By Lloyd Mackey

A happy camper at Evangel Church's 2008 'garage sale.'

The inside activity will be the traditional Good Friday service, with music and the spoken word intended to bring attention to the solemnity of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. Participants will also prepare for the commemoration of the resurrection.

Outside – and stretching into the community – will be an Easter egg hunt, complete with activities for children, personal testimonies and a range of other ways to “let people know the love of Christ, his faithfulness and his death on the cross.”

Those words come from Don Richmond, Evangel’s community pastor for the past year.

The Easter egg hunt is on the Easter weekend. Then, on May 23, the church’s humongous parking lot will host the second ever Evangel ‘garage sale’ – following up on last year’s highly popular post-Victoria Day event.

Richmond is tasked with, in effect, helping the 1,500 strong Pentecostal church to “alter its spiritual DNA.” The alteration process, he confesses, will take years – and is, by definition, a little difficult to describe in a few words.

But BCCN invited him to try, anyway.

Part of it is “having a church far more outwardly focused, having a fresh look at what the call to the church was in the New Testament.” And that means “it is not all about us; not just a larger crowd. It involves changing and adjusting our definition of success.”

In the case of the Easter egg hunt, the church is not “going it alone,” but doing “kingdom thinking.”

This involves, among other things, working in cooperation with Willow Park Church, a multi-site Mennonite congregation; and Victory Life Fellowship, a growing charismatic congregation on the north side of town.

And the garage sale, if it follows last year’s pattern, will be “103 [tables], a band, concessions and pony rides. We want the community to come to us, and to sense the peace of Christ.”

For Richmond, the task involves working with other Christ-ian leaders, including lead pastor Will Sohnchen – who, he noted, has taken a proactive approach to encouraging the changes, and is “excited” about it.

In effect, the egg hunt and garage sale only scratch the surface of things which are going on at a deeper level.

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Richmond described the plans he and Evangel executive minister Irv Cordes had, the day following the interview, to meet with “two people working with women involved in the sex trade.”

They were to discuss the possibility of helping in the development of a “mercy house” – a safe place in that community.

“We want to put our mark outside the walls of the church, and to capture the imagination of the younger crowd. The church is becoming far more socially active.”

At Evangel, he said, “we have [traditionally] viewed social action as cautionary. The born again radical kind of action, we might have left to the Salvation Army or the mainline churches,” he said.

The challenge to “change the DNA,” Richmond added, grows out of a “sense of restlessness in the younger generation, the loosened connection” with the established church.

“For many their idea of doing church is not mom and dad’s pew, choir or Bible study,” he noted.

For Richmond, at 51, the Evangel challenge is only part of his ministry work.

He is also the British Columbia coordinator of Hockey Ministries International. In that work, he is involved in developing and assigning chaplains to hockey teams at all levels of play.

That work, too, like the church DNA project, is “cross-cultural.” He said they find people who are “familiar with the game and the culture surrounding it, and they prepare them further in a cross-cultural training program that helps the chaplains to share “the love of Christ” effectively with the players.

He and his wife, Lorraine, came to Kelowna from 26 years of pastoring in traditional Pentecostal settings in Smithers and Vernon. They have three grown children, with three grandchildren and a fourth on the way.

April 2009