'Preaching to the Congregation' by Jacobs Alberts, c.1910

I was immediately attracted to this painting when I saw it shared on a Facebook group last week. It is entitled 'Preaching to the Congregation' by German artist Jacobs Alberts, dated c.1910. 

I began to reflect on my attraction: what was it about the painting that drew me to it? I share these thoughts with the important qualification that I know very little indeed about art or art history. This post, therefore, is merely an account of my reaction to the painting.

To begin with, it could - with but a few small changes - easily portray Anglican worship in these Islands and North America a century earlier, c.1810. The preacher would then have be in a gown, not surplice, for the sermon. The beautiful, quiet simplicity of the church - not least the clear glass - would also have been the norm. (The decoration on the font, of course, is a hint of the Lutheran context.) Those of us who have an attachment to Georgian and Regency Anglicanism can, therefore, see something of a reflection of this in the painting. 

There is also the painting's title: 'Preaching in the Congregation'. What immediately comes to mind is the charge given to the newly-ordained presbyter in the Prayer Book Ordinal:

Take thou authority to preach the Word of God, and to administer the holy Sacraments in the Congregation where thou shalt be lawfully appointed.

We can similarly think of Article XXIII:

It is not lawful for any man to take upon him the office of publick preaching, or ministering the Sacraments in the Congregation, before he be lawfully called, and sent to execute the same.

'Preaching in the Congregation' quietly captures something of this due order in ensuring the Word and Sacrament are ministered to the local congregation.

It portrays something of the character of the preaching ministry. There is nothing dramatic or glamorous about the scene in the painting. This is a pastor who takes to his pulpit each Lord's Day, before the same congregation, with only time bringing changes. No doubt his sermons were quite ordinary, unremarkable - but faithful. And so it should be. This is how the congregation are fed by the holy Scriptures week by week, year by year. By quiet, unglamorous, faithful preaching, shaping and sustaining a congregation in the faith, over a lifetime.

The ordinariness of the scene is also deeply attractive. It might bring to mind, for example, the churches, ministries, and congregations in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. This is what the Christian life is like. Lived out in by ordinary, unremarkable people, in ordinary, unremarkable communities. Yet it is here, to use words from the Prayer for the Clergy and People, that - unseen, in hearts and souls - "the healthful Spirit of thy grace" is at work, bestowing "the continual dew of thy blessing". 

This occurs in the midst of an uncertain world. There are hints of this in the painting. The Danish flag is visible but, as has been pointed out by others, the pastor is wearing preaching bands, not the distinctive Danish clerical ruff. It has been suggested that this might point to the painting being located in Southern Jutland, occupied by Imperial Germany from 1864, after Danish defeat in the Second Schleswig War, until 1918. We might also think of the young boy in the congregation, who would have probably lived to see the Nazi occupation of Denmark in the Second World War. Amidst the conflicts and uncertainties of "this transitory life", the painting speaks of the church faithfully ministering and witnessing, holding and proclaiming divine truth greater than earthly power.

But not, however, in a manner aloof from and unrelated to the realities of life in our earthly communities. With both of the above historical contexts in mind, the small Danish flag in the painting evokes a quiet, but deeply rooted patriotism, of which the Folkekirken was an important and inspiring part.

Finally, this painting can also be set alongside William Teulon Blandford Fletcher's 'The Sabbath Day', c.1916-17. Here is a portrayal of divine service in a Church of England parish church, with a similar quietly beautiful simplicity. Here too, Word, prayer, and Sacrament are administered, sustaining ordinary lives in divine grace and truth. And here too, we know that conflict was occurring, for the painting comes from the midst of the Great War. 

What is seen in both paintings is, I think, a sense of the sanctified ordinariness of a mainstream Protestant Christianity, with a quiet but potent spiritual and cultural attractiveness and significance. And this, perhaps, is something that the paintings might bring us to consider how to renew in our own age.