Ice Ice Stagey

Jessica Garcia from Red Mountain Community Church in Mesa, AZ brings us these ice blocks. 

For their Advent season, they did an ice-inspired stage design. In order to cultivate a sense of longing, waiting, and anticipation, they featured eight 16″X24″ blocks of ice on the walls onstage and watched them slowly drip throughout each service. Inside the blocks, they froze different items symbolizing the coming Christ (olive branches = the prince of peace, palm branches = the coming king, branches with fruit = the shoot from the stump of Jesse).

Instead of using their large center screen for images like they usually do, they cast shadows of branches on it from behind so they’d be peaking up over the onstage walls. They used photography of ice as their lyric backgrounds and they also hung some photos of ice on their side walls.

For their Christmas Eve services, they replaced the ice blocks with hanging mason jars with candles to represent that the “ice” of time has melted and Christ, the light of the world has finally come. To freeze the ice blocks, they just filled plastic Wal-Mart storage bins (16″X24″) with 5 gallons of water each. They took about 7 or 8 hours to fully melt, so they lasted fine throughout their two Sunday morning services each week.

The large onstage wall was wood with wooden pegs and the two smaller ones were painted dry wall. Around the bottom of all the onstage walls they made a little “moat” by laying some heavy plastic sheets on the ground surrounded by a small wooden barrier to collect all the water from the melting ice.