Our Church

Carrie and I had the pleasure of worshiping this morning with our church - Vintage Faith Church. This is the church that we have been a part of since we've moved out here. Recently, our church joined ministries with First Presbyterian Church of Santa Cruz. It's kind of a wierd relationship, as there is one set of buildings and one staff for two different churches. We aren't becoming "presbyterian," nor are they becoming non-denominational. One of the pastors compared it to a KFC/A&W - 2 eateries doing a whole lot of sharing under 1 roof.

It's actually kind of a cool story - allow me to explain. Vintage Faith Church (VFC) is actually a church plant of Santa Cruz Bible Church. We were meeting in their facilities, but the location wasn't the best. One of the visions of VFC is to have a presence in downtown Santa Cruz. So, we as a church were praying for options to open up downtown. An anonymous donor gave a bunch of money to purchase a building, but no one was selling space downtown. So, they were starting to consider other alternatives. Somehow our head pastor, Dan Kimball, heard that First Pres might be a good church to talk to. First Pres is in an amazing location - very close to downtown, a high school, a middle school, and their parking lot is used during the week for UCSC. So Dan calls First Pres' pastor up to talk about the possibilities. Their pastor then tells Dan that their church leadership had been praying about talking to Dan about the possibilities of joining ministries! God was clearly working in both of these churches, long before they knew it.

So since this Easter, our churches have been sharing. I think it's been going really well. The First Pres people have been really welcoming, and it's been great to have a better representation of the different generations (VFC was heavy on the 20 year-olds and light on everything else). We started a series today dealing with The DaVinci Code, looking at what we as Christians believe and how those beliefs originated. I'm really looking forward to it.

This photo was taken at our church a couple of weeks ago. It's only in Santa Cruz that you would come across this in the parking lot! (Those are wetsuits, in case you can't tell). Out for a surf before the gathering!