Unconventional Churches Draw Young Believers To Worship In Odd Places

FORT WORTH, Texas — A trailer pulls up to the Aardvark, a bar across from Texas Christian University’s campus. It’s early on Sunday morning, and several people unload metal folding chairs, cramming them into rows facing the stage inside the bar. Other people clean vomit off the floor from the night before. Some set up stations for donuts and coffee. They work quickly. Nothing is fancy.

College kids begin to show up and are greeted by smiling faces. The dive bar begins to fill with laughter and color. Music illuminates the room, but the gospel music is a different tune than what’s played the Saturday night before. Pre-COVID-19, the students worshipped and pray side by side. Each Sunday, for a few hours, this bar turns into a church.

“I remember a friend literally pulling up in a truck and taking me to church at a bar, the most Texan thing this Californian could have imagined,” said Ally Greene, who attended the Aardvark during college and now attends the young adults’ service at Christ Chapel Bible Church in Fort Worth.

Christ Chapel’s college ministry moved from its traditional church building to The Aardvark in 2011 to deal with a space issue. “We needed to offload something, and college students tended to be the most adaptable,” said Josh Storie, the college pastor at Christ Chapel. The church said 76 people came to the first service in 2011 and, by 2019, an average of 253 students were attending services at the Aardvark and Christ Chapel had to consider a new location.

Christ Chapel uses the phrase a “church without walls” to describe its ministry and its mission beyond the confines of the church building. Christ Chapel is a non-denominational, self-governing mega-church with campuses in Parker County, Johnson County and Fort Worth, Texas. It demonstrates the entrepreneurial, flexible and innovative mindset many churches and denominations in North America possess. This month, Christ Chapel again moved, from the Aardvark bar to Common Grounds, a coffee shop.

Home Churches & Odd Worship Locations 

Since the early New Testament church met in homes, many startup churches and church plants have met in eccentric, odd and unusual locations. A church plant in Berlin, Germany, called Berlin Projekt, draws many members from the young creative class in Berlin and has long met in a historic movie theater called Babylon. A church called Church in the Indianapolis suburb of Fishers, Ind., meets in a YMCA. Steel City Church in Pittsburgh now meets in homes and online while it looks for a permanent location. It used to meet in a night club called Altar Bar in the city’s Strip District, which was previously a Slovak Catholic church, and was turned back into a church in 2016. The global charismatic church from Australia, Hillsong, often opens its locations in non-church buildings. In Montclair, N.J, for example, Hillsong church packs hundreds of people into a local music venue called the Wellmont Theater for Sunday morning services.

Bryan Collier, church planter and lead pastor at The Orchard said seeking the community and planting the church in a place that is familiar to people makes for an easier conversation about the gospel. The theology of church planting is incarnational, said Collier. “You’re already inhabiting what is there. Jesus came and inhabited human form. We are stepping into the community, in forms that are already determined by the community, to do the work of Christ,” said Collier.

Utilizing repurposed buildings is a good use of kingdom resources and, unencumbered by the distraction of a facility, the focus is on building a connection to other believers within the community, said Collier. “When you don’t have some ornate facility, you just see wherever you are as a tool to connect to the community,” he said

For many Catholics, Orthodox Christian and mainline Protestant believers in America, building an expensive, beautiful and impressive church building was part of demonstrating God’s embassy on earth – a place of meaning for believers and the community. And when these buildings lose members or close, some see a decline of religion in America.

A Gallup study in 2019 reveals that roughly half of Americans are members of a church, down from 70% two decades earlier in 1999. While research from Gallup and Pew Research indicates younger generations are less religious than older generations, many denominations from Pentecostals to Baptists to Orthodox and Catholics are finding ways to connect with younger generations. Part of their methodology is to create a more casual and less formal, churchy style of dress, music and worship. Another part of the strategy involves location, location, location.

Planting churches in uncommon places stems from the desire to be in the marketplace and to reach new people who couldn’t be reached through other means. They emphasize community and they put a big emphasis on small groups that focus on building relational connections, said Gary McIntosh, professor of Christian ministry and leadership at Talbot School of Theology.

“There’s no lone rangers in the Christian faith,” said Mcintosh. “In the Christian faith you’re always part of a community that cares for each other.”

Church Planting & Innovative Spaces

The practice of de-emphasizing buildings and emphasizing outreach and relationship has been a powerful force in the Protestant church for decades. Missionary theologian Leslie Newbigin was an early proponent of the church considering culture and adapting to be more missional. Christian coffee houses were popular in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s sometimes called the “Missional movement.” And that movement has kicked up some debate within denominations and seminaries, with some criticizing missional churches for being “watered down” forms of Christianity that further Biblical illiteracy. Others counter that Jesus, his disciples and the early church was missional rather than doctrinal and hierarchical.

Seminaries, consultants and publications help church leaders think about their tactics on growth. In the 2008 book “Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement,” author Will Mancini explains how church leaders can use strategic planning to grow their church among new generations. Another 2016 book, “Growing Young” by Kara Powell and Jake Mulder offers tips on how to “help young people discover and love your church.”

The phenomenon is also global. For example, Flavio Soares, a missionary bishop for the Anglican church in northern Brazil, has 30 churches in his diocese. He has planted 16 churches in Brazil, Colombia and Panama. One of the churches meets in a coffee shop, another in a tattoo parlor, one in a hotel and another in a movie theater.

And, during the COVID-19 pandemic as in-person meetings are limited, many churches have overhauled their websites to note the church is virtual and creating new pathways for people to become part of the church via Zoom groups, YouTube channels, Facebook Live events, Twitter feeds and many other digital methods.

Church in a Horse Barn

Dr. Travis Kerns, Associate Professor of Apologetics and World Religion at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, planted a church in Salt Lake City that met in a horse barn. Kerns said he and his wife, along with two other couples, planted the church to reach a certain demographic.

“We reached people that wouldn’t have gone to a big, county seat First Baptist church because they were used to wearing t-shirts and Wranglers and dirty boots all the time. They were always farming, ranching, working with horses,” Kerns said.

While the location was part of what attracted these people, Kerns credited the authenticity of the people at the church for creating an environment that felt normal and genuine.

Kerns said church is meant to be a space where people can be open, share the positive and negative aspects of life and overtly express love and devotion for Christ. The horse barn helped create this space for the demographic of people they were trying to reach.

“The unconventional way of meeting in places convenient for the people is the need of the hour,” said Carolyn Kuzhivila, a PhD candidate in the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary. “Many will never walk into a church building but will gather in places where they meet with people like them(selves),”

Kuzhivila said a personal relationship with Christ and love for one another is what matters the most. Churches located in unexpected places often emphasize this. She cited Matthew 18:20, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

Ben Fuqua, the young adult and former college pastor at Christ Chapel, decided the Aardvark would be the ministry’s new home. Nine years later, Christ Chapel’s college ministry is moving again, this time to a new building near TCU, a building which functions as a coffee shop during the week and a church on Sundays.

He said the church wanted to build a space for the college ministry. “The bar dictated that we don’t want to just meet in a place that’s just for us, he said. “We want to meet in a place that also serves students throughout the week who don’t know Christ and who don’t even like Christ, and we want to love them where they’re at.”

The Advent of the Aardvark

“I think for a lot of people, there was something really disarming about getting to show up to the bar and worship,” Storie said. Church in a bar wasn’t something the church initially planned. Christ Chapel had a connection with someone who was in a band who happened to play at the Aardvark. The musician agreed to ask if Christ Chapel College could use the space on Sunday mornings. Danny Weaver, owner of the Aardvark, agreed.

“Aardvark wasn’t open on Sunday mornings, so that space was available,” Storie said. “And they have a stage.” Christ Chapel payed $100 a week for a sound guy, and that was their primary expense. The Aardvark did not charge them to use the space.

“Our church is an older, well-established church that doesn’t need to take chances, but they still do,” Fuqua said. “It’s almost unprecedented in a way that they would support us- who want to meet at a bar, and then when the bar closes, they would support us by spending the amount of money they did to create a place for college students when they know there’s never going to be a return on that investment financially.”

“Honestly we kind of lucked into it, and I would say it’s a God deal,” Fuqua said. His first year as College Pastor was the year the church needed more space. Rather than leaving it up to TCU students to find a church in the suburb to drive or Uber to, Fuqua wanted to bring Jesus to them. “We believe the church should be engaging with the culture …We see Jesus in history in his ministry and he didn’t set up a tent and say, ‘everybody come to me.’ Every week he traveled, and he came to them and he went to leper colonies and he went to towns and went to fishing villages.

When Christ Chapel first started holding its college ministry at the Aardvark, it was still a functioning bar. “Initially it was a temporary fix to our space problem, and then as soon as we saw how many students were coming specifically because we were in the bar it became strategic,” Storie said.

The move from bar to coffee shop

The bar closed in February of 2018, and Christ Chapel leased the space after the bar closed. Two years later, Christ Chapel decided to buy the building next door and build a new space because rent at the Aardvark was too expensive.

Christ Chapel has partnered with Common Grounds Coffee which will lease the space in the new building every day of the week except for Sunday mornings when the shop will be converted to a space for worship just as the bar was for all those years.

“They are not a Christian coffee shop but the guys who own it do share our faith and love the vision around making a place that feels welcoming to all,” Fuqua said. “I think that bar really set our culture, and we’ve really just continued that culture.”

Chris Jordan, an intern at Christ Chapel this fall, said the church will move all the coffee shop furniture out and set up the chairs and turn it into a worship venue just like they transformed the Aardvark into a worship venue. “Once we’re done, we’ll put it back to the coffee shop, and no one knows the difference on Monday morning,” he said.

Storie said partnering with Common Grounds made a lot of sense. During the week, it will be a place where students can study and hang out with friends, and on Sunday’s it will be a comfortable, familiar place to hold church service. They think some students who might not have wanted to walk into church in a bar will be more open to walking into a church at a coffee shop.

“We really wanted the space to be a staple in the community where anyone from any walk of life could come in the door, sit down, hang out for a while, enjoy a cup of coffee and just have a place to belong,” Storie said. “A lot of our mission as a ministry has always been creating a place where people belong even if they’re not ready to believe.”

A member of the Christ Chapel College ministry, Clyde Cross, said even though he grew up in a traditional church and attending a bar was radically different, he still felt like it was less threatening to show up at a bar instead of a church. “I’m sad that it’s moving buildings, but I’m more excited about the space the coffee shop will provide,” he said.

Beyond the building: what the ministry means to the people it serves

Whether students showed up at the Aardvark because it was a novelty; because they had a bad experience with a traditional church as a kid; or simply because of its proximity to campus, coming to the bar had an unassuming atmosphere the ministry leaders say.

“We do everything we possibly can to tear down any barriers that might keep someone from coming in and actually getting to know Jesus,” Storie said. “So if a church building is the thing that’s keeping you from a relationship with Jesus then, great, let’s figure out a way to redo the building.”

Fuqua said the neutral locations attract two types of people: those who were searching and maybe not quite comfortable with attending a traditional church, and those who wanted to live their life on mission, reaching those who are farther from God.

“It’s easier to talk about the grace of God when you’re sitting in a bar,” Fuqua said. “It doesn’t feel as ominous.”

According to Fuqua, about once a month, people would come to the service because they had left their ID at the bar the night before. They were petrified when they first walked in, but Fuqua said the ministry was always intentional about making sure they felt welcome and didn’t feel embarrassed or that it was an accident they were there.

“Aardvark, and the people in it, changed my life forever,” Greene said. “The funny thing about an uncommon church is that it brings the focus to the building. We know as believers that when we refer to the church it is truly the body of people coming together to worship.”

Haeven Gibbons is an intern at The Media Project and a journalism student at Texas Christian University. She works as a producer for the TCU “News Now” newscast, as a photojournalist for TCU360 and as a writer for IMAGE magazine.