Church member paints paper audience so the pastor doesn’t have to preach to an empty room while streaming his sermon Simon A. Thalmann Follow Mar 24 · 5 min read

Northeastern Baptist Church member Joyce Zuiderveen created paper audience members for her church sanctuary so the pastor wouldn’t have to preach to an empty room.

When the Rev. Nathan Pierpont took to the stage to minister to a home-bound congregation Sunday, he expected empty pews.

Instead, thanks to the artistic talents of one church member, Pierpont saw more than two dozen happy faces of parishioners smiling back at him.

“I walked into the worship center early Sunday morning, and before I could turn on the lights I sensed something new in a room I was very accustomed to after 18 years,” Pierpont said. “Instantly, it hit me: That’s what she was up to!”

Pierpont is Pastor of Worship and Congregational Care at Northeastern Baptist Church, located at 6536 East G Ave. in Kalamazoo, and the she is church member Joyce Zuiderveen, who on Saturday afternoon installed 27 watercolor portraits she created of herself and fellow church members in the pews.

Zuiderveen had asked Pierpont to let her know when he was done for the day on Saturday so they wouldn’t be at the church at the same time, and the installation was a complete surprise when Pierpont and Lead Pastor Mark Holeman arrived early Sunday. Right away they began to recognize the faces he said, as members of the congregation “sitting” in their normal spots.

Some of Joyce Zuiderveen’s paper portraits, installed in the sanctuary at her church.

“At first I wondered how I was going to concentrate on the service with those images in the pews right in front of me,” Pierpont said. “Then I sat down at the piano and began to play, and in the next moment I realized those little cutouts of the congregation were actually helping. It really brought a lot of joy to a very strange situation.”

As public spaces in Michigan are increasingly forced to limit services or close in a state-mandated measure to prevent the further spread of coronavirus, churches have been no exception. On Sunday, March 15, in-person services at Northeastern were canceled and streamed online with only limited attendance. Before the March 22 service, as the governor increasingly limited the recommended size of public gatherings, it was decided to temporarily offer future services online-only via video.

“It needed to be done”

Zuiderveen, 56, of Otsego, has been attending Northeastern since 2003. She and her husband, Larry, became members about a year later. She currently plays flute on the church’s worship team, and was among the few to hear the sermon delivered onsite two Sundays ago.

“It was a very odd feeling to be the only ones in the audience,” Zuiderveen said. “As a team we are used to ministering to the congregation. Having them gone was hard, but we got through it.”

The 27 portraits took Zuiderman a total of 13 hours to create; she only stopped when she ran out of paper.

The idea for the art project came to her later in the week, after seeing a post on Facebook showing an empty room with cutouts of characters like Yoda and Disney’s Elsa in the seats; the Rev. Holeman’s wife Jann had also “put a bug in my ear,” Zuiderveen said, about creating some kind of artwork so the pastor wouldn’t have to preach to an empty room.

She started the project on Thursday and finished Friday evening, spending about 13 hours total and stopping only “because I ran out of paper,” she said.

The subjects were chosen from the church directory for both personal and practical reasons. They include Jann; Pierpont’s parents and his son Nate; Zuiderveen and her husband; and a missionary couple currently in Colorado, where Holeman’s first church is located. Others were selected because their photos in the directory were simply larger and easier to use as a reference, Zuiderveen said.

Zuiderveen, a homemaker, teaches an occasional art workshop and also gives private lessons, but she doesn’t usually focus on people in her work.

“I don’t normally draw people,” she said. “But this was something that I felt needed to be done to help our pastor.”

“A blessing”

Zuiderveen said she plans to add to the project each week for the duration of the congregation’s separation, along with some possible additions that she’s keeping up her sleeve for now. She’s pleased with the response to the project so far, she said.

Dozens of people have reacted to, shared and commented on pictures and videos featuring the illustrations on Facebook, many praising the likenesses of the illustrations to their respective real-life counterparts.

“It accomplished what I hoped it would,” Zuiderveen said. “It was a blessing not only to the pastors but also to our church family.”

Zuiderveen installed the portraits Saturday afternoon so they would be a surprise to the pastors on Sunday.

Indeed, Pierpont said the cutouts helped the pastors to relax at an unusual time that’s found them singing and preaching to a remote congregation that thanks to technology is viewing services from around the country and as far away as South Africa. The impact of Zuiderveen’s art goes much deeper than the art itself, he said.

“This artwork has a godly woman behind it who has dedicated her ability to be used by the Spirit of God to bless others,” Pierpont said. “The thoughtful use of her time and talents was coupled with her loyalty to us as pastors and her love for God. That’s what I see when I look at the cut-out congregation by Joyce Zuiderveen.”

The next Northeastern Baptist Church service livestream will begin at 9:30 a.m. Sunday, March 29. For more information, including archived audio and video of previous sermons, visit the church website at https://nbckz.com.

Simon A. Thalmann is a writer and photographer based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He can be reached at simon.a.thalmann@gmail.com.