Index: our Story

Ever try explaining how you ended up pastoring a Church that meets at a gay bar? You should try it sometime, you’ll get some interesting looks. You could choose to peg the start of Adullam at several points, our first meeting, the first time we had more than four people at a meeting, maybe you might want to start it after we finally get around to getting that tax exemption status? Well I’d say our story starts before we ever started meeting.

I was in my fourth year of Bible College, it was October 20th, 2006, and I was sitting at the MTS centre observing one of the most disturbing things I’d ever seen. It was called the Franklin Graham Festival, it was an evangelistic crusade lead by the son of famed Evangelist Billy Graham. There was loud music, stirring speakers, actually the whole thing felt like a manipulative twisting of the gospel that made my stomach churn. But the thing that I really took away from that evening was one of the video testimonies. They had a woman talk about how she had been sexually harassed at work, and then Jesus made it better. Another man talked about being an alcoholic, and go figure, Jesus made it better. The last one left me disturbed and angry though, since it was a man explaining that when he was younger, he realized he was attracted to other guys, and now he has a wife and kids, because somebody told him that’s the only way Jesus would ever love him.

Seeing that, I was angry. Actually, I was furious. I walked out of the MTS centre, and walked right down to the corner of Smith and York and walked into Gios one of Winnipeg’s gay bars. I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that God wanted me to pray. So I sat in a corner, and I prayed. I prayed for anyone I saw, that somehow God would put a Church in Winnipeg that would actually be able to effectively reach out to these people and share the gospel with them. It was one of those instances where I felt like I was praying for the impossible. I knew there were a few Churches in Winnipeg that wouldn’t turn a gay person away, but I knew that really wasn’t good enough. Strangely enough, a year and a half later I realized that God had used me to answer my own prayer. Near the end of May that same year, Adullam had its first meeting in my parents' basement. By early summer we’d moved to meeting at Matt’s house. We stayed there till December, and now we break the bread upstairs at Gios.

And this, my friend, is just the beginning.