Arts festival launches with creative worship experience
[scrollGallery id=8]A festival Avondale hosts to celebrate and encourage the production of creative arts for ministry has launched at a youth rally in Melbourne.
The rally (October 19-20) gave participants a taste of what to expect at the third annual Manifest Creative Arts Festival, which Adventist Media Network and Avondale College of Higher Education will organise in March 2013. It began in a cafe-type setting on Friday with an art exhibition, live music and a showcase of the best shorts from the SONscreen Film Festival and from Manifest’s Hope Channel Filmmaking Competition. It continued on Saturday morning with a worship service that explored questions of tragedy, beauty and transformation and in the afternoon with workshops on creativity.
The service, presented by Master of Arts (Research) student Nathan Brown, Young Alumna of the Year Joanna Darby and friend Lidia Nowicki, featured Bible reading, drama, film, flowers, live and recorded music, hundreds of colourful paper birds and preaching. The aims: to present biblical perspectives on living faithfully, to create a memorable experience and to evoke a response.
“So much in our world and in our lives pushes us toward numbness—or hardness of heart, in biblical terms—often as a means of survival,” says Nathan, who is also book editor at Signs Publishing Company and a co-convener of Manifest. “But the faithful and creative life should be sensitive and deep and fully alive. That’s what God calls us to be and that’s what He calls us to share.”
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Victoria’s Adventist Youth Ministries Department organised the rally. “The support and enthusiasm of director Moe Ioane Stiles and her team is important,” says Brenton Stacey, public relations officer at Avondale and one of the other co-convenors. “It not only shows Manifest is growing but that others value creatives and the way they challenge us to think about our faith.”
Manifest 2013 features filmmaker Terry Benedict, producer and director of the documentary, The Conscientious Objector, and Dwain Esmond, vice-president of editorial services for the Review and Herald Publishing Association. New events include the premiere of a play written by Avondale alumna Linley Lee, a dinner and awards ceremony for Adventist communicators and the launch of a Manifest-branded book on faithful creativity.