Vintage Faith Church

Karena and I were in the Santa Cruz area for a couple days so we stopped by Vintage Faith Church for a Sunday night service. The church is home base for pastor and author Dan Kimball who has written such books as "They Like Jesus But Not The Church" and "The Emerging Church". When we pulled up to the church, it reminded me a lot of First Pres Visalia (older traditional brick building). We had about 20 minutes to kill before the 7pm service so we walked into their new coffee, art and music lounge called "The Abbey". They had refurbished an old room in the church and made it into a pretty cool looking coffee house. There were church members and community neighbors hanging out, listening to music and talking with each other. After exploring the campus for a few minutes we made our way into the sanctuary. The inside was similar to the outside and looked like an old traditional church with stained glass windows. The only difference was the 2 video screens hung on both walls. As with some other churches I have visited on my sabbatical, it started out pretty empty but within 10 minutes it had filled up. There ended up being people sitting in the aisles. I recognized a few of the modernized hymns they started out with before Dan came up to speak. He didn't stand on stage but on the floor just a few feet back of the first couple of rows of pews. Dan was continuing on a series called, "Theology Gone Wild" based on the book of I Corinthians. The night we were there he spoke on I Corinthians 11:17-34- Loaded at the Lord's Supper. (There were also 2 ladies that were putting together a mosaic piece of art throughout the whole service that was made from broken pieces of different colored glass taken from beer bottles and forming them into the nail-pierced hand of Jesus- very cool and symbolic of the passage). He gave us a lot of historical context from the first century church on how communion went from a communal "love feast" to a little plastic cup and a piece of bread. I learned more about the history of communion (the last 1500 or so years) in his 30 minute message than I had in any of my reading or education. It was truly fascinating. After the message we took communion together (at different stations with each person turning and serving the elements to the one behind them and saying, "Remember the sacrifice of Jesus"). Even though there is an incredible openness to spirituality in our world, there are a lot of misconceptions about the institutional church and what Christianity is all about. Vintage Faith is rethinking church and ministry and trying to live out their faith and communicate Jesus' love in a language of the culture. I was excited to see how God was using them to impact their city.