New Hope Baptist Church (Seattle, WA)

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NEW HOPE BAPTIST CHURCH PROJECT

Fact Sheet

When the national media focused on forty-one churches having been burned due to race prejudice, I wrote to the National Council on Churches in Washington, D.C. offering my time and services to repair or restore stained glass destroyed by fire.

I received an immediate response and my contact was Betsey Miller, coordinator of the Church Rebuilding Project, for The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. She immediately connected me to Rev. Robert L. Jeffrey, Pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Seattle, which began an enormous rebuild and an eighteen-month correspondence on my part with one visit to the leveled site before construction.

Beginning with a contest with the children of the congregation, names of twelve (12) African American and international heroes were suggested along with eight (8) liturgical themes. Each child had to do an extensive report or biography on each hero and the best of the lot were chosen from this contest. Additionally, a six-foot diameter panel depicting a dove of peace was requested as well, netting a total of twenty-one panels for this commission.

When I received the names and list of liturgical themes plus the idea of a dove, I began the task of making design sense out of all these themes and tying them all together. Cohesion was paramount and the twenty panels being restricted to a two-foot square space was of serious concern. A further restriction was the fact they would be two stories off the ground therefore detail from any given distance would be lost. Simplicity was the way to go. Immediately I knew that the face had to predominate and that something in the background either indicated by lead line or glass design had to inform the viewer as to who this person was. For example, behind Harriet Tubman’s head is a geographical map of the free states slaves escaped to in the “Underground Railroad.”

Conversely, I revolted at the idea of a huge bird filling a six foot circle so I conceived a picture reminiscent of Tiffany that was heaven-like with a path to the kingdom of God strewn with flowers, representing each of the heroes and finishing with the dove of peace overhead. On the right or left lapel of each hero, I consigned to each person a genus of flower in ink or lead line, which comes to full technicolor on the main circle panel. The overall design concept came to me in this fashion: Each hero, in his or her own way, showed the path to peace, which leads to the kingdom of God.

I decided to organize the heroes chronologically earliest deceased towards the front of the sanctuary (or nearer to God) and the liturgical themes as they chronologically appeared in the Bible and balanced between the heroes (see Design Plan). A further consideration was balancing gender as well on either side of the sanctuary.