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Building churches from the ground up
Asenapha Bentley, originally from Fiji but now living in Santa Rosa, sings and prays during Sunday services at Metro Church held at the Steele Lane Community Center, June 20, 2010.
Crista Jeremiason / PDPublished: Saturday, June 26, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, June 26, 2010 at 9:48 p.m.
A slide projected on a screen in the corner of the DeMeo Room announced the sermon subject: “Proclaiming the Power of the Pentecost.” The band — three Fijians, a Samoan and two white Americans — warmed up.
Then Pastor Joshua Mateiwai, who had been fiddling with his laptop, took the front of the room. He was energized and it showed. He moved from side to side, rubbed his hands, bounced on his toes, already starting to sweat. His shirt was drenched by the end of the service.
“Let's move around,” he called, speaking through a wireless microphone headset. “Let's declare the goodness of the Lord.”
This low-ceilinged, rectangular room in the Steele Lane Community Center is absent any religious iconography or symbols. It has a mottled-blue carpet and a fireplace, a door that opens into the community center's parking lot, and, at the rear, an industrial kitchen with a metal accordion gate.
Every Sunday, it is home to Metro Church, one of seven churches that rent space in Santa Rosa community centers and are part of a growing flock of Sonoma County congregations that have started their churches from the ground up.
These religious entrepreneurs, often beginning with two or three members, finds space in public buildings, warehouse districts and office parks, established churches and downtown storefronts.
Mateiwai tells his congregation: “Where we meet, in the Steele Lane Center, you can meet in church, you can meet in a sanctuary, the underlying purpose has not changed. God has come to meet you there.”
Some of the churches are nondenominational, like Christ the Healer, which convenes down the hall from Metro at the Steele Lane Center and emphasizes healing through prayer, and New Birth Community Church, which meets at the Bennett Valley Senior Center.
Others are evangelical, like Metro and New Day Christian Church, which meets at the Finley Community Center and has about 100 members.
They view their spaces of worship in different ways.
Some consider them way stations en route to bigger things.
“I want it to grow so big that we're going to have to have an amphitheater to put it in,” said Bob Cary, 57, a self-employed businessman in the telecom industry, who joined Metro in November.
Others say that the smaller, nonreligious spaces are suited to their congregations.
“There's a lot of people who won't come to a church building but will come to a community center,” said Dustin Gallup, pastor of the New Day Christian Church, which has met at the Finley Center for about four years.
Energetic, emotional service
As Metro's service moves on, Mateiwai cries out: “We declare the fire of God all over this building today.” With each new exhortation the energy in the room rises noticeably; congregants raise their hands skyward, some cry out in reply.
This is the way of Pentecostals, who assert the infallible word of God as written in the Bible and believe that Jesus Christ is soon to return to Earth. Their intense brand of spiritualism drives worship services often full of emotional peaks.
At a recent service, Dedra Archini collapsed backward in tears while Mateiwai and others held her and prayed for her, the congregation gasping at this sign that God had inhabited her body.
“I'm on a new plane spiritually and I just don't want to be anyplace else,” Archini, 40, said later. A cashier at a Petaluma Safeway, she joined Metro about a year ago.
Hers is a church that has set its sights on a much larger future — one that would propel it into larger quarters and vastly extend its reach.
“I'm expecting we're going to grow past 100 people maybe by the end of July,” said Mateiwai, who arrived from Fiji in December at the invitation of Jeremiah and Eleanor Temo, Fijian immigrants who founded the 3-year-old Pentecostal Charismatic church.
The church, which started with six people and now has 64 registered members, is one sprout of Pentecostalism, the world's fastest-growing branch of Christianity — and on many social issues, one of the most conservative.
Fast-growing sector
In Sonoma County, it reflects the growth in the number of evangelical Protestants. Evangelical Protestant churches in the county grew from 83 in 1980 to 119 in 2000, the latest year for which data are available. Church membership over that period grew by 5,350, to 24,632.
“This is the grass roots of something exciting,” said Jeanie Barnett, 63, of Cloverdale. “It's the beginning of something that will affect the community in a great way.”
Mateiwai, 43, has a singular mission: to expand the church.
“I'm looking for 500 members in a matter of about three or four years,” he said in a midweek interview scheduled between appointments he'd made to counsel church members.
The pastor goes about his work with the zeal of a management guru, a role he played in the Pacific Islands, where he oversaw 350 Pentecostal churches, and worldwide, speaking at conferences and churches from South Africa to England, he said.
“We definitely run it like a business,” he said of Metro. “Effectively and efficiently.”
He has formed teams of churchgoers, such as the Eagles Leadership Team, and is holding training sessions to hone their ministry skills.
“There's no way for a church, just like a company, to run effectively and productively without leadership,” he said.
He is planning a July youth conference — complete with “lights and smoke screens” — to strengthen ties between the church and the community and to recruit young members.
“Because people beget people, just like money begets money,” he said. “We want to be involved in the community. I don't want to be a church in the 21st century that is ancient and old. I want to be relevant in the community I'm in.”
Mateiwai — who is paid $250 a month by the church, which also provides him an apartment — charts a decidedly modern path to that end, declaring that Metro Church must not be “religious.”
“When a church becomes religious we lose our personal contact, our personal impact with people, because people don't want to be religious, they want to be real,” he said.
Since arriving, Mateiwai has seen the congregation climb from 13 to 64 members. The music is louder. Its prayer and study groups have multiplied. It's bringing in more than $1,000 a week in contributions. Even the church's name — originally, and still for official purposes, Oasis — has been changed to mirror its rising aspirations.
“‘Metro' means something big,” Mateiwai said. “I don't like religious names, I always like a name that is like an advertising name, an in-your-face name.”
Answer to prayers
The roots of Metro Church are in the Temos' modest home in Larkfield, where, in 2007, they were praying.
They were members of another Fijian-led Pentecostal church, Christian Mission Fellowship, which meets at the Finley Community Center, and which they had belonged to in Fiji. But they were looking for something different, something more focused on Santa Rosa.
“We need to work around the community that is right here, Jeremiah Temo, 52, said. “And that's why we were praying: ‘What shall we do?'”
The answer to their prayers: Start a church of their own.
“I do not have the intention to start the ministry, but the signal came,” Temo said.
Eleanor Temo, 47, resisted at first: “I said, ‘No, no,' because I know the responsibility that comes with it, the commitment. It involves time, your money. I said, ‘Forget it, Jeremiah, change your prayer.'”
But she relented. The couple — whose five children are still in Fiji — named the church Oasis, dug into their pockets for rent money, and held their first service at the DeMeo Room. There were three other woman and one of the women's daughters, a young and disabled girl who Jeremiah Temo believes has since been healed by God.
Switched to English
The first services were in Fijian. But that changed when Temo received what he described as a directive from God.
“One Sunday when I was getting up to preach, the Lord told me I had to preach in English, and ever since I am speaking to you in English,” he said.
The church grew slowly. But the Temos' vision was clear.
“It is a place where broken people — broken marriages, people who are rejected or hurt — this is a place where they can come,” Jeremiah Temo said. “It is the toolbox of God.
“The toolbox is the church. Bring all these rejected tools to the church, oil them with the word of God and they will come to be mighty in the word,” he said.
The Temos have shepherded the church to the point where it can take the next step, said Barnett, a retired cashier who was introduced to Oasis through a chance encounter with a Fijian woman in a Cloverdale store.
“They have stood the test of time,” she said. “They have faith beyond measure.”
In January, after periodically attending Oasis services and prayer groups for three years, Barnett and her husband, Barney, left their Cloverdale church, The Bridge, to join what soon would become Metro Church.
“We were committed to our church,” Barnett said. “We loved the people there, and yet this door was opening.”
Now the leader of the women's ministry at Metro, Barnett said, “God is orchestrating a team and putting a church together that he's called my husband and I to.”
There is an aspect to Greg Sterzenbach that recalls Jeremiah Temo's call to broken people. A quiet 34-year-old with a hesitant manner, Sterzenbach is among the newest of the church's regular attendees.
He is “struggling with some inner demons,” he said, not willing to disclose them fully. All he will say is that, “Three and a half years ago I did something I wasn't very proud of.”
During services, he sits quietly near the back. He is still when the congregation sways. His hands remain lowered when the others raise theirs high in prayer. Though he stands, he remains still when the band strikes up and singing gives rise to dancing.
At first, he said, the high-spirited nature of Pentecostal services was unsettling. It still is, to a degree.
Worshippers cry out in response to the preacher's calls, his neighbors sway and stamp their feet and raise their hands to the glory of God, the pastors occasionally speak in tongues, evidence, according to Pentecostals, that the speaker is filled with the Holy Spirit.
New spiritual experience
“I'd never seen anything like it before,” said Sterzenbach, who was once a Catholic.
Despite the unfamiliar spiritual terrain, Sterzenbach says he has started to find some comfort in the fellowship of the church, even as he struggles to understand the scripture that Mateiwai leads the congregation through each Sunday.
“I do believe in what they're saying, but sometimes I can't grasp it because I'm still new,” he said. “But I think it's a good place for me to be. It's shaping me into a stronger person than I was before.”
Another service ends with another round of prayers — included in its recipients are the Sonoma County supervisors and Santa Rosa's City Council.
Then a song to close the morning. The band builds to a crescendo as the congregation join in a lusty chorus:
“Santa Rosa, sings a new song
Reaching out with a new hallelujah
Every son and every daughter
Everyone sing a new hallelujah.”
“C'mon, feel it today,” Materwai cried. “C'mon, one more time today.”
You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com.
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