What’s Playing at the Local Movie Theater? Church

Pastor Wes Beavis showed part of a Hollywood movie at church one recent Sunday.

It was a scene from “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” a film starring Will Smith and Matt Damon, about a disillusioned man who takes up golf.

The point was a modest one about doggedly pursuing one’s goals. It was brought home more forcefully, however, by being displayed on the big screen at Edwards Stadium 10 cinemas in Irvine’s Market Place mall.

“We’d be lost without the screen,” said Beavis, the 43-year-old leader of Destiny People Christian Church, which holds services at the theaters each week. The screen, he said, plays a central spiritual role. “The great thing about it is that it’s huge. We fill it with my messages, PowerPoint presentations, words to songs and great images of nature.”

The 5-year-old, 150-member congregation is among a growing number nationwide offering salvation Sunday mornings where popcorn is the usual fare. The trend is especially pronounced in Southern California, experts say, combining, as it does, two popular activities: going to movies and attending church.

“It’s a very good business for us,” said Kurt Hall, chairman and chief executive of National CineMedia, a Denver-based conglomerate whose 4-year-old subsidiary, CineMeetings, rents theater space to 83 churches nationwide at prices he declined to disclose. Eleven of them are in California, almost all in Southern California. And by year’s end, Hall says, the company expects to have more than 100 congregations in tow. “It’s stadium seating,” he said. “A lot more comfortable than regular church.”

It’s also good economics. Back in 2002 when the company started, Hall said, theater multiplexes were looking for ways to use such down times as Sunday mornings before the first screenings begin. And financially strapped churches were seeking places to hold services.

“I think more and more churches are looking for someplace to go before they can raise the money to build their own facilities,” Hall said, adding that worship in theaters is especially popular in such areas as Southern California, where real estate prices are high.

That’s the main reason California Victory Church has been holding Sunday services at South Coast Village cinemas in Santa Ana for three years. “We can’t find a church building,” said Neal Doty, an associate pastor at the church. The major drawback,” he said, is that “you have time restraints -- you can’t really leave it set up the way you want.”

But the benefits outweigh the inconveniences, Doty says. “The advantage, especially for churches that are growing, is that you’re renting it for one day instead of seven, when it’s usually empty. It’s good for beginning churches because theaters are inexpensive, well-distributed throughout the Southland and you don’t have to put down a big investment at the beginning.”

In fact, some experts assert, the move into theaters is part of a larger national trend away from the cloistered settings traditionally associated with church. It’s about “trying to get out into the community instead of being in a country club and saying ‘come to our club,’ ” said J. Frederick Davison, executive director of the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology and the Arts at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. “It’s meeting in the public square, where people gather.”

Along the way, other advantages emerged.

Multiplex theaters, congregants found, are almost always near restaurants, pedestrian malls and shops. They provide comfortable environments, familiar and non-intimidating to most. And, in an age increasingly driven by technology and what Davison describes as “more dramatic and theatrical” worship services, theaters offer big screens and audiovisual equipment that can make those services sing.

“You can change the whole feeling of the auditorium,” Beavis said, “by putting a different photo up on the screen.”

Lots of that was happening one recent Sunday as he dimmed the lights on his flock for the 9:30 a.m. service. While he preached, played guitar and showed pictures of snow-capped mountains in Theater 2, the church nursery was up and running in Theater 1. And as Destiny’s youth rock band rattled the rafters of Theater 3, children attended Sunday school in the lobby near the popcorn machines.

“We have to do a lot of setting up and taking down,” said Beavis, who started Destiny People Christian Church with a handful of congregants in 2001 after emigrating from Australia with his wife and two children. The fledgling independent, nondenominational church met at the John Wayne Airport Marriott hotel and, later, at a south Orange County school before discovering the cinema three years ago.

Not everyone took to it immediately.

Tom Stillwagon and his wife, Roberta, who attended a traditional Episcopalian church before joining Destiny People, initially found the experience unsettling. Worshipping in a movie theater, said Stillwagon, 51, of Long Beach, “was the weirdest thing and the highest hurdle. I had to get used to it by closing my eyes and pretending I was in a real church.”

Eventually, he did get used to it, as apparently others have. A recent survey by CineMedia, a spokeswoman said, found that 84% of the churches served by the company report increased attendance since holding their services in CineMeetings’ theaters. And most members of Beavis’ congregation, the pastor says, have adapted to the setting quite well.

“I think it’s fun,” said Katie Schulz, 24, an occasional visitor from Yorba Linda. “It’s up-and-coming and culturally relevant. It gives church a young, contemporary feeling.”

Twenty-year-old Jeff Faulkner of Garden Grove agreed. Being in a theater, he said, “gives us an opportunity to reach out to the community.”

Indeed, as churchgoers recently drifted from the theater to their usual after-service coffee gathering in the lobby about 11 a.m., Edwards Stadium 10 staffers were already popping corn nearby for patrons of the 11:45 a.m. showing of “Glory Road.” Features with less godly titles included “Underworld: Evolution” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.”

“They don’t bother us,” one worker said, nodding toward the worshippers.

Apparently, the feeling was mutual.

“I don’t even think of it as a theater,” Tustin resident Angie Brandon, 48, said of the just-concluded service. “We could meet outside in the parking lot and I’d be just fine.”

Perhaps Faulkner put it best. “It’s not the building that matters,” he said, “but the people.”