Lifestyle
All Nations building new church
BY HEATHER CAMPBELL
Summer 2010 |
Music and technology is what drives the message at All Nations Church. A regular Sunday service includes uplifting songs performed by a six-piece band and harmonizing singers who get the congregation on their feet to sing.
There is something special about this Sunday service that attracts hundreds of followers. The pastoral team of Rev. Jeremy Mahood and his three associate pastors minister to one of the largest congregations in the city.
As other churches close their doors due to declining membership, this church just keeps growing. After bursting out of their own church walls, the congregation have been holding services at the Fraser Auditorium to accommodate the numbers.
A new church is being built off of St. Raphael St. in Minnow Lake. Th $5-million church, which will have an 800-seat auditorium, is expected to be open for worship in 2012.
"Marketplace Christianity for the common person" is how Mahood describes his church.
"We have taken an older expression of Christianity and tried to bring it into the market place of everyday life," he explained.
He says he believes Christian churches need to become more relevant with the issues we face today such as divorce and technology.
"We are reinventing ourselves to speak to the issues of the day and not issues from the 1950s and 1960s."
Mahood grew up in All Nations Church. His father was the first pastor in 1953. Kitchener and Jean Mahood and three- -year-old Jeremy came from Northern Ireland at the invitation of Jean's brother, Gordon Magee. A fellow pastor, Magee, had come to Sudbury in the early 1950s. Unfortunately, he was not able to stay in Sudbury. That's when the Mahoods answered the call and came to Canada.
"I was devastated when I arrived. It was March and I had never seen snow before. And it was all dirty," recalls Jean Mahood. "I was certain God had made a mistake, but we did what He guided us to."
That was 56 years ago. Now a great grandmother, Jean radiates acceptance and gentleness that is coated in an accent from her homeland.
"Acceptance and compassion are key words to describe the church today," she fondly confides.
The name ‘All Nations' came from the mixture of nationalities that attended the early church services.
"There were a lot of displaced people living in Sudbury after the war, and we would have our members read scripture in their own language," she says.
When Jean's husband retired, their son took his place at the pulpit. But before he took on the leadership role, Jeremy Mahood went looking for God first. He attended a seminary in New York City to study music and experiential psychology. He left the seminary to become an entertainer. He sang and played piano in some of New York's best nightclubs.
But as he recalls, God finally got his attention and gave him another opportunity to choose a different lifestyle. That new lifestyle meant coming back home to the church with his American wife, Eileen.
Listening to Mahood talk about his church, it becomes evident that his passion for helping people has come from his own experience of finding God.
"My own journey was to get connected with God," he says. "Although I grew up in a religious home with the rituals and the language, what I came to realize was that I didn't need all the religious trappings to be connected with God."
That is exactly what he is sharing with his congregation today and it appears there are many people who want a church that understands them.
"We go searching for a connection and many search in isolation but eventually we have to move to interdependence. Better together than alone. That's why it's important to worship together. Something happens when we are all together that cannot happen alone."
There are countless opportunities to get involved in this unique faith community including performing music, joining study groups, doing outreach work, or helping to put the message out on the internet or radio.
"I think we have the opportunity to help heal that pain and bring a sense of meaning and purpose that people are missing, and I actually think we know how to do that. If we can present Christ and Christianity the way He was intended to be represented; the way it was meant to be represented, there is healing in that. A lot of people have given up hope. There is tremendous emptiness there that I think we could help begin to fill by giving people a different view of the world in which they live, the view that Christ wanted us to have," says Mahood.
