On Friday, Feb. 22, Dan Sluys is hoping to reimagine an event that hasn’t come to Agassiz for years.
Sluys, the youth director at Central Community Church, has been working to put together a worship night that will bring together members of Agassiz’s five churches: Agassiz Christian Reformed Church, the Agassiz United Church, St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, All-Saints Anglican Church and the Central Community Church.
“I just thought it was a really good thing for the community, a really good thing for the churches of Agassiz to do,” he explained, sitting at a table in Heritage House Cafe. “There’s so many churches in Agassiz, and the amount of stuff we do together is very small.”
The worship night, which will take place in the Agricultural Hall at 7 p.m. on Feb. 22, isn’t the first time residents have worked to bring Agassiz’s church community together. Pete Wiehler, a local paramedic who passed away from ALS in 2013, started one many years ago.
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“His vision was to see the churches of Agassiz come together and worship together. Put denominations aside,” Sluys said.
The event didn’t take off at the time, so Sluys is bringing it back with a modern twist.
The evening will feature a lot of music, Sluys said, mostly contemporary Christian songs that he hopes will create an upbeat atmosphere. He’s also hoping to get a member of the community to come speak about “a story of radical tranformation in a person’s life,” although he hasn’t confirmed whether that speaker will be able to come yet.
There will be no preaching, just “worship with an edge.”
“It’s not going to be your typical church service, it’s going to have a very different feel to it,” Sluys said. “It’s not going to be a rock concert, but it’s not going to be liturgical hymns either.”
Ultimately, Sluys hopes to have the worship night become a reoccuring thing for the community.
“I would love to see some continuity, whether that’s twice a year in the spring and the fall kind of thing,” Sluys said. “But our first thought right now is let’d do one and see what the feeling is, see what the thought is with the churches.”
Central Community Church pastor Eldon Fehr, who came out with Sluys to Heritage House, has brought up the idea with the ministers at Agassiz’s other churches and said they were all on board.
“This is not a Central thing,” he said. “It’s not a Dan (Sluys) thing. We want it to be an Agassiz thing.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story gave two different dates for the joint worship night. The correct date is Friday, Feb. 22.
grace.kennedy@ahobserver.com
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