Scrapbooking enables women to pass along their values

By Rachel Stallard

Special to the Baptist Standard

LONGVIEW—Jodie Hilburn found a distinctive way to tell her husband she was expecting their third child—through a scrapbook project for his office. Carol Weiss is preparing for her family’s first holiday season without her father this year, after borrowing her mother’s Christmas album. Wendy Jones found a hobby on which she knew her family would not mind her spending time and money.
All three women are proud to call scrapbooking—or cropping—an art form. And many more women consider it a ministry of Christian encouragement and outreach.

Mobberly Baptist Church in Longview recently held the first of three “Scrapbook and Craft Extravaganza” nights it has planned for the year. It allowed women to get away from the busyness of their home life, pull out their pictures and create for a couple of hours. But Lesa Floyd, women’s ministry coordinator at the church, saw it as another way for Mobberly to lead women to a life-changing relationship with Jesus Christ.
These kind of events “provide the opportunity for Christian women to get together, fellowship and encourage one another to grow in their relationship with Christ,” Floyd said. “It also gives them the opportunity to invite their unchurched friends who enjoy scrapbooking or other crafts, those who might not ever come to a worship service or Bible study and introduce them to other Christian women.”

Hilburn emphasized that theme during a devotional on “faithbooking” during the event at Mobberly. She explained faithbooking allows a scrapbook creator to document her faith, pass on family values to her children and testify to the praiseworthy deeds of God.
Hilburn also calls faith booking “an act of obedience,” citing Joel 1:3.
“The Bible tells us to ‘tell it to our children, and let our children tell it to their children, and their children to the next generation,’” Hilburn quoted.

Christians who incorporate their faith into scrapbooking can serve as the family historian of faith, said Sandra Joseph, author of Scrapbooking Your Spiritual Journey and The Women’s Ministry Guide to Scrapbooking. She also is co-founder of Reminders of Faith, a Christian-based scrapbooking group.
Joseph said her calling is to inspire women to share their story.
“It really doesn’t matter if the books are beautiful,” she said, adding that the embellishments sometimes get in the way of the message. “It matters if they’re real.”
These “real” books may be humanly flawed, but they serve as an encouragement, Weiss agreed. After recently retiring as director of accounting for a Longview hospital, Weiss is eager to revisit her mother’s hobby, and she sees Mobberly’s meetings as “a good way to get back into it again.”

Taking on her mother’s book is “a way to preserve memories for everybody in the family to enjoy,” she said. “In times when a relative dies, it’s good to have the albums out and around when the family gathers. It helps ease things.”
Jones also had a mother who documented events photographically. However, Jones took on scrapbooking as a hobby as an act of posterity.
“Our mother took pictures of special events, and they ended up in a drawer in a folder,” she acknowledged.
Jones has gathered all the pictures of herself from birth to age 17 and plans to make a book one day. But she also has grander plans.
“I’m doing this so we will all have memories to look through,” she said concerning her husband and two children. “I feel like I’m accomplishing something worthwhile— for myself and for my family.”
Molly Norwood has made a home business out of scrapbooking by becoming a consultant with Close to My Heart, a stamping organization. But even with all of her training and materials, the mother of three boys has learned resourcefulness and stewardship in the face of what some may consider an expensive hobby.
“I keep lids, scraps of paper, clips, everything I can find,” she said. “I am always asking, ‘How can I alter this for scrapbooking?’”

She recently created a photo album out of a breath-mints tin.
Norwood also has found a fellowship of moms by joining Internet swaps, one where other mothers recently created alphabet pages for boys. Through this and her consultant group, she has bonded with other croppers who do not hesitate to share life’s problems through e-mail.
“We are not all Baptists, but we are definitely like-minded,” Norwood said. “It’s really like a sisterhood.”
And it’s a sisterhood Joseph said she foresaw the day she felt called to help women through scrapbooking.
“My desire was always to see small groups of women meeting around a photo,” Joseph said. “I see this as a time for sharing.
“As women, we can become very isolated in our life. We think everybody else has a perfect life, and we’re the only ones who are struggling. When we meet like this, we can see what God is really doing—in the bad times, as well as the good.”

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