07/23/2026
This Month’s Featured Artist: Jonathan Green
Every month, we focus on a different artist, scholar, or author as part of our church’s commitment to deepen the understanding of our faith community. This month, we are focusing on South Carolina-born artist Jonathan Green, whose work preserves and celebrates the sacred memory of Gullah life.
Green’s painting, Daughters of the South, is featured on the front cover of this week’s church bulletin, while Summer Reflections appears inside.
At a time when diversity, equity, and inclusion are under attack and Black history is being threatened, distorted, and erased, our response must be more than disgust. We must study. We must remember. We must teach. We must preserve. We must resist.
Raised near the Sea Islands, Green learned through his grandmother that culture is not decoration. It is survival. It is instruction. It is inheritance.
Through water, color, stillness, family, memory, and grace, Green carries us into the beauty of Black Southern life. His figures do not beg to be seen. They stand, move, gather, work, worship, and endure with the dignity of a people who made beauty out of burden and community out of struggle.
Pentecost is about freedom, even weeks after the fire first fell. The Spirit does not leave us at the altar or trap us in one holy moment. The Spirit sends us into ordinary days with extraordinary courage, giving language, memory, and holy boldness to those whom the world has tried to silence and erase.
America’s freedom story remains unfinished. Black people have been forced to build, bless, defend, and redeem a country that has too often denied our full humanity. Yet we are still here, rooted and rising.
As a church grounded in liberation theology, we believe the Gospel confronts every power that denies abundant life. Jonathan Green teaches us that beauty can resist, memory can preach, culture can carry a people, and a Spirit-filled community can still rise.