She Paints!

It's been almost a year now since a whole new phase of women's ministry began at our church. I was invited to be part of the planning team at the beginning, and then when the pastor over the ministry left last summer, I was asked to fill in as the full time leader of the ministry at large.

I have loved this chance to serve.

There are several ministry capacities that make my heart leap, and this is one of them. It's a huge task, and I take it extremely seriously, but I still love it. In fact, I miss being able to devote the time to it that I did before I had a full time job. Last week I had two days when I worked full office days and then spent the whole evening on our ministry, and those were two very long days!

Our ministry is called She, and one of the outlets of it is a craft/creative ministry named She Creates. Last fall, at our final leadership meeting of 2019, our team decided we wanted to kick off 2020 by hosting a canvas painting party open to all the women/girls of the church. We wanted to make it a fun night of fellowship where we provided snacks and supplies, and the ladies could just come and enjoy a low-stress evening. We also hoped this would give the women of the church a chance to get to know the leadership team better - and give us a chance to get to know some ladies we may not have met!

So last Monday night, after our leadership team meeting, we had a trial run as a team, painting our project and learning the fine points of this particular painting. Our teacher for the night (one of our team members) did a fantastic job, and even though we are clearly not all overly skilled in painting, I was proud of all of us for making a unique masterpiece! Here were the leadership team paintings at the end of Monday night:

Friday evening, we covered tables in our church gym, arranged nametags on canvases, distributed paint and brushes, set up two tables of snacks, and prepared to meet the women who signed up to hang out with us! We had about 50 women sign up (really great for this ministry!) and when it was all said and done, I think we had 40 show up.

Ryan even came by the church after work to help us get coffee going and make sure we had enough snacks (and didn't need an emergency grocery run) before we got started!

My favorite part of the entire night was watching these ladies have fun together. We had older women, middle aged women, young women, and girls, all mixed in that gym together. We had grandmas painting with granddaughters. Aunts painting with nieces. Moms painting with daughters. We had women I've never seen at a church extracurricular event sitting in the crowd, trying something new. We had people who had never painted before giving it a shot. Longtime friends caught up on conversations and brand new friendships formed right beside them.

I. Loved. It.

The entire night, I wove among the tables, watching, listening, and documenting, and it was so encouraging! I knew some of the ladies didn't think their paintings were masterpieces worthy of display, but even the non-artists said they had great fun and would do a night like this again without hesitation.

Here's a sampling of their work - just one of the group pictures:

After the night was done, the team worked hard to clean up, and Ryan came back to help! (He's such an amazing ministry support. I appreciate him and love him for how he shows love to me!)

I was so happy to see the women having such a great time, and I can't wait to see what other fun projects come about in the remainder of the year!