Card Cross

Brad Hillier from Bay Life Church in Florida brings us this prayer request cross.

For Easter 2014 they constructed a giant cross and covered it in prayer request cards. Their theme was ‘White Flag’ and their prayer requests symbolized the surrender of their issues to God. The cross was then covered with the thousands of personal ‘White Flags’ – the prayer cards and made the piece extremely personal and powerful.

The cross had a 2×4 steel stud interior structure that included a number of pieces of ¾” plywood for strength. The steel studs were lightweight but were very strong when put together properly. The cross dimensions were approximately 22’ tall, 12’ wide, the beams are 24” square. Once the structure was in place, they covered it with 2” polystyrene sheeting, again very lightweight, and they painted it white. Once it dried, they stapled thousands of prayer cards to every square inch of the piece.

To get it into its final position on stage, they bought a winch and bolted it to a beam in the ceiling. With the winch’s high-strength cable they hoisted it into position, safety cabled it to the beam and left the winch locked at the necessary height to hold it in place.

The four backdrops that they used behind the cross were painted with 3 different colors of gray handprints. They wanted the entire set to feel personal and for people to associate it with an element of another set that they’ve used for a different passion week event.

Finally, they placed nails, a crown of thorns and a whip on three pedestals on the thrust stage to support discussion points in the sermon. The pedestals were made out of Coroplast with a carefully folded fabric runner to tastefully present each item.