"Adore" at Glad Tidings Pentecostal

Sunday Nov. 15, 2009 6:30 pm
"Adore" at Glad Tidings Pentecostal Church, 1800 Quadra St. Victoria BC
Pastor Andy Moore

So I found myself in Victoria this past Sunday, a beautiful city for anyone wondering. "Adore" is a youth-based evening offshoot of the Glad Tidings Pentecostal Church in Victoria BC. The building looks potentially old-fashioned from the outside, but inside for "Adore" it's transformed, with four jumbo-screens, a coffee center and lots of information centers. And little mini-bibles all over the place.

My first thoughts were "holy shit, this church has a mascot," and in fact it has not one, but two giant "child" mascots who lead the kids off to children's time or Sunday school or whatever you choose to call it. It was something I've absolutely never seen before.

This church probably had about 2-300 people and bar none the largest population of youth I've seen in any church. Makes sense, since the program was started with youth in mind. There were a few families and even a couple of older folk out, but the youth were dominant.

The service started with about 20 minutes of songs from the worship band. The band played well; the singers were both a bit lacking but they were enthusiastic in their worship. My only question mark was that the worship band had a "look," all wearing the same style of low-neck t-shirt et cetera. I'll leave that one without comment, just saying that my eyebrows raised a bit.

After that there was an offering, and I always love it when they encourage the visitors not to feel pressured to give, which I think is extremely considerate and often overlooked in churches who seem to assume that the congregation all knows what's going on.

Then Pastor Andy took the stage. He was what I have now come to consider the "norm" for the hip, young pastor: silk shirt, designer jeans, gelled hair. It almost feels like a new pastor stereotype is being formed: we all have the image of the old-time pastor in black with the white collar, or the older fellow in a suit. Now we have the guy with the styled hair in a dress shirt.

He spoke well, if a tad frenetically, continuing the established theme of "Text Me," in which the church is taking a look at the Bible. Pastor Andy talked today about the reliability of the Bible. He pulled out a few interesting statistics (the chances of Jesus having fulfilled all of the prophesys that he did are approximately 100,000,000,000,000,000 to 1), analyzed the Bible according to a system for evaluating the historical accuracy of academic texts and even talked about archaeology and the Bible. It was interesting stuff; not terribly in-depth or scientifically solid (understandable given the time constraints) but it was thought-provoking, so I think it did its job.

Pastor Andy prayed and the worship band played a couple more songs to end the evening. I did enjoy myself and I enjoyed the pastor's message and the absolute influx of youth. I always find a certain amount of ego inherent in these band-and-jumbotron-based churches and this one had it in particular. But it also had literally over a hundred youth.

Hm.

http://adorevictoria.blogspot.com/