A Creative Approach to Worship

The smoky stench assaults the senses first. Then the raucous rock music.

A parade of silver balls hanging from the ceiling leads visitors past the penthouse room and down a stairwell decorated with rum bottles. Purple backlights give everything an ultraviolet glow. The full-length bar dominates the scene.

Welcome to church.

Saturday nights, the main floor of this downtown L.A. nightclub is filled with drunken, pawing men and women dancing and grinding the night away. Sunday nights, the club-goers are replaced by hip twenty- and thirty-somethings who call their place of worship Urban Mosaic.

While other Christian churches have struggled to reach members of Generation X, Urban Mosaic has swelled to almost 200 strong on Sunday evenings in just a year. It has benefited from strategic placement (the nightclub) and an emphasis on the expression of faith through the creative arts.

Services typically integrate frenetic MTV-style music videos, dramas written by Hollywood screenwriters, and artwork from professional painters and sculptors.

Urban Mosaic is officially Southern Baptist, falling squarely in the tradition of conservative, evangelical Christianity. Its mission statement (“We want to live by faith, be known by love, and be a voice of hope”) echoes countless other churches.

Yet its style has given it arguably the highest concentration of painters, designers, screenwriters, actors, directors and producers of any Southern California church.

Dozens of so-called “seeker-sensitive” mega-churches have drawn national acclaim for crafting informal, contemporary services and eschewing theologically heavy sermons for practical primers on daily life. But Mosaic has blazed its own path by focusing on the relationship between spirituality and creativity.

Senior Pastor Erwin McManus, whose hard-hitting theological messages would not be out of place in more fire-and-brimstone churches, says the Bible is replete with references to God as the creator of all things and the instiller of creative gifts and talents. That means the church, “being connected to the creator God, ought to become the most creative entity on Earth,” he said. “We believe that glorifies God and expresses who he is.”

That is why Urban Mosaic owns $25,000 in video production equipment, has its own art studio, showcases a “praise band” that tours the country, recently added a dance team and offers a Bible study group in which members respond to the Scriptures by painting, writing plays or composing poetry.

“We’re presenting the Gospel in a way that’s culturally familiar,” said Natalie Chaidez, 31, a church member and screenwriter.

Urban Mosaic is a creation of a church called simply Mosaic--originally the Church on Brady--which has been on the Eastside for nearly 50 years. Sunday morning services are held at a larger facility at East Los Angeles College. When pastors elected to establish Urban Mosaic as a Sunday evening service a year ago to broaden the church’s reach, Club Soho at Boylston and 3rd streets seemed a logical place.

Fashion designer Beatrix Histand, 25, a graduate of the Otis College of Art and Design, was asked to oversee “ambience” at the new service--everything from mood lighting to music to smells.

At a recent service in which McManus preached on the symbolism of clay in the Christian life, worshipers were greeted as they walked into the club by two artists molding a man’s face in clay. Scattered throughout the club were photographs of clay on the human body. Another artist had produced landscape photographs, as the clay sermon was part of a series on creation. Finally, members were handed a piece of clay to mold and ply--as God molds and plies humans.

Last year, Chaidez was among a group of writers and actors from the church who staged a six-week serialized drama that took the audience on a soul-searching journey through the lives of five characters who met at the nightclub.

In the play’s opening scene, the audience, through a video feed, observed a portrayal of a young woman committing suicide in the nightclub’s bathroom. From there, the characters went on to explore their mortality and the possibility for God. Yet, true to life, most of the play’s characters did not choose Christ, Chaidez said. The one who did eventually announced he was gay.

McManus says the church’s mission is to produce radical disciples for Christ. “If people are coming here to be entertained, they’re going to be shocked. It’s for people who are serious about finding truth.”

On a recent evening in Mosaic’s art studio, next to its Eastside church, three artists were hard at work on a 15-by-15-foot mural that hangs from the ceiling at Urban Mosaic every week. The artists alternately painted and meditated.

“God gave me the talent, so I serve him with it,” said Olivia Draper, 18, as she dabbed milky clouds against a deep blue sky onto the canvas.

The mural, in 16 pieces, will ultimately appear as a swirling fingerprint--the fingerprint of God.

“Throughout all of scriptures, God creates,’ said another artist, Ronald Lopez. “He is the magnificent artist and the best creator of all.”