Parishioners enter the newly opened Peace Tower Church on Bronson Avenue.
As more traditional churches close downtown, a church whose parishioners practice a more boisterous form of worship has taken over one of the empty buildings.
Last week, about 300 people descended on 343 Bronson Ave. to celebrate the opening of the Peace Tower Church.
The church took over the building that housed Erskine Presbyterian Church for more than 100 years.
“Our Kingdom of God conquered the city!” shouted Pastor John Mark Raymer from the altar. Hundreds of parishioners echoed him.
Raymer single-handedly founded the Pentecostal church on Carling Avenue five years ago with his wife.
Raymer says the congregation, which is drawn from across the city, is excited about the move to downtown.
“It is not who we are, to be a suburban church. We are committed to the city centre.”
He says with younger families and immigrants moving downtown, Erskine is a perfect location for a multi-ethnic church like theirs.
Having parishioners from 27 nations with an average age of about 35, Raymer says one of the church’s core values is empowering young people and laying a religious foundation for the next generation.
“If we have no commitment to that, there will be no next generation,” he says.
“Twenty or 30 years from now, there’ll be 40 people meeting here and somebody else will come here to try to renovate the mess we left.”
The church plays straight to young people's interests and tastes: rock music, hip-hop and break dancing are all incorporated into the service, especially youth sessions.
“We’re not doing the way that used to be done 20 years ago,” says Tara Hutchison, associate pastor for youth ministry.
“With what the kids are going through these days, they don’t need . . . an old-school church.”
“It’s a change for the better,” says 61-year-old Dianna Brown, who was clapping loudly with the rock music in the celebration service. “I accept young people’s way of expression.”
Raymer says they’re looking at ways to merge the old with new.
He has installed a pipe organ in the new church, which he says represents an old style of worship.
“We do our best to accommodate the elderly people’s need as long as we’re not compromising our core values,” he says.
The opening of the new church reminded some of closing the former.
With a congregation with an average age of 65, a declining senior population in downtown and high maintenance costs the century-old Erskine Church was forced out of downtown at the end of 2007.
The church amalgamated with Westminster United Church, headed by Rev. William J. Ball.
Several other downtown mainstream churches have faced the same demise.
St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church on St. Patrick Street was closed one month before Erskine.
One year before, the First United Church, one of the city’s oldest congregations, sold its building on Kent Street to the Ottawa Chinese Heritage Foundation and moved in with All Saints Anglican Church in Westboro.
Doreen McDougall was a member of the church for 60 years.
She suggests that the spate of church closures indicates a demographic shift in the downtown core, rather than an overall decline in traditional church attendance.
“It’s just the way it is. The city centre has become a multi-cultural society with new immigrants coming in and former residents moving out to the suburbs.”
But Ball notes that evangelical churches that incorporate pop music and dancing are doing something that the traditional churches are not able to do.
“They have a style of worshipping and praying that is more attractive to young people in the neighbourhood,” he says.
“They are able to handle changes better than the more established churches.”
“The bottom line is they lost their influence on the next generation,” Raymer says about the decline in mainline churches.
Hutchison agrees. “You have to continuously re-invent yourself,” she says.
“If you hold on to what was, then that’s when you start dying.”