Broken Cross

Dave from Abbeyfield Community Church in Colchester, UK brings us this creation to help them explore the theme, “Broken”.

They wanted to firstly capture the truth that Jesus’ body was physically broken for us. Secondly, they wanted to create a visual metaphor that captures how we come to the cross as broken people, lost, alone, and without hope and it is only at the cross that we can be truly fixed and made whole.

The finished cross constructed out of broken everyday items however felt very industrial, so as a juxtaposition to this they wanted to place it in a setting of natural and untouched beauty, a forest. As a gentle reminder of both the garden of Gethsemane and our lost Eden. They accomplished this through doing the photo shoot in a real forest and then bringing in to the Church trees and leaves to give it a sense of nature once it was installed for holy week. They lit it externally with PAR cans and used their environmental projection to add cloud loops. For Maundy Thursday they had clouds rolling over the moon as if in the garden of Gethsemane with green and blue lighting and then on Good Friday they had thunder and rolling clouds with rain with red lighting. They used audio loops that they created from http://naturesoundsfor.me to add the sound of crickets and insects on Thursday and thunder and lightning on the Friday.

For Easter Sunday, they installed an empty grave slab and used stock loops of a forest to complete the effect.

Videos of the services are online here.