Deciding to inquire about custom stained glass windows for your church is a momentous occasion.
Few things are as unifying to a congregation than anticipating the completion of this major project.
I have been blessed to have completed or contributed to seven churches across America. Knowing that parishioners will see these windows during their worship helps me work through God.
Stained glass windows in your place of worship create the inspiration and feeling of God’s light shining on your congregation. The choices of designs and selection of colors is a chance for those interested in the process to form a Stained Glass Committee. From there, we take several steps in the design process to ensure you will get exactly the windows that will fulfill your need for light, content, colors and the ‘feel’ you want to come into your church.
Funding your windows: It is easier than you would expect to find funding for your windows. People get excited when they see the poster size full color design in the lobby. Seeing the first window to go up is very energizing, and after that the excitement is contagious.
Your Stained Glass Window Committee can sell the windows to the parishioners individually as memorials, celebrations, commendations for service or any reason. Groups of people (altar guild, choir, missionary society, etc…) can go together to pay for one window. Gifting a window to a retiring pastor or someone well loved is popular.
Or, the entire congregation could pay for the project in group activities, bake sales, tag sales, and pancake breakfasts. One by one, your windows will be created and installed, which fuels the momentum and brings the congregation together.
I get paid when the window is installed, so if the next window in your project is unfunded, I can just wait until the money is available to begin again.
For more information please feel free to call me or email me: 360-748-3644 or mmanholt @ yahoo.com.
The Highland Ave Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, asked me to design twelve tall slender windows with a central theme of bible stories or verses. Some of these windows had scrolls with verse hand painted. These windows were such a tremendous success that they later asked me to do a large mural behind their baptismal font with lights behind the glass.
Windows from Dayspring Baptist Church
The soft pastels in this window in the Borst Park Pioneer Church are over 100 years old, donated to me by old churches.
My first church was the Fern Prairie United Methodist Church in Camas, Washington. This small church, built in 1902, was uplifted with two sidelights by the front door.
This window is a memorial in Pleasant Valley Community Baptist Church in Gresham, Oregon, to four parishioners who passed away in an accident. Their favorite place to camp was trillium Lake on Mt. Hood, so they commissioned me to make a window of that view. A restoration of that church’s windows is described in Historic Restorations.
This window at the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Chehalis, Washington, is a memorial window from Dr. Ken Burden to his wife, Clarita, for her 40 years of playing the church organ.
