PORTABLE CHURCHES GAIN POPULARITY
By Kevin Dale
Over the past couple of Sundays, the leaders of Fellowship Bible Church performed an unusual pre-service ritual: removing two pairs of lacy bloomers.
The 3-year-old evangelical church leases the Venice Little Theatre, which featured a January run of the “The Underpants.”
The “laugh-out-loud farce” centers around a woman who loses her knickers during a parade for the king of Germany. To promote the play, the theater displayed the antique lingerie in the lobby.
“Of course, that’s not real church-oriented,” said Fellowship’s Pastor John Meyer, “so you kindly put them behind the counter.”
While most congregations don’t confront such worldly intrusions, Fellowship’s members join in a weekly ritual with churches nationwide. Unable to afford their own sanctuary, religious groups are worshipping in leased and less-than-holy sites.
The landscape of rented churches is explained by two trends: the steady growth in the number of evangelical Christian churches and a booming real estate markets that force congregations to rent instead of buy.
And many newer churches avoid strip-mall shopping centers, deterred by increasing rents and the landlords’ preference for high-traffic, retail tenants.
As a result, for several hours on Sunday, churches occupy the area’s secular spaces.
Congregants sing hymns in public-school cafeterias. Pastors recite scripture in civic condo clubhouses. And in the Venice Little Theatre, members take Communion under the house lights and the disco ball.
“It happens all over the place,” Meyer said. “People stick a sign outside Sunday mornings, and it’s no longer a hardware store. It’s no longer a high-school auditorium. It’s a church.”
A growing model
New churches are not limited to evangelical Christians or isolated to areas where their numbers are growing, said Bill Leonard, dean of the Divinity School at Wake Forest University.
“It’s more prevalent in the south and west from what I can tell, but you find these groups all around the country — New England, too,” said Leonard. “It’s a model that’s being used by a variety of religious groups.”
But the majority of the “church starts” appear to be launched by the country’s estimated 100 million evangelicals, many of them independent and non-denominational and difficult to track, said Larry Eskridge, associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College in Illinois.
Still, there are enough start-ups, known as “church plantings,” to support such companies as Startchurch.com, which sells how-to books on incorporating a church and applying for federal tax-exempt status.
Consulting groups specializing in plantings speak at a growing number of conferences devoted to the subject. In April, the 2006 National New Church Conference will be held in Orlando.
Organizers expect around 800 people to attend what is being touted as the largest gathering for the “purpose of focusing national attention on church planting.” Workshop topics include “Beyond the Call: New Church Planning” and “‘The Nomadic Church’: Doing Church in Rented Facilities.”
The latter workshop is being led by Portable Church Industries, a Michigan company that consults with churches on “making the most of a rented facility.” The company customizes and delivers packages of sound and lighting equipment, music instruments and even toys for the nursery.
“Basically, our business is a function of land value,” said owner Pete van der Harst. “North Dakota — we haven’t done any churches.”
Since its founding in 1994, the company has helped start more than 500 churches in 44 states, including Hawaii. This year alone, PCI expects to work with more than 100 churches.
The overwhelming number of PCI’s clients are evangelical churches renting school gymnasiums or cafeterias.
“We’ve probably been in more school buildings than a textbook salesman,” van der Harst said.
He estimated 80 percent of PCI’s clients rent space in schools. About 15 percent rent space in movie theaters, and PCI has worked with churches that met in a bowling alley and a comedy club.
Van der Harst admits there are “some really incongruent things” when sacred practices occur in borrowed spaces. He once designed a backdrop to obscure a rotating, illuminated slushy machine that was distracting services.
“But it’s the people that matter,” he said. “Churches are life-changing operations, and the trappings aren’t really that critical.”
The sentiment is shared by Pastor Garry Clark of Englewood’s Fellowship Church, a growing evangelical congregation that has been meeting in the auditorium at Lemon Bay High School.
“Where there are God’s people, you are going to have God’s presence,” Clark said.
When the church started more than three years ago, purchasing a building in Englewood’s rising commercial market wasn’t even an option.
“When we started, we had nothing,” Clark said. “We don’t have a denomination or a fat cat that is bank rolling.”
The church’s portable status hasn’t hampered its growth. Attendance has grown from less than 100 to more than 500 attending two Sunday services. The church has raised nearly $1 million toward land and a new building in Rotonda while paying about $700 a week to rent the auditorium.
Fellowship also rents space at the Englewood Sports Complex for Communion and senior fellowship services. Prayer breakfasts are held in parks or on the beach. “We’re all over the place,” Clark said.
Many portable churches spread their ministry across multiple venues. Sunday services might be held in a school, but weeknight Bible study is conducted in a condo clubhouse.
The lack of a fixed location can eventually doom a new church, especially given the competition from other evangelical churches, whose worship styles run the gamut from rock ‘n’ roll to black-Bible fundamentalism.
Church starts have an extremely high failure rate, but many evangelical congregations are encouraged by the pioneering example of “mega churches” that once gathered in schools or movie theaters.
Saddleback Church in Southern California began with a seven-person Bible Study and rented out high-school gyms. The church now occupies a 120-acre campus and
attendance averages more than 20,000.
“So you have this mythology: ‘Today, we’re 100 people, and one day, we’ll be 3,000,” said Leonard, of Wake Forest.
Transforming spaces
Given the cost and energy required to start a church, the number of newer congregations in the area signals a healthy demand for new and varied worship options.
Churches are renting space in nearly a third of the roughly 100 public schools in Charlotte, Manatee and Sarasota counties.
Fellowship Church, at Lemon Bay High, sits across the street from Foundation Church, an evangelical church that leases a former fitness center. Before relocating to the gym last year, its members met at Englewood Elementary School.
The church has adapted its unconventional space to meet its needs: The sanctuary was the aerobics room and the hot tub is used for baptisms.
This transformation from secular to sanctuary didn’t always take place in gyms and community centers, but the idea is nothing new, Leonard said.
“The sort of ‘creating your own sacred space’ is very Protestant, very revivalistic,” he said. He cited the early-20th century camp revivals, where pastors were equipped with nothing more than a stoop and a Bible in their attempts to save souls.
Of course, some churches have a tougher job when it comes to making rented spaces sacred, “to make it look as churchy as you can,” said Meyer, who leads services at the theater.
On a recent Sunday, Meyer was trying to lead Bible study on a theater stage set for “Cabaret,” which details the passionate affair between a cabaret singer and a writer in decadent, pre-World War II Berlin.
Meyer decided the set, with its nude male statutes, wasn’t appropriate backdrop to study scripture. “You know, I’m not going to do this,” Meyer said before moving to an upstairs rehearsal theater.
But despite the odd theatrical distraction, Meyer said the space, at the rate of $175 a week, is ideal.
Youth Bible study is held in the rehearsal theaters, and the Green Room doubles as the nursery. The theater allows the church to scroll its sermon on the lighted marquee, and the acoustics are hard to beat.
Meyer said the theater will be Fellowship’s leased home until members can afford a permanent one.
“In the next five years, I want to be in our own building,” Meyer told 80 members as he stood before the set for “The Underpants.” Meyer was speaking during a recent business meeting, which he had to cut short.
“We’ve got to be out of here in the next few minutes,” he announced. It was minutes before noon, and the cast and crew would soon arrive to prepare for the 2 o’clock matinee.
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