Montreal church finds home in campus bar
MONTREAL, QC—Want to worship with The Living Room church community? Prepare to get your hands dirty.
The community meets at Reggie's, a bar on campus at Concordia University in downtown Montreal, every Sunday afternoon. They get to use the space for free, provided they clean the bar before worship.
"It's still our only membership process—you have to clean," says 42-year-old Michael Jones, who planted the church with his wife, Michele. "If you don't like cleaning bathrooms and urinals and potentially vomit off the floor, we're probably not the community for you."
Roughly 90 people, all of them younger than 45 and most of them in their 20s, call The Living Room their church home. As its website describes, "The Living Room is not a place you go, it's a community that encourages relationship with God, with each other and with the world—no matter where we are or what day of the week it is." It's an interdenominational congregation that is partnered with the C2C church planting network as well as the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches.
In addition to worshipping together, The Living Room focuses on campus outreach and service in Montreal's downtown core.
Jones says that many of the people he serves—20- to 30-year-olds—are fatherless and need mentors and people to encourage them.
"I don't want to disparage anybody, but the [impact of their] fatherlessness and the broken homes they come from is profound," Jones says. "Young men who haven't been taught what it means to love and respect women, young women who don't know what it means to love and respect themselves—God's given us … a grace to just love on them."
Jones views the church as a spiritual family.
"You don't pick your church—God places you in the body as He decides, and once you're in, it's a family," he says, adding later: "I think family is the vehicle God uses to reflect His love probably most vividly."
Originally from Milwaukee, Jones was playing drums in Nashville for the Christian rock singer Plumb when he felt God calling him to Montreal. He started an outreach ministry at Concordia that led to 12 young people becoming Christians. The group started a Bible study that eventually turned into a house church in Jones's home.
In 2007, a student suggested that Reggie's might be an interesting place to meet for worship on Easter Sunday. The manager at the time was skeptical, but told the group that if they cleaned up, they could use the space.
Worship was at 6 p.m. and Jones and his group showed up at noon to start cleaning.
"Reggie's after a Saturday night is not a pleasant place to be," Jones says. "There were corners of that bar that I don't think had seen the light of day in decades. It was just nasty. At about 3 p.m., the bar manager walked in and he flipped out—he'd never seen the bar look (so clean). I told him, we just wanted to leave it better than we found it."
That night, 50 people gathered for worship. The gospel was preached, relationships were formed, and Jones asked the bar manager if they could use the space again. He replied that if they kept cleaning the bar, they could keep using it each Sunday. And so they have.
Jones says that while The Living Room is changing—young families are now the largest growing segment of the community—the group has no plans to stop meeting at Reggie's.
"We're called to be downtown and that's where we are, and that's what we reflect," he says, adding that when the community received the use of the bar, he saw it as "God giving us territory in a dark place."
"It's truly God's favour," Jones says.
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