2022 The Bride To Be. Acrylic and gold on burnt birch panel. 33x21. Bryn Gillette for L4NCY

In the summer of 2022, the leadership of the Lausanne Movement met in NYC to plan for the sep. 2024 L4 Global Congress in Seoul, Korea. I painted this as the “antihero” for the Lausanne Pillar 2 image of the glorious heavenly “Bride of Christ”. This was meant to be the sobering and contrite meditation on the broken and defiled reality of the human church, full of dogma, hypocrisy, and unwarranted self-righteousness. These two realities are held in tensions by the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ… the current broken reality of who we are (collectively) and the promised future hope that HE WILL complete redeem, perfect, and beautify us.

I took the bride figure that has haunted my work for over a decade and featured her again her among the ruins. Symbolically in a prophetic act, I physically burned the wooden panel with a blowtorch after painting the work. The ash covered sections of exposed wood weren’t painted to look that way, it’s the actual ruins captured by the camera.