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New Vintage Church finds a way
Bree Elliott sings at New Vintage Church services at the Wells Fargo Center, where a fundamental Christian message is delivered along with amplified music on the main stage on Sundays in Santa Rosa. Other rooms offer youth programs at the same time.
Mark Aronoff/PDPublished: Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 10:39 p.m.
Church starts Sunday morning with rock music loud enough to rival Van Halen, spotlights cutting through the dark auditorium and a fog machine adding to the show-business setting.
Facts
FAITH IN SONOMA COUNTY
FIRST OF A SERIES
Beginning today, The Press Democrat is publishing a yearlong series of stories profiling the varied ways people worship — and the steps congregations are taking to build their numbers and sustain their faith.
A common experience is the search for spiritual meaning, from the decades-old church to the newly opened storefront, from the literal belief in a savior to the symbolic embrace of a universal force.While faith is intensely personal, And Many are striving to
translate their beliefs into community involvement — and social action.
This series will chronicle the inspiration, the challenges and the
search for spiritual meaning.
Many of the 200 worshippers are on their feet, clapping and singing along to words flashing on three large video screens — creating a mass karaoke experience.
Lead singer Bree Elliott belts out the lyrics:
Oh happy day,
Happy day,
You wash my sin away,
This is no pop music concert at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts, Sonoma County's largest entertainment venue.
Instead, it is the first of two Sunday services for the New Vintage Church, a seven-year-old, 1,000-member Christian congregation that markets itself as “the church for people who don't like church.”
Sprouted from a traditional Baptist church, New Vintage remade itself — with high-tech communications, a casual collegiality and a streamlined, Bible-based theology — to compete for followers seeking a spiritual haven in a relentlessly commercial culture.
And as if in an act of redemption, the congregation has restored preaching of God's word to a building erected three decades ago as Santa Rosa's largest evangelical church, only to fall into bankruptcy and scandal and ultimately be converted to an entertainment venue.
“My name is Andy,” says an energetic man who takes the stage wearing jeans and a mod-style shirt, untucked. “We're so glad you're here this morning.”
Andrew Henry VomSteeg, 45, like many pastors, urges his audience to donate freely and generously to the collection containers going around the theater.
He does so with a decidedly worldly twist, reading from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's account of a neuroscience study that found the idea of giving money to charity lights up parts of the brain associated with selfish pleasures, like eating or sex.
“So what we're going to start saying at New Vintage is, do it a lot,” VomSteeg says, pausing for effect, “giving.”
For most sermons, VomSteeg perches on a stool, “as if we're sitting at Starbucks having a conversation,” he said in an interview. But the informality that pervades his church is part of a rigorous plan to convey Christianity's 2,000-year-old message in what VomSteeg calls a “post-modern age.”
New Vintage is a “Christian church that believes in the Bible as the word of God” and “as the final authority for our lives,” he said. Its mission is “to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.”
VomSteeg deflects the label “evangelical,” wary of any association with politically conservative clergy like the late Jerry Falwell.
An ordained American Baptist minister, VomSteeg likens his congregation to the 1st Century followers of Jesus, who operated without rules, titles or church buildings. “I'm against organized religion,” he said. “So was Jesus, and that's why they killed him.”
The son of Methodist missionaries who served in Brazil, VomSteeg grew up speaking and writing Portuguese, went to high school in Fresno and graduated from Asbury College and Asbury Seminary in Kentucky.
He began pastoring at a small Methodist church in Tranquility, a farm country town 25 miles west of Fresno, in 1991, served at a Richmond Methodist church for four years and came to Santa Rosa's First Baptist Church on Sonoma Avenue in 1998.
Breaking convention
Once among the largest Protestant churches in town and dating back to 1868, First Baptist had shrunk to 78 members, most of them elderly worshippers attached to sermons from the pulpit and accustomed to singing hymns.
There were only 145 members of the American Baptist Church denomination in Sonoma County in 2000, down from 593 in 1980, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives.
The contraction was part of a nationwide trend that saw mainline Protestant membership fall by 3.5 million people, a 12 percent loss, from 1980 to 2000.
VomSteeg, who married his high school sweetheart, Kelli, and has three children, said he felt stifled by religious conventions that “really didn't match my gifting.”
In 2002, he took out the wooden pews at First Baptist with a chainsaw, replacing them with movie theater seats from the Airport Cinemas. He smashed the old church organ with a sledge hammer, brought in a rock band and installed video screens.
Membership swelled, but VomSteeg said the original Baptist congregants groused. He prevailed in a fight for control, and in 2003 he renamed the church New Vintage, borrowing the name from T-shirts at a wine tasting room.
“It communicates who we are,” VomSteeg said. “God wants you to have a quality life.”
On Jan. 11, 2009, New Vintage held its first service at the Wells Fargo Center, trading up from the 380-seat Sonoma Avenue church to the 1,600-seat auditorium. New Vintage retains its offices at the old site and rents out to another Christian church.
Al VomSteeg, the pastor's father, said it is a risky move, considering the cost of renting the center for six hours every Sunday and the challenge of filling its cavernous theater.
A year ago, Andy VomSteeg said in an interview that the rent was $5,000 a week and collections averaged $15,000 a week. But last week, he declined to give details of New Vintage's finances, other than to say the church has no major benefactors and is supported “100 percent by members and attenders.”
Wells Fargo Center considers its rental agreements confidential, spokeswoman Kristi Buffo said, declining to say what the church is paying.
Al VomSteeg, who is retired from the ministry, said the traditional Methodist style of the Fresno congregation he led for 14 years no longer appeals to younger people. “They're looking for a different way to respond to life,” Al VomSteeg said. “They're not used to just sitting in the pews.”
Church begins in parking lot
Church consultants say theology is taking a back seat to four other things people look for in a religious congregation: music, youth and family programs, convenient parking and a warm welcome, said Edward Viljoen, senior pastor of the Center for Spiritual Living Santa Rosa.
“We say church begins in the parking lot,” Andy VomSteeg said, and New Vintage deploys volunteer greeters to welcome people before they reach the church door.
One reason he relocated services from the Sonoma Avenue church was the limitation of its 92 parking spaces and learning that his congregants were parking up to five blocks away.
The Wells Fargo Center offers people ample parking and the same comfortable seats they've filled for pop and classical music concerts, lectures, dance and dramas. Lapsed Catholics, disaffected Protestants, at least one secular Jew and a bevy of recovering addicts are among those finding comfort, strength and a sense of community under New Vintage's Christian tent.
‘I started to feel something'
Jason Windus of Santa Rosa, who grew up with rock and roll — “long hair and all that,” he said — and no religion, found inspiration in New Vintage's amped-up music. “It grabbed me,” he said. “I started to feel something. It was God.”
Windus, 37, and his 10-year-old son, Bailey, were baptized by VomSteeg together in a private swimming pool on Bennett Valley ridge in October. The church has changed his life, he said.
“Just knowing that I've been forgiven for what I've done,” said Windus, who is in a 12-step addiction recovery program. “It allows me to look forward to each day in a new light. It helps me to do the right thing.”
Bailey, a fifth-grader at Whited Elementary School, enjoys singing with the teacher and lessons on subjects like cooperation, in the UpStreet program for elementary school students. “Once in a while I go into the big group” in the auditorium service, he said. “It's really cool.”
Jason Windus, who's been attending for nine months, also brings his son Dakota, 2½, to New Vintage. “They're going to get something I never had,” he said.
A Rohnert Park man who is also in recovery from addiction said the church is a haven. “It's just easy to come here,” he said. “Everybody's really cool."
Logan Adams, a Santa Rosa real estate agent, said he was raised a Southern Baptist in Denison, Texas, where 2,500 people attended the First Baptist Church. “You were taught to fear God,” he said, by a faith that threatened sinners with damnation to hell. It also forbade going to the movies and dancing, the latter prohibition Baptist youths circumvented by attending weekly dances at the Presbyterian church.
At New Vintage, the message is “God loves you,” Adams said. Belief in Jesus as the Messiah assures eternal life. “Even if you sin, you're still going to heaven," Adams said. “It's completely different. It's freedom.”
Center's circular history
Adams, who moved to Sonoma County in 1972, attended the Christian Life Center, the 5,000-member congregation founded by the late Rev. A. Watson Argue, Jr.
As Argue's evangelical congregation swelled, it built a 140,000-square-foot landmark church along Highway 101 north of Santa Rosa, which was sold to local civic leaders in 1981 after Argue filed for bankruptcy and his church collapsed in a financial scandal.
Converted to a cultural center, the former church was first the Burbank Center for the Arts and in 2006 was renamed in a licensing agreement with Wells Fargo Bank.
Adams, who said he admired Argue's charisma, said it “feels good to be back” in the auditorium for church services. “It's almost like you're at a concert,” he said, “but it's a Christian environment.”
Jeff Wandel, a Santa Rosa business owner, bridged an immense religious gulf when he was baptized by VomSteeg last month. Born Jewish, Wandel had been bar mitzvahed and confirmed as a boy, but had stopped attending synagogue in high school.
A non-observant Jew — “I eat bacon and everything” — Wandel said he never imagined he'd wind up hosting a Christian church single-parents' group in his home.
Outraged by the theft of about $20,000 in collections at New Vintage's first Wells Fargo Center service in January 2009, Wandel said he went the following week intent on donating money to help cover the loss. But the human warmth Wandel said he found at New Vintage helped ease the pain of his father's death and his own wrenching divorce.
“It is such a welcoming place," Wandel said. “There is no handshaking; there's just hugging."
By December, with Hanukkah approaching, Wandel had decided to be baptized. He was trying to break the news gently to his Jewish mother, telling her how he had embraced this Christian church and a faith focused on a man the Jews do not recognize as the Messiah.
She said: “If you get baptized, I don't want to know about it,” Wandel said. He took it as an affirmation of her love and trust.
Wandel no longer considers himself a Jew. “Now I'm a Christian. I have turned a corner to a different place where I feel welcome. I feel very blessed.”
Andy VomSteeg said there is no point in “playing the church game if we're not here to solve a problem.” Just as Jesus's followers were sinners, lepers, tax collectors and prostitutes, New Vintage's doors are open to all, especially to those who have strayed from religion.
“Our level of spirituality is measured by how well we love one another,” he said.
And for those who find the hard-driving rock music too loud, earplugs are available at the door.
You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.
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