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Mystery mural

5 min read
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Pastor Jay Freudenberg talks about the unique chancel in Broad Street Baptist Church. The chancel was painted in 1952 to look like the Jordan River.

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The mural that stretches across the front of the church depicts the place where two of the Gospels say Jesus was baptized.

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Parts of the mural were painted on textured plaster, giving it a three-dimensional look.

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The work is signed “Fullerton,” but not much is known about the artist.

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Stones and glass were placed around the baptistery, where a trickle of water flows when a spigot is turned.

Most people who worship at Broad Street Baptist Church in Washington have never made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but each Sunday they have a view of an artist’s conception of the Jordan River, the setting named in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark as the place where Jesus was baptized.

“I love it,” said Charles Mellars, 92, who was baptized into the congregation long before the mural was painted. “I saw it in progress. We still could see from week to week how it advanced.”

Rhonda Winters, 51, who was, along with Mellars, attending a recent Bible study at Broad Street Baptist, said she enjoys looking at the scene because “it’s peaceful,” but she acknowledged that the mural, which depicts the Jordan River from Mount Hermon as it makes its way to the Sea of Galilee, sometimes distracts her from the Sunday sermon.

“I’ve been coming here quite a while, and I enjoy it,” added Ellen Cape, 82.

Broad Street Baptist Church traces its roots to 1899, when First Baptist Church of Washington established the West End Mission Bible School in a house at Baird Avenue and Ewing Street. In 1902, the mission moved a few blocks to the congregation’s present location at Broad Street and McCarrell Avenue. Fifty years later, an artist by the name of Fullerton created a mural around the chancel baptistery, a deep pool in which a person being baptized is immersed.

An Internet search for information about an artist by that name revealed only a meager bit of background from two people posting on an ancestry.com message board. One also called the muralist “Fullington,” saying he painted between 1940 and 1960 at Akron Baptist Temple, one of the largest Baptist congregations in the United States, and at Canton Baptist Temple, and that he died in 1963. A reply noted that John Alfred Fullerton came to Jacksonville, Fla., after falling on hard times. He painted a mural on a baptistery there in exchange for room and board in a previously unoccupied house owned by the church, the Auditorium of Victory Baptist Church. He stored all of his painting supplies in the back of his station wagon.

“It was not long after he left Jacksonville he was hit by a car crossing the street in Vero Beach, Fla.,” according to the post.

Although most of the Jordan River scene at Broad Street Baptist Church is painted on plaster, there are dimensional elements.

“None of the other churches have this,” said Pastor Jay Freudenberg, spiritual leader of the 66-member congregation, as he pointed out the features of the scene that one might not notice at first glance.

Fist-sized, jewel-like chunks sparkle along the rim of the baptistery, reflecting the industrial heritage of Washington. The chunks are what is known as “cullet,” a product of the glassmaking industry. These scraps of broken, waste glass can be remelted, but factories sometimes dumped them, and collectors consider them a find. Integrated into the scene are white milk glass, red, clear and green glass, and multicolored vitreous layers resembling agate. Embedded in a rough sand and pebble concrete mix, they shimmer when a stream of water runs over them from a well-hidden spigot. The water is designed to appear to be flowing from the painting of the Jordan riverbank directly behind it.

The member of the clergy who is performing the baptism, which is not a sacrament in the Baptist Church but an “ordinance,” and the baptismal candidate or candidates enter the baptistery from behind a screen of metal mesh that is decorated with a network of bas-relief branches and leaves.

“We look on baptism as the public profession of faith. It’s not what saves you, it’s what’s here in the heart,” Freudenberg said, pointing to his chest. In his church, 7 or 8 years old is about the age of the youngest baptismal candidate.

Although the Gospel of Luke mentions the baptism of Jesus and includes the appearance of a dove and a the words of a heavenly voice identifying Jesus as the Son, it does not give a location of Jesus’ baptism. The Gospel of John does not mention this event at all. Christians celebrate Easter as the resurrection of Jesus, not his baptism, but there are connections.

The third chapter of the Gospel of John reports a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, a Pharisee, or Jewish religious leader, in the Sanhedrin, a judicial and legislative council that met inside the Temple in Jerusalem.

Nicodemus, in the first of three encounters included in John’s Gospel, questioned Jesus about his teachings and actions. In some translations of the Bible, Jesus uses the phrases, “born again” and “born of the Spirit,” and is quoted in John 3:16, one of the most famous Bible passages – sometimes called “the Gospel in a nutshell” – as saying, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

After the discussion between Jesus and Nicodemus, the Gospel relates that “Jesus and his disciples went into the land of Judea; there he remained with them and baptized.”

Freudenberg, a licensed, certified lay minister for the past 10 years, also discussed the symbolism of baptism as related to Easter. “Going under the water is death to old life,” he said, “just as Jesus was in the grave.”

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