Pastor Chris Synesael of West Village Church recently tweeted, “How many pastors get to watch Puss n’ Boots right before their Christmas Eve Service? #ChurchPlanting.”
As my family and I entered through the movie theatre doors, we were welcomed into a lobby with West Village Church signs sitting tall among colourful, illuminated ticket dispensers. The West Village refreshment table held coffee, baked goods, Milk Duds, and buttery popcorn. Greeters mingled in the lobby next to staff members wearing maroon vests, as the theatre was being prepared for their first movie showing immediately after the service ended. When we exited the service nearly two hours later, paying customers entered the theatre. Now the challenge was to decipher who was who. You couldn’t tell the difference between those singing praises to Jesus just minutes earlier, and the ones holding tickets to see Beauty and the Beast in 3D. Synesael says that what happens on Sunday is not called a morning service but a morning gathering.
Pastor Synesael and his wife Kellee planted West Village church on the West Shore of Victoria, B.C. less than one year ago and originally had no plans of choosing a movie theatre for its future location. Synesael mentions, “On the West Shore, there are very few places that will hold 40 people.” West Village started in the Synesael home with 12 people. Soon it grew to 50 people. The move from living room to movie theatre was what Synesael describes as, “the beginning of our outward face.”
One of the things you may not notice right away when attending a Sunday morning gathering, is that West Village is actually built upon community groups. These groups meet and reach out in their community throughout the rest of the six days of the week.
Synesael encourages these groups to be active in their neighbourhood and choose a mission that they can own as a community group. One group has embraced their local school, where they hold open barbeques and set up bouncy castles for the local children. “We don’t go in with the posture of trying to convert anyone or evangelize anyone . . . we just love and serve the people and the community that God has called us to,” he says.
Victoria, specifically, has had a difficult time with church attendance and has even been called one of the least churched communities in Canada. Synesael looks at this dilemma as an opportunity. He says, “The question that drove this church plant was not, ‘How can I get people to come to church?’ but ‘How do I get the church to go to people?’”
I asked Synesael about his family, and specifically how his three kids have responded to being a church planting family. He shares his kids’ response to this journey as, “fantastic . . . especially now that Daddy works from home!” The main challenge for the kids has been around “sharing their Legos” and people invading their personal space. Synesael talks about some weeks having over 100 people pass through their living room. However, he sees this more as a discipleship tool, saying to his kids, “Mission is sharing your Legos with kids, so their mommies and daddies can hear about Jesus.” This seems to be a key message for all of us, that, in a lot of ways, being church and community is more difficult than just attending church. Pastor Synesael would respond this way, in a recent tweet he wrote, “The mission of the church is not [to] make more seats in its Sunday service — it is to make more seats at your dinner table.”
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