Color and light.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

The gentlest of biblical narratives came to light in vivid reds, blues and greens Friday at Grace Lutheran Church.

Stained-glass panels depicting Jesus with children were installed in soaring foyer windows, the final part of a remodel to the church's south side at the corner of 18th Avenue and Patterson Street.

Colorado artist Phillip Watkins spent the day placing the panels that took him months to create. From the inside, the glass brightened the otherwise meager light of a cloudy winter day. But in the evening, the lighted windows will shine for those on the outside, too, said Barbara Ronne, a church member who served on the building committee.

"We put in the windows for our members but also for the community," she said. "We meant for it to be welcoming."

The church commissioned Watkins to do the windows after Ronne saw his work at the Denver church her parents attend.

A skilled artist carrying on a family tradition, Watkins is the eighth generation to create stained-glass windows. His great-grandfather Clarence emigrated from London to the United States and by 1868 had made his way to Denver, said Jane Watkins, Phillip's wife and assistant.

Her husband possesses painstaking skills and is particularly adept at selecting color. With 40,000 square feet of glass in 200 different hues in his workshop, he will often take days to select just the right piece, she said.

As he worked methodically on Friday with volunteers at the church, brilliant reds, emerald greens, startling blues and coppery browns suffused the room.

Watkins created his first stained-glass window for a church when he was 12 and working for his father, his wife said. After obtaining an art degree and apprenticing for several years, he became a co-owner of the studio in 1979 and its outright owner in 1985.

While he has taken occasional apprentices, he still does most of the work himself, employing traditional methods handed down in his family through generations, she said.

The $39,000 project involved a year's worth of design and five months of cutting and glazing, she said.

The four images show Jesus with a child on his lap, a young shepherd with a lamb to one side and a family to the other. The theme was inspired by New Testament verses in St. Mark and by the close connections among church members, Ronne said. The church is also home to a private Christian school for children through the eighth grade.

"We have enough members here that it's an active congregation, but few enough that we're family," she said.

The origins of stained glass are lost to history, but such windows date back at least to the 10th century and are frequently associated with churches and cathedrals.

To Ronne, the windows are more than mere art.

"It's a beautiful form of worship. It's an act of worship," she said.