Gilead Church Celebrates its 2nd Anniversary
Gilead Church in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago celebrated their second anniversary, January 20th. Rev. Rebecca Anderson, one of the two pastors shares in a recent church email, “Gilead is a queer, storytelling, bar church that meets…in a theater (not a bar). For now. Starting February 10 (no church Feb 3!), we’ll be a queer, storytelling, bar church that meets at Mary’s Attic (5400 N. Clark) — a Rogers Park church meeting in an Andersonville karaoke joint. It can all be a little…disorienting.”
Vince noted in his sermon that “we’ve started a church to say: that the point of a spiritual life is not to learn to love the things that are sacred, but to learn the sacredness of the things we love.”
Vince also shared that “the point of music in church is to get you out of your head and into your feelings. To drop you down into your body, into your heart and be moved. To experience joy and pain, and hope and rage. To stop feeling separate and self-conscious for a minute and remember our deep connection to each other and to everything. To stop trying to understand life and God and just take a shortcut to experiencing the sacred. The point of music in church, I think, is to let it do what music does. Anywhere”
“When we started Gilead,” Vince stated, “we insisted that ‘everyone’s story is a God story.’ No one is left out. But that turns out to be only half of it. The other half is: all my stories are God stories. And all yours. There aren’t some pieces that belong and others that get left out. There aren’t church stories and outside-of-church stories. There aren’t sacred songs and secular. It’s all one. It’s all secular, and it’s all sacred. All human, and all divine.
Co-pastors Rebecca and Vince, with two lay leaders, met this past fall with the New Church/Ministries Team (NCMT) to present a grant request for funding from the CCIW for their second year. With the presentation and through observation over this past year, the NCMT is excited about where Gilead Church is at and where it is going. We celebrate with Gilead, a church of “real butter Christians.” www.gileadchicago.org
Jeff Zimmerman
CCIW Minister for New Church/Ministries
