Summer at Grace: Proposal of Final Project by Jane

Summer at Grace: An Invitation to Visit
Grace Episcopal Church, Brooklyn Heights

What makes a church? Is it the building, the stained glass windows, the magnificent organ and choir? Perhaps it is the programs offered, the ministries to parishioners and members of the wider community? Or perhaps it is the people. But what happens in the wilting heat and damp of summer, the season of Pentecost in the liturgical calendar. Is the church still the church when the choir, the education programs, most of the clergy and many of the parishioners flee the city for vacation.

Summer at Grace is pared down to bare bones essentials. But our community and our spirit remain vital and alive. Services are held, liturgy happens, prayers are offered up, and the needy get fed.

We are all needy in different ways and we are all at times seekers. What is it about Grace in the summer that attracts us seekers, calls us to leave our air-conditioned comfort and gather in fellowship on Sunday mornings.

The purpose of “Summer at Grace” is to provide a virtual visual experience of a Sunday morning visit to Grace Church Brooklyn Heights. The audience will be those who are looking for a church home or even just a place to go the one or two Sundays they are in town. Tools will be still photographs taken with my Olympus digital camera presented through Digital Photo story. Rhetorical choices will be the visual movement through still photographs taken on a typical summer Sunday at Grace from the moment a visitor steps up to the main entrance through the courtyard and enters the open doors of Grace. The presentation will pan through photographs of the interior, the gleaming brass, the Tiffany stained glass windows, vaulted ceilings, stunning, gigantic organ pipes and the altar before focusing on the people: in procession, seated, singing, praying -- the service in progress. It will conclude with the Coffee Hour, the after the service gathering and fellowship, people laughing and talking, clergy with collars still firmly in place but robes shed and shirt sleeves rolled up. Children running, babies being bounced. Final scene will be the last lingerers, someone needing a hug, and then a long shot of those solid red/brown sandstone blocks building to steepled heights. Music (preferably something played on our organ and sung by our choir) will float over the sequence, with an occasional voice over as I open with a “Welcome to Grace Church”, describe some of the history and the remarkable facts about our building, and end with a “go in peace.”