Ivyland Arts meets for weekly arts classes on Tuesdays at 1:30. We also host a drop-in “Third Thursdays” Open Studio on the Third Thursday of every month at 7pm that is free and open to the public. ICA invites local artists to work with our community to envision a brighter, more peaceful future, and curates art exhibits featuring local artists that are addressing questions of loneliness, community, and the need for God’s Kingdom.

About Ivyland Arts
Ivyland Presbyterian Church is a small, community church located in the heart of Ivyland Borough. With just over 110 members, our community sees itself as a close-knit family of believers. At the same time we also recognize that our community is constantly changing, and that if the church is to witness authentically to Jesus Christ, we must always be prepared to respond to the challenges and changes that our community is facing outside our doors. We are propelled out into our community by our mission, which is to “love God by loving all of God’s creation.”

Two years ago, we felt called to respond to what we saw as an epidemic of heroin abuse in our community. Our church boasts a strong community of artists and people in recovery, and our vision was to use the arts as a way to bring healing to a broken population while also building stronger community with the recovery community that is in our midst.

Today, we have found that the arts appeal to far more people than we could have initially imagined. People are coming to us seeking healing, but they aren’t always struggling with addiction. Many of those we serve struggle with loneliness, bullying, and the lack of community that can accompany suburban life. And our church has responded to the creative arts as a new lens through which to see the world—the arts have brought our focus in new ways to peacemaking and justice, to addiction and recovery, and to the issues of homelessness and economic insecurity that attend addiction.

We believe that God is calling us to make the case for the arts as sacred space, not just to our community, but to our worshipping community. We want to build stronger connections with our worshipping community so that they can understand and celebrate the ministry of the arts and the potential for healing that they offer. We want to engage with our local community and create intergenerational relationships between youth, retirees (from Ann’s Choice Retirement community and the church), and young adults. We believe that there is an epidemic of loneliness, of disconnection, of vulnerability and of fear right in our own back yard. Some of it is directly related to poverty and addiction, but all of it is worthy of healing.