For over a year, I’ve been working with a church in Pennsylvania to develop icons to represent the different areas of their worship and work. Distilling the vision of an entire congregation into a set of simple symbols proved no easy task, and we went through many rounds of revisions. These four are my personal favorites.

My hope is that the new icons will be accessible, flexible and stand the test of time — but moreover, I hope that by going through this process, the leaders of the church have found a common language for the intangible aspects of ministry that are often difficult to put into words.