Alabama artists help Baptist churches display their faith

As a developing artist, Jinger Glasgow of Birmingham tried just about every medium available. Then, at age 40, she started working with stained glass and all the pieces of her personality, her art and her faith finally fell in place. She’d discovered her calling.
   
“I think the Lord had a plan,” said Glasgow, who found fulfillment in stained glass because she could encompass not only artistry but also craft and faith. Glasgow and her husband, Sonny, own and operate Jinger’s Stained Glass Originals, which is often commissioned to create stained glass windows for area churches. “It was meant to be,” she said.
Glasgow, who belongs to Faith Free Methodist Church of Pleasant Grove but often works with Southern Baptist churches such as First Baptist Church, Hoover, and Edgewater Baptist Church, Birmingham, grew up “adoring this beautiful stained glass church window.”  Although she attended church regularly, it wasn’t until she was 29 that she “was born again,” Glasgow said. Now she sings with the choir and performs solos as well as plays the violin and piano at church. “The artistic side of me is well connected.”
   
In stained glass she found yet another place to create art and express her faith.
   
Although designing stained glass windows for churches comprises only about 30 percent of her business, that fraction is enough to inspire her. “When we go into a church, it’s so refreshing,” she said.
   
Although some craftsmen use familiar drawings of Christ, Glasgow creates her own after talking with the pastor and the committee working on the project, doing biblical research and praying over the design. “I feel very firmly that I don’t want to do extreme abstract church windows,” she said. “I want an image that will add or enhance the message, not one that will detract from it.” Therefore, she believes each window should not only reflect light but the particular philosophy and mission of the church.
   
Designing church windows can be time consuming. Glasgow spent almost a year doing 17 windows for one church, from design to installation, something the Glasgows personally oversee. The process of creating stained glass is labor intensive in itself (see related story), but design demands most of Glasgow’s time. Her favorite window is a baptistry she designed for First Baptist Church, Hoover. It depicts the baptism of Jesus and features sliding glass doors so that when someone is baptized, he or she is standing under the dove that came down from heaven. She elaborates its theme as angels of the Ark of the Covenant ministering to Jesus, who is the fulfillment of that covenant.
   
Glasgow — who took drafting in high school — is conscientious about craftsmanship as well as artistry, noting proudly that none of her and her husband’s windows have broken. The only exception was from tornado damage — one at Edgewater Baptist Church, Birmingham. And her faith compels her to make the same investment in each church as members put in their church windows. She tithes on profits from new stained glass windows back to the churches that ordered them.
   
Glasgow also has found that stained glass became a window for ministry. Dubbed as the Glasgow’s “ministry built from scrap,” she started using leftover glass to make crosses that she and her husband distributed to the church committees.
   
“We always gave two crosses,” she said. “One to keep, and one to give away. The idea was that every time someone looked at theirs, they would be reminded of the other person and keep him in their thoughts and prayers.”
   
The Glasgows also gave them to the sick and homebound, to visiting missionaries as witnessing tools and “to anybody we felt needed encouragement.”
   
When demand for their crosses grew, they started selling them in order to fund a ministry for needy families at Christmas.
   
“Now all the proceeds from the cross sales go into this ministry, and we have been able to help more and more families each year since,” she said. Aanraku Stained Glass recently published a book by the Glasgows, “Share Crosses,” containing original cross designs for hobbyists to use to make their own crosses. “It’s just a great way to share your faith,” she said.
   
And stained glass helps Glasgow personally share her faith. She routinely shows visitors her small gallery featuring crosses and explains to them the meanings of the church stained glass windows she is working on.
   
Although not everyone who creates stained glass windows for churches may be a Christian, faith adds a dimension or depth that would otherwise be missing, according to Glasgow.
   
“I do real designs with real messages.”