Springs Church

May 17, 2009 11:30 am
Springs Church, 595 Lagimodiere Blvd. Winnipeg
Pastor Leon Fontaine

Can you say pop-Christianity? Yeah, so can I, and I'll admit that was on my mind as I headed into this one, probably one of the biggest churches in Winnipeg. You know a church is massive when it's got more parking attendants than some churches have congregants. You could land a 747 in the Springs Church parking lot. The building is huge with a massive sanctuary in the center, circled by a hallway that has classrooms for the Springs school, Sunday school rooms, lounges, a huge gift shop and a Starbucks knock-off. By this point the place is screaming at me: business! business! I was greeted by a couple of ushers as I pushed through a throng of people into the sanctuary.

I'm not even going to hazard a guess at how many people were in there. Upwards of a thousand. It was huge. The age demographic was extremely varied, though dominant were the twenty-somethings, believe it or not. I sure didn't. The sanctuary was a huge space with chairs set out in a semi-circle around the stage, which boasted not one but four jumbotron-style screens. Christian hard-rock was playing through the speakers.

The service was kicked off with four songs from the resident rock band, and they were pretty solid. Bass, guitar, drums, keyboards, four vocalists and a backing "choir" were all onstage unleashing hits from the Christian rock world, all highlighted by a light show. A light show.

Pastor Leo Fontaine took the stage and said a prayer in his booming voice with a hint of a southern accent, which had me all ready for some ridiculous, speaking-in-tongues sermon. My expectations weren't high.

And then he blew me away with one of the best sermons I've heard all year. It was thought provoking, relevant, and had just the right amount of "shit-disturbing" to satisfy my young adult brain. You know something's going down when the first words out of the pastor's mouth are "I don't like religion." The sermon was all about the difference between the Christian faith and Christian religion, the latter being the often-abused organization of the "Christian church" around Jesus' teachings, the former being living through Jesus' teachings themselves and not some forced religious doctrine.

Pastor Fontaine spoke about how Jesus didn't come to start a new religion, he came to challenge all religions. He talked about how we "jump through hoops" and try to do exactly the right things to please God because our religion tells us to, when through Jesus we are offered a "free gift" of salvation and really, we don't have to do anything but live through His teachings. He produced an interesting metaphor in the idea of a father and his children: why would children fall over themselves to please the father, bring him a drink after work and bring him the paper and hang up his clothes and on and on, if they are loved by default? Why should they feel they need to do all kinds of stuff to gain their father's approval when they have it already, simply on the merit of being his children? Pastor Fontaine also touched on something that interested me, and that was the formulization of the modern-day church service, how people get so set in their traditions and their organization that the message is lost.

I'll stop now. But on their website under "Media Player" you can access a video of the sermon, and I'd suggest you take a look. I'm trying very hard to think objectively about what he said, because the presentation was extremely powerful, to the point where I wonder if I was really blown away by the message or just brainwashed by the charismatic man. But in any event I've been given food for thought.

Though the sermon and the music were great, I'm not sure how I would feel belonging to a church with probably a couple thousand members. For me church needs to be about community. Of course with a larger community there's more opportunity for interaction, but is some intimacy not lost with such a massive congregation? There's no way that Pastor Fontaine knows the names of all his members, and how could he possibly make time for everyone? There's a level of implied buerocracy and commercialization to this church that makes me wonder, and obviously heavily influenced my first impressions.

Boy has this one got me confused, and thinking. About time.

http://www.springschurch.com/