble: drums; and Alex Reber and Eric Durham: piano. Other youth participants were Erica Sorenson, Jennifer Mickey, Jessica Dunn, Adam Barrow, Christine Ross, Corbett Frye, Sarah Atwood, Jonathon, and Mary Grace Beets. Frank and Julia Frye, and Cathy Barnes were our adult leaders in addition to the Rev. Carl Southerland. We tried to go through the performance at least once every time we met, but did not always succeed. Our entrances were perhaps the most important part of our performance and we practiced these very often. I admit there was a lot of grumbling among our youth because of all the repetition and loud cries of “Volume!” from Nathan, while we were in the middle of our monologues.

Finally, we came to Saturday, March 27, 2004, and we had our final rehearsal. We were all very nervous, but tried to give our personal best. Meanwhile, Kevin had taken pictures of our clay faces and put them on slides with various backgrounds. The slide projector was set up in the choir loft while we performed in front of it. At the end of our Saturday meeting, Nathan told us that we were on our own and to do our best and use our good judgment.

The next day, our youth group skipped Sunday School to set up instruments, slides, portable microphones, etc. We asked our leaders our last minute questions and got ready to start. Nathan instructed us to come “dressed in character,” in other words dressed in an outfit that represented our personality. Soon the service started and we opened with a few poems and then the opening song “Here I Am”, which was our signal to enter from our separate doors. We proceeded through with our poems, monologues, and songs. Our songs were “Here I Am,” “The Choice is Yours,” and “The Master Jeweler.” My performance error was with my portable microphone that I had clipped to my outfit. I was doing a dialogue collection with three other youth members and was squatting in the choir loft. I stood up and stepped hard on a cord that made the microphone squeak very loud. Other than that, the performance went swimmingly. We finished with a Benediction that Laura Gamble read and then “The Choice is Yours,” which is based on one of my monologues, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” We then received an enthusiastic standing ovation from the congregation. “Face to Face” was a very successful process and I am very glad to have participated in it. I can’t thank Laura, Nathan, Kevin, and Carl enough for arranging this opportunity. It was an amazing experience with some amazing people and I found out a lot more about my church friends and myself.