IT’S NOT every day that a church buys a strip club, but Queensway Cathedral did just that. The Toronto congregation completed the $1.2 million purchase of the Casino Gentlemen’s Lounge across the road from its building in late June. 

The church intends to use the facility as an outreach centre. Senior pastor Billy Richards said he is expecting “tons of walk-in traffic.”

He added that, because “everybody in the neighbourhood” knows about the strip club, its ‘conversion’ may reach people the church isn’t currently reaching – since “a lot of people have trouble walking into a church.”

The church hopes to run a variety of recovery programs, including alcoholic recovery and grief counselling. The church already has a number of outreach ministries.

Richards said that when the club was operating, some of the strippers would drop into the church to talk about their problems. At a prayer meeting dedicating the building, a woman told him she is in a Bible study elsewhere in Toronto with three women who were formerly strippers at the club. She said they were “thrilled” about the development.

 Queensway Cathedral is a Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada congregation that was founded in 1953. It moved to its current location on The Queensway, now a six-lane arterial road, in 1962 and opened its current 4,000-seat sanctuary in 1985.  

Continue article >>

Richards estimated attendance has grown 30 – 40 percent in the past year or so. He has been at the church for more than two years.

Richards said pastoring in the city of Toronto is “very different.” A key element is cultural diversity.

“The beautiful part,” he said, is that we have people from all around the world in our congregation” – more nationalities than there are Sundays in the year. 

As well, many people in Toronto are “very poor.” Richer people tend to move out to the suburbs, but Richards doesn’t know of a millionaire in his congregation of about 1,700.

Nevertheless the congregation was able to raise over $500,000 of the purchase price for the new building in a few months. 

Richards noted it can be difficult, because Torontonians often “don’t feel love from the rest of Canada.” He suggested that this antipathy is unwarranted because if the big cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver experience revival, it will surely have a positive effect on the rest of the country.

The conversion of the former strip club is the kind of thing Richards would like to see happen on a larger scale. 

“I am very excited. We have taken something bad and through God are turning it into something good. It’s not every day you get to do that.”   – Jim Coggins

August 2007