Vintage Faith Church

I spontaneously decided to go to this church in Santa Cruz last night, Vintage Faith Church. I’ve been reading Dan Kimball’s blog for a few months now (the pastor). Yesterday I was reading it and saw that the San Jose Metro and the Santa Cruz Metro did an article on the church this past week. I didn’t read read the article until after I got home, seeing as how it was already 6:15 pm and Santa Cruz takes a good 45 minutes of travel. If you are interested in seeing Dan Kimball’s blog about the article, it is here.

Anyway, I arrived about 7:10pm. It wasn’t hard to find as it’s right off Mission St. near the UCSC campus. I could tell right away that it was packed because there was no parking in the lot or on the street around the church. They moved to the First Presbyterian building for their services around Easter of this year. The Pres church still meets there, its basically two churchs with the ultimate goal of merging together if it works out, but not anytime soon from what I understand. It seems to be a great thing, showing that different chuch can be a community and accepting of each other. Anyway, by the time I found parking (illegally), jay walked, got inside the church and found a seat, it was near 7:30. They had just finished singing and were just beginning the sermon.

The decor for the service was very “vintage” as you might imagine. Not too many lights on (it was daylight, so it was light enough to see of course), candles set up around the room, a backdrop of something that had a Bible verson on it–it looked like trees or something, a metal-looking cross and some velvet-looking fabric, blankets or whatever, setting around. It was interesting seeing as how the Pres church is pretty traditional looking, minus the “vintage” stuff, so it was an interesting mix. I liked it.

It was very crowded. I was told it was their biggest crowd ever. Pretty much standing room only. I figure since the article ran in the Metro, it peaked people’s interest in going to check it out.

The sermon was good. It was about proving the validity of the Bible. They had the powerpoint going with the sermon ouline up there, so it was easy to follow along. Kimball was a good speaker too. Energetic and hip looking (had the Elvis hair going, only blonde–of course). He spoke very plainly and wasn’t preachy, which of course I liked, seeing as how I’ve blogged about how I don’t like “preachy” before. The crowd was mostly young, 20-30s probably, but it still had a good mix of ages. I sat next to a couple who were probably in their 40s. There were also some older people there, grandparent age perhaps, and some families with children as well. It was all pretty casual.

Okay, my favorite part of the service was the music. It was amazing. The praise band was really great, but didn’t try to be too showy, which is another thing I hate. They had a piano player, who was the main singer and was was awesome. She had this jazzy, Norah Jones voice, and the music reflected that. Even songs I’d heard before just had something different about it. Otherwise, there was two other guys, the drummer and a guy playing a stand up Bass I presume. It was cool. Awesome music where the people didn’t pretend like they were at a rock concert. I’ve seen that before at different churches, especially larger ones. They just played the music, went into the next song and then prayed when they were done. They didn’t stop in between to tell us about the song we just sang, pray, or the song we were about to sing. The lack of interruptions was nice and made it easier to reflect on the music and my own time of worship, and not just what the leader wanted me to reflect on. It was also great to just hear some nice, slow worship music. I will say that is the one thing I think that lacks from my own chruch, or other churches I’ve been to around here, everything has to be fast and upbeat. Perhaps a bid to keep people awake, I don’t know, but it everything is just so fast nowadays, its nice to just slow things down and focus on worshipping the Lord. Yeah, a good fast praise song is good too, but it shouldn’t be that way all the time. I’ll go back there just for the music alone.

After the meeting the had a meeting called “The Ten” which is just a 10 minute meeting for anyone new who was interested in knowing more about the church. I went just to see what it was about and meet some new people. There was about 5 of us in there with one of the church leaders, Kristen. Everyone was very different. Anyway, it was cool. She filled us in on how the church started, the values and some of the happenings. Apparently she’s also a fellow blogger too. It appears that some of the leadership team of the church have blogs that are linked to from the church website.

Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot lately about the “Emerging Church” and I guess this church seemed to fit that trend, or at least want to. There wasn’t anything majorly different about it from what I can tell so far,b ut it just seems to be more open to thinking outside of the box and getting back to the more old-school Christianity. It doesn’t water it down. It is very much an evangelical church. Definately more than my church. But it seems they are able to do it in a way where people aren’t turned off, scared or come across as too aggressive. It seems to be more inclusive and loving than a lot of churches, or Christians, come across today.

Anyway, I hope to get a chance to go back. It seems like they have a lot happening.

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