An unusual Easter service

I was looking at the Relevant website and found this interesting article on an Easter service in Ohio where a man was tattooed...




Getting inked for Easter
A church service features live tattooing
By Sara Smith / april 5, 2007

Ben French
“We always want to go for that wow factor”: Pastor Feathers (left) with Berk, who will get a cross on his forearm Sunday

When you think of an Easter service, you probably don’t picture 30 parishioners gathered around, looking on as a guy named Iggy presses a tattoo gun into a fellow parishioner’s forearm. But if you’re a member of the CrossLink Watershed Church that gathers for worship in the Drexel Theater on Grandview Avenue, you’re counting on it this Sunday.

Nathan Feathers, the young pastor of this new alternachurch, wanted to add a jolt of adrenaline to his Easter service, something edgier than the church’s resident rock band.

Then it hit him: What says Christ and the resurrection more than a big black tattoo of a cross?

“We always want to go for that wow factor, especially for Easter,” Feathers said. “It’s not that we’re trying to entertain, but you have to get people to understand church doesn’t have to be uptight.”

Members of Feathers’s church and its parent congregation, CrossLink Community Church, in Grove City, try to keep Christ relevant in modern culture, he said.

And yes, he’s aware there are passages in the Bible that could be interpreted as banning tattoos, but Feathers said there are also passages, in Revelations, that describe Jesus with a tattoo on his leg that could be read as an open invitation to ink it up.

“Leviticus 19 does say something against tattoos,” Feathers said. “But at that time, tattoos were a symbol of worship of idol gods. That’s not what tattoos are for now.”

“Some things can be modified to work within the culture of the time, and we need to reach people now in 2007,” he said. “We’re just trying to speak the language of the culture, and our culture has many tattoos.”

Feathers himself has two tattoos, the co-pastor of the church has seven, and much of the congregation is inked to one degree or another. While preparing his Easter sermon on the meaning of the cross, Feathers couldn’t help but think of all the cross tattoos he’s encountered.

“That’s how we tied in Easter with the tattoo,” he said. “Most people think the church is against tattoos, but tattoos aren’t wrong.”

Once the tattoo-a-parishioner-during-service concept was born, Feathers got to work checking with the health department to make sure it was legal and then finding an artist. It was on his third call that he connected with Iggy Sweeney at Bodystain Tattoo.

“My biggest reason for doing this tattoo is their premise behind it,” Sweeney said. “I don’t consider myself a Christian, but I respect someone sitting down and putting themselves through pain for what they believe.”

Sweeney has been tattooing for 13 years, and he’s done a lot of crosses in that time. But he said this one will be particularly memorable.

“I sort of feel like I’m just a tool. The most important thing here is the tattoo itself,” he said.

Not every church would find a volunteer for an Easter morning tattooing. Feathers had to choose from among 30. After careful consideration, he chose 26-year-old Joe Berk, an armored-truck driver.

“I thought it was a really cool idea,” Berk said. “Not so much traditional, but we’re a younger church and most of us have tattoos.”

The tattoo will take about two hours to complete. Berk and Sweeney will begin at around 8:30 a.m. and finish up during the first half hour of the service with church members looking on.

“I interpret it as you lead by example. It’s not what you say but how you act,” Berk said after reciting a passage in Revelations 19 that describes writing on Jesus’s leg that reads “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.”

Berk, who already has a tattoo on his right bicep of the Chinese word for “ox,” said he originally was going to put the Celtic-style cross tattoo on his left bicep. But he’s decided to place it lower on his arm, where it will be more visible.

“I got to thinking about it and thought, ‘I’m doing this. It might be on TV. People are gonna know about it,’ and that’s when I changed my mind.”