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God’s people in The Valley of Sin

It’s a Tuesday night in Whistler. The band is hot, the music’s loud and the crowd is loving it. About 50 young people are moving to the rhythm and singing along. The lead guitarist looks cool – as a lead guitarist should. He has baggy pants, a "Burton" T-shirt and a great voice. The crowd looks like a typical group of young Whistlerites – baggy clothes, multiple body-piercings and rainbow-coloured hair. But these young people aren’t just looking for a good time, they are attending a Twentysomething Tuesday held by the Whistler Community Church, and they are here to celebrate their love for Jesus.

Going to church isn’t the first activity which comes to mind when you think about Whistler. In a resort which focuses on the pursuit of pleasure, people are a lot more likely to spend Sunday on the slopes, rather than at church. But as the community has grown, so have the three local churches. Still, although the numbers are up, they are far smaller than the congregations in other communities the size of Whistler. But then Whistler has never been a typical community.

Right from the beginning, the early residents of Whistler approached things a little differently. In the early days of settlement in British Columbia, a church was usually one of the first institutions established in a new community. Pioneers would build a church on every corner and each denomination would have its own building. This didn’t happen in Whistler.

The Whistler Skiers’ Chapel wasn’t built until 1966, 50 years after the valley was first inhabited, and from the start, the chapel was unusual. A brass plaque affixed to the wall 35 year ago said "Whistler Skiers’ Chapel, Canada’s First Place of Worship for all Faiths." The idea was that all faiths could share the same space. For over three decades, Whistler’s churches have limped along. All the different denominations did manage to share the tiny cramped chapel and, until a few years ago, the size of the chapel was not an issue because the Whistler congregations were so small. On some Sundays, as few as five or six people would show up at services.

Last year, the tiny Skiers’ Chapel was torn down and nowadays it is not unusual for nearly 200 people to gather in the gym at Myrtle Philip School at the Whistler Community Church service. Whistler’s two other churches, the United Church and Our Lady of the Mountains Catholic Church have also grown, but their numbers are much smaller, averaging about 30 to 40 people for a service. Tourists will buoy up these numbers on holidays and during the busiest part of the season, but for the most part the United Church and Catholic congregations are made up of a small core of hardworking members.

Now the United Church has teamed up with the Lutherans and Anglicans, and this Sunday, the three denominations will celebrate their first official multi-faith service in Maurice Young Millennium Place, continuing Whistler’s tradition of sharing space with other faiths. In addition, Whistler’s Jewish community will also use Millennium Place for their celebrations throughout the year. The Catholic Church has already built a community hall which they use for their services. And the Community Church is in the planning stages of building their own church facility. All of the churches are hoping that having buildings dedicated to worship will help increase their numbers.

The challenge of building a church congregation in a community which is focused on fun is a rather daunting one. Dr. Bill Burgess is a retired United Church minister with a doctorate in theology. He has visited Whistler frequently over the past 20 years because his daughter, Leslie, lives here with her family. "People don’t think of coming to Whistler to go to church," says Burgess. "But one of the biggest obstacles to church growth is probably the fact that Sunday is just another busy working day for most Whistler residents."

This sentiment is echoed by Harlene Walker, the minister for the Whistler United Church from 1994 to 1999. "The church doesn’t recognise the reality of the seven-day work week," remarks Walker. "Whistler is not unlike a lot of other communities where people work weekends and nights, but the church chooses not to respond."

Of course, a resort community does have some unique characteristics. The demographics, for instance. Whistler and other resort communities have a large percentage of the population in the 18 to 35 age group. This is an age group which often didn’t grow up going to church, and they don’t have extended family around who might encourage them to do so. Also, there is the transient nature of the population. People frequently don’t stick around long enough to truly become part of the community.

Churches in other resorts face many of the same challenges as the churches in Whistler. James Strachan is the minister at Rundle Memorial United Church in Banff and they too have struggled with building a congregation. "Resort communities never really mature," says Strachan. "There will be a small core of people who are committed to the church and they end up doing everything because the other people come and go." Strachan says sometimes the long-term members can become jaded because, no matter how enthusiastic newcomers are, they never stay very long.

Tim Unruh, the pastor of the Whistler Community Church, doesn’t think Whistler is that different from other communities. "Church life is transient all over North America these days," says Unruh. "The church in Whistler is more like a city church than a rural church. Whistler is less settled than the usual rural community, but the church is not that dissimilar from a city church."

Unruh is currently the only full-time church leader living in Whistler. The United Church, in conjunction with the Lutherans and Anglicans, is looking to hire a minister, but they are currently dependent on ministers from the city who take turns coming up once a month. The Catholic Church did have a full-time priest for several years, but they are now sharing a priest with Squamish. They haven’t been able to get a new priest to come to Whistler.

"Not enough vocations," says Father Angelo DePompa, the priest from St. Joseph’s in Squamish who also leads the masses in Whistler. "Not enough men are choosing the life of a priest." This is a problem which is plaguing the Catholic Church around the world. It has even led some in the Vatican to consider allowing priests to marry, or even more astonishing, to permit women to be ordained. But in the meantime, Father DePompa drives back and forth between his two flocks. Although Squamish only has a few thousand more people than Whistler, DePompa’s congregation there is over 10 times the size of his Whistler one – 320 people versus about 30.

The lack of a full-time leader has made it difficult for the United Church or the Catholic Church to undertake much of the work traditionally associated with a church. There simply aren’t the human or financial resources to do any outreach into the community. This may be one of the reasons why the Community Church has been so successful – the fact that they have had a full-time leader. But Tim Unruh says there is more to it than that.

Unruh came to Whistler after 10 years at Willingdon Church in Vancouver. This hugely successful church has 2,000 to 3,000 people showing up on a Sunday morning, and Unruh was the youth pastor at the church. "When I arrived in Whistler, I decided there were two key ministries – young adults and families with young children." Unruh consciously sought to attract these two groups. His first summer here, he started a youth group. The first week, two people showed up. The next week, two different people came. But he persisted and laid the foundation for today’s large Twentysomething Group.

Every Tuesday evening, members of the Twentysomething Group gather at the Myrtle Philip Community Centre to sing, laugh, celebrate and support each other in their faith. Last fall, the group was relatively small and they met at someone’s house. By midwinter, the group had grown to nearly 70 people some evenings and they had to move into a larger venue. These young people make up a large part of the congregation of the Whistler Community Church, a congregation which has nearly quadrupled in size in the past six years.

But why would young people be attracted to the Community Church, a Mennonite Brethren church with a reputation for being very conservative? "It’s the music," says Rev. James Strachan, who has seen the same thing in Banff. "The more fundamentalist churches have bought into using contemporary music in their services. And you tend to be attracted to the music you have grown up with. Other churches tend to be more musically conservative."

"The music speaks to their emotions," says Harlene Walker of the Whistler United Church, "and people who have an emotional hunger can be nurtured through music." Unruh agrees with the importance of the music. "It has to be in the language of the people in the community. In music, we see people’s hearts, their emotions. At our church, you’ll see people jumping around and dancing during a service. This helps them to express their joy."

And the Community Church is certainly a joyful place. Recently a young girl from Calgary commented to Unruh that there was a lot of passion in the congregation. Unruh thinks people pick up on this passion and they want to be a part of it. That sense of belonging is an important component of any church. Burgess says that many people are looking for a sense of community, and young adults are drawn to a church where there are other young adults. Walker says that a congregation will often reflect the minister – an older minister will usually attract an older congregation.

Recognising the reality of Whistler’s unique characteristics has definitely been one of the factors in the Whistler Community Church’s success at attracting young people. Many of the people who attend the Tuesday evening worship service can’t come to church on Sunday morning, because most of them work in the service industry and Sunday is one of the busiest days of the week. In an effort to reach out to young families, Unruh’s wife, Jeannette, has started a group for the mothers of young children. These "Mom’s Morning Out" gatherings have included cooking classes and craft workshops and they are attracting many women who have never been involved in the church.

Although Whistler’s churches aren’t as large as they could be, Harlene Walker says Whistler is definitely not a "Godless" place. "We may be church-less or synagogue-less, but we are not Godless," comments Walker. "A lot of people in Whistler are searching for spirituality and they may not necessarily find it in a traditional church setting."

Mel Diamond, a member of Whistler’s Jewish community, agrees. Diamond describes himself as "not a religious person" but he is looking forward to having people come together at Millennium Place to celebrate Judaism without a strong emphasis on religion. Diamond thinks people can feel the presence of God in many different ways and he stresses the fact that an important aspect of spirituality is bringing people together. "If Whistler doesn’t come together in a spiritual sense," says Diamond, "there will be no Whistler left. Just a community focussed on money and development. We need that spirituality."

Unruh too thinks that the church can become an integral part of the community of Whistler. Already he is seeing young people moving to Whistler because they have heard about the church here. "A few weeks ago, I got a call from Australia from a father. He wanted to thank me for what is happening in his boy’s life as a result of being a part of our church."

Unruh’s vision for Whistler? "I’d like to see a time when Whistler will be as well known for its churches as it is for its mountains."

In the meantime, young people are flocking to the Community Church. At the Tuesday night gathering, there is a young man dressed in typical snowboarder garb. Emblazoned on the back of his hooded sweatshirt is the bold slogan, "Snowboarders for Christ." When asked about his sweatshirt, he says he is from Fernie, where he and his brother have started an organization of Christian snowboarders from around the world. They even sponsored a "big air" event earlier in the season. What’s he doing in Whistler? Well, he heard about this really cool "snowboarder church" and he wanted to see it for himself. Maybe Unruh’s vision of the future isn’t too unrealistic.



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