Keeping the faith without a church: 'Churches without walls' growing in Vermont
By Andy Netzel
By Burlington Free Press Staff Writer
SOUTH BURLINGTON -- The entire congregation stood during a jazzy rendition of the "Our Father." Hands stretched toward the heavens. One woman bounced in the first row -- most others simply swayed to the church service's music.
Mixed in with the hallelujahs, a debate about the value of an Upper Deck baseball card seeped in through the back wall.
This church service was in a Holiday Inn where only a temporary wall separated the baseball card convention from the Victory Center church. Weekly church services held in such locales as middle school cafeterias and hotel conference rooms are common in other parts of the country, but Vermont is just beginning to produce more churches without walls.
"Be faithful with what you've got," Pastor Anna Drinkwine told her congregation, now seated on the mauve seats characteristic of hotel furniture. "If you're faithful with a little, Jesus will give you a lot."
Small churches in temporary quarters do not have a high level of success in New England, said Carl S. Dudley, a professor of church and community at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.
"These efforts are most effective in areas with high population growth," Dudley said, "so, not in New England. The churches tend to grow with the community."
Churches too small to have their own facility are much more common in the southern and southwestern parts of the country, Dudley said.
The Rev. Robby Pitt, who in 2000 founded the Daybreak Community Church that meets in Colchester Middle School, said the small church scene in Vermont fails to compare to his old home innorthern Virginia. There, he said, every public facility has a waiting list for churches to begin meeting.
The number of such churches, although low in Vermont, is expected to rise. One purpose of the newly formed New England Theological Seminary in Williston is to train ministers to start tiny churches in the area, Renee Bittner, director of operations, said.
When congregations grow large enough to support a facility, the Vermont landscape will be dotted with more evangelical churches, Bittner said.
The seminary is teaching its first class. The four students -- three of whom will remain in New England -- plan to start their own churches.
"This is the training ground for future church planters in New England and in other places in the world," Bittner said. "The students, all seminary graduates, are getting hands-on training as well as continued studies in Christ-centered preaching, personal and family formation, and management and leadership."
Christ Memorial Church, which is attached to the seminary, had its start in lecture halls at Champlain College and eventually the University of Vermont. The 20 or so weekly worshipers turned into 500 with their own building.
Drinkwine started her church 18 years ago in the living room of her Essex home. The Holiday Inn has been the regular meeting place lately.
The inspiration to become a preacher came from a revelation from God, she said.
"Warn my people," she said God told her in one of her prayers. "Warn my people to be very careful of which church they attend in this end-time hour, because there is coming great error. Also warn them to be very careful of whom they elevate, because many of these leaders will also turn astray to error."
Victory Center has a regular attendance of 30 parishioners, Drinkwine said. The church has many more followers of its radio program on 760 AM, the television program on Adelphia Cable and the Web site at www.victoryforyou.org.
Drinkwine said her church tries to fill a niche in the community that is currently devoid.
"There's very few churches I can find that are on fire," she said. Victory Center, a non-denominational church, tries to convey faith through passionate prayer.
While Drinkwine ministered on a recent Sunday, the parishioners interjected with a "Praise Jesus" here, a hallelujah there. After singing their praises to God, Drinkwine said she felt God inside her and offered prayer and healing.
A half dozen parishioners approached the front of the conference room. One wanted help with a friend with pancreatic cancer; another was having back pain.
Drinkwater placed her hand on the foreheads of the worshipers as she prayed with them.
"Come on, let Jesus in," she said. Her prayer turned to non-words -- what she called "speaking in tongues." One by one, the parishioners collapsed and were covered with mauve sheets that matched the hotel chairs.
When they arose, the worshipers shared their religious experience with some members of the congregation.
Joanna Williams, a Californian who is living in Vermont temporarily, said this kind of passion is what draws her to the Victory Center. She would like to see the church acquire its own facility some day, she said.
"If you are committed to believing in Christ, you can pray anywhere," Williams said. "To some, praying in a hotel is not comfortable. People tend to gravitate to the traditional church setting."
Contact Andy Netzel at 660-1867 or anetzel@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com.
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Victory Center Church
Holiday Inn, 1068 Williston Road, South Burlington
By Mike Ives [01.09.08] - 477 reads
Most dues-paying members of the Judeo-Christian tradition agree that the “House of the Lord” is a pretty ambiguous concept — just watch the film Dogma, or listen to singer-songwriter Joan Osborne. In Vermont, perhaps no religious leader stretches the definition of “church” further than Pastor Anna Drinkwine: Her Victory Center Church meets every Sunday at the Holiday Inn in South Burlington.
Drinkwine, who grew up in Canada, describes her 22-year-old church as “non-denominational Pentecostal.” At first, she held services in her home, and later switched to a downtown Burlington building. Victory Center moved into this temporary site on Williston Road in April 2006.
“God is good. Amen!” cries Drinkwine. It’s 10:30 on a Sunday morning, and the pastor has just thundered into the Holiday Inn’s wood-paneled Birch Room wearing heels and a checkered sweater. “I had my car towed this morning,” she adds. “I wanted them to take it before the snowstorm.”
Drinkwine may be a half-hour late for her own service, but the small assembly of six middle-aged, mostly female disciples doesn’t seem to mind. When the pastor declares herself a “secretary” of God, they respond with a chorus of “Amen!” and “Praise God!”
As latecomers trickle in, Drinkwine dictates a heavenly memo in a lyrical cadence: “We ask that you take com-plete control of this service,” she requests of the Lord in a low alto, “and that you touch everyone’s idle God, halle-lu-jah! Let it not be under-mined by the spirit realm . . . We thank you, Father, for what you are about to do in Jesus’ name. A-men!”
After that kind of warm-up, another church leader might dive directly into a sermon. Not this one; for the next hour, Drinkwine leads a group rendition of pan-Caribbean Christian sing-alongs, courtesy of a silver boombox and lyrics displayed with an old-school slide projector. By the fifth or sixth tune, what was initially a sheepish flock has morphed into an all-ages gaggle of 23 impassioned genuflectors — think Rusted Root concert meets Jesus Camp.
One footloose participant is literally floored with excitement. Toward the end of the sing-along, gray-haired Joan Ehrke collapses in what looks like an epileptic fit. “Hi. Hi! Hi! Yaaa! Ahh! Oh!” bellows the former nun from New Jersey before crashing onto a row of cushioned chairs. “Ohh, hi! Oh, hi! Ohh —”
“JEE-sus!” someone in back exclaims. Two women rush to pick up their fallen comrade. Other members of the audience — those who aren’t busy speaking in tongues or grooving to a fuzzy medley of conga drums, electric guitars and syncopated beats — simply gape at the spectacle.
“Don’t worry, folks,” Drinkwine asserts with a hearty laugh, gearing up for the second half of her three-hour service. “She’s just a little drunk on the Holy Spirit.”
This Holiday Inn exhibition may be small, but Anna Drinkwine’s booming voice carries well beyond the concierge. Every Sunday, her radio program “Blow the Trumpet in Zion!” is broadcast from Champlain, New York, on 760 AM. In case you miss that Sabbath airing, “Zion!” streams five times the following day from WWCR.com, a Nashville-based Christian website. According to Drinkwine, her show could be reaching “millions.”
The pastor does other spirit-media, too. Drinkwine’s cable-access show, “Victory for You!” has been running since at least 1992 on Vermont Community Access Media (VCAM). A VCAM spokesperson says that, while Drinkwine isn’t the only religious leader on the air, she’s one of the most “local.” The pastor received a VCAM producer’s award in 2004. “We minister incredibly over media and television and our website,” she proclaims at one point during today’s service. “We’re also getting invitations to go around the world and preach, so when the timing’s right, we’ll be on our way.”
Public outreach notwithstanding, it’s hard to pin down the reach of Victory Center Church’s kingdom. Drinkwine herself, for example, refuses to estimate the size of her own congregation. Two representatives from prominent Burlington-area religious organizations hadn’t heard of Victory Center. And a spokesperson from Essex Alliance Church, the largest evangelical congregation statewide, declined to comment.
That lack of recognition doesn’t stop Drinkwine from dishing dirt on the national Christian establishment. Though maintaining that other preachers are her “brothers and sisters in Christ,” she likens seminaries — a.k.a. theological schools — to “cemeteries.” After today’s sermon, over a late brunch in the hotel restaurant with two new thirtysomething recruits and a Seven Days reporter, she contends that contemporary ministries face a “leadership crisis.”
According to Drinkwine, certain churches preach what she slightingly terms a “feel-good” message. “Their goal is building their own church, no matter how big it gets,” she alleges over a plate of hash, eggs and home fries. “Because if you’re building God’s kingdom, you would be telling people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.”
“Yeah, yeah, absolutely,” chimes in Kathleen Morrow, a mother of two who moved here from West Virginia in November. Today marks her first encounter with Victory Center. Morrow, who dabbled in new-age and esoteric faiths before settling on messianic Judaism, thinks the gospel has been “watered down” by certain congregations.
Her new acquaintance Laura Luchini lobs a similar critique against the media. “Television programs your mind,” she suggests. Luchini, a slender woman with dark hair and glasses, is also a former new ager. “Really, if people focused on praising God,” she insists, “they wouldn’t have to live in fear.”
“Yeah, what is television?” wonders Morrow between bites of pumpkin pie. “God’s vision is one thing . . . But what does ‘tele’ mean?”
“Tel — e — vi — sion,” Drinkwine says. “It’s somebody’s vision, but it may not be healthy.”
“‘Touched by an Angel’ — I like that show,” Luchini reflects. “But most of what’s on TV is actually illegal — it goes against all the ‘isms.’ That’s how Hitler got away with what he did — by making people laugh at things that were painful.” In her view, the Iraq war is a “distraction from the spiritual battle of God and Satan.”
“My message is the gospel,” asserts media-savvy Drinkwine. “A man once told me, ‘I learned more from you in one television show than I did in a whole lifetime of church.’” Filling a fork with potatoes, she adds, “I want to reach people who don’t really understand God, or who’ve had a bad tasting of the churches.”
It’s now 2:30 p.m.: four-and-a-half hours since the start of today’s solemnities. At the diplomatic requests of two consecutive hotel employees, Morrow and Luchini begin to settle the check. Behind them, in the far corner of this near-empty restaurant, a monolithic flat-screen TV broadcasts a football game.
Meanwhile, Drinkwine is cozying up to the nearest potential convert. “Do you have any belief?” she asks the reporter. “I’m just curious.”
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is Pastor Anna Drinkwine's public access program, which airs on Adelphia channel 15 in the Burlington area: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday.
You can't help but notice that she has a love for her listeners and desires the best for us, as she preaches the uncompromised word of God. Even when she states God's view on homosexuality you can tell she loves the homosexuals and desires they would be set free from their lifestyle.
