As usual, Matt Davis spends his weekends performing music. As usual, he sdoesn’t dress up on Sunday mornings. On the surface, Davis’ life hasn’t changed much since coming to Grace Community Church.
Two years ago, Davis was an agnostic drummer in a local heavy metal band — not the stereotypical churchgoer. But that’s exactly the type of person Grace Church attracts, he said. “I found my way to church through this church, which is how a lot of people end up here.”
Three years ago, John Slye, a lifelong Arlingtonian and graduate of the Wesley Seminary, founded Grace Community Church on Christmas Eve. In the congregation for the first service were 18 adults and seven children. Now, in an average Sunday service, Slye said he preaches to about 125 – a 500 percent increase in attendance.
It was especially difficult since Slye has drawn churchgoers without a church building. Grace started meeting in a Mason’s Lodge on Wilson Boulevard and still have no plans to move into a permanent home.
Without the traditional means of expanding the congregation, Slye went high-tech, using the web and public access cable television in Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax. He also worked hard to create a new type of church environment, where members of the congregation host discussion groups at their homes, and cookouts and kickball games can follow Bible verses and sermons.
Slye wanted to reach out to people who had never gotten into religion, or who had become dissatisfied with traditional worship – to create “a church for people who don’t go to church.”
THAT MOTTO PROVIDED a starting point for understanding what the church is all about, said Bill Dean, who has attended Grace Church the last 15 months. “It sums it up, I guess, but it’s becoming much more than that,” he said.
Dean, 37, heads his own electronic securities company, M.C. Dean, and is one of the investors with the Virginia Baseball Club, the group that’s trying to bring the Montreal Expos to Northern Virginia.
Grace Church appeals to young professionals, said Dean, who are often turned of by the rigidity of traditional churches. “Some churches are like, ‘This is the only way.’ That’s just not the message here,” he said. “It is extremely unpretentious and very, very tolerant.”
The untraditional approach may rile Christian purists, Slye admits. But he’s received few complaints over the years. After attending a service, one visitor was upset by the informal attire, “I don’t think it’s right to wear shorts in the House of God,” she wrote in a note to Slye.
He shrugged it off. “Obviously we’re not the place for them to be,” he said. “People who don’t go to church, they just get it.” Traditionalists have a harder time adjusting to the informality, he said.
Even Russ Simms, Slye’s father-in-law, had to make some adjustments. “It was hard for us,” said Simms. “We grew up in a very traditional church.” But he trusted Slye’s judgment and is now a regular member of the congregation.
BUILDING A CONGREGATION from the ground up proves difficult just about anywhere, but doing it in Arlington presented a number of challenges. For one thing, there aren’t new pockets of development, where a new community pops up and residents need a place to worship.
In addition, the county’s many young singles are the least likely age group to attend church. “The demographics weren’t in our favor,” Slye said.
But by and large, those are the people Grace attracts. Many of Slye’s young parishioners on Sunday morning are in the same demographic as the crowds in Clarendon Saturday night.
Pili Hawes came to Grace Church two years ago, when she was studying for her master’s degree in chemistry from Georgetown University. “I was new to the area, I didn’t know anybody, and I was looking for friends as well as a church,” she said.
WITH SO MANY factors stacked against him, Slye often asked himself, ‘Why?’ “That’s a question that we labored with for a while,” he said. “Why here, why now?” He still hesitates to provide a definitive answer. Faith was a major factor. But Slye keeps an eye on practical matters as well.
Being different wasn’t a motivation in and of itself. “That wasn’t what was driving me,” Slye said.
One reason it’s hard to answer “Why,” said Slye, is because he doesn’t see the church as a completed work—it’s constantly evolving depending on the people in attendance.
Grace Church doesn’t have a membership. Having people sign on as members would be too rigid. It would have people thinking “rules” instead of “relationships” again, Slye said.
“People aren’t looking to join something. That speaks to religion,” he said, and Grace Church is about relationships—with people and with God, not about religion. “People are looking to belong to a community.”
It was the idea of a community that drove Slye to form the church – driving through Clarendon one Saturday night, he saw people lined up outside Clarendon Grill.
Those people were out in the community looking for something, Slye thought. In biblical times, Christ too was out in the community, looking for converts in the marketplace, finding future apostles– Slye thought it would be an apt model. “That’s where I want to have church, in that marketplace,” he said.
It would be a challenge, he admits. “You’d have to know the person who runs the bar,” he said. “Either that, or you’d have to build it yourself.”