Bowling alley provides unique church space
Trend to repurpose existing spaces serves the Church and community
AT A SMALL lectern in the darkened auditorium at Hillside Church, a converted bowling alley with a growing congregation in London, Ont., senior pastor Pernell Goodyear stands to give a brief sermon about the redemption of Peter.
“God has this delightful habit of surprising people by redeeming a life or a situation that absolutely seems irredeemable,” says Goodyear. “We need only to open ourselves to the work He wants to do through us, in us and all around us.”
Goodyear, 46, is a veteran church planter with a Salvation Army background. He wears blue jeans and a casual white short-sleeved shirt that reveals his arm tattoos.
Redemption is a guiding principle at Hillside, an independent evangelical congregation that moved into the former Bowlerama on London’s Thompson Road last October after renovating it into a worship and community space (www.HillsideLondon.com).
“It’s a pretty great biblical metaphor that we take spaces that already exist and recreate them into something beautiful,” he says. “We hope to do the same thing in the neighborhood – why build something new when there are spaces that you can reuse and repurpose?”
Hillside formed in 2007 out of the former Wortley Baptist Church, a once thriving congregation that saw its
numbers dwindle in the 1990s and 2000s. “The change of the name was the first of a whole bunch of things to restart,” says Goodyear.
The congregation sold its cavernous building at Commissioners Road and Wortley Road, and looked for a smaller, more sustainable space nearby. It settled on the bowling alley for practical reasons.
“It was one big open shoe box,” he says. “There was a decent amount of parking, and it’s in a neighborhood that nobody’s really ever heard of that is very under-resourced.”
Hillside is one of several new churches in the London area that occupy unconventional spaces. Impact Church on Adelaide Street is in a building that once housed an electronics company. Destination Church in St. Thomas is a former downtown bar. More renovations are planned, but Hillside intends to keep four of the bowling lanes active. “We’re a pretty innovative and creative community,” says Goodyear. “And this is kind of in keeping with what we want to do.”