Pro-Gay Church Plans To Open Brewery & Donate Profits To Planned Parenthood

The Greater Purpose Community Church in Santa Cruz, California is making headlines not only for its unusual practice of drinking while holding services, but also for its plan to open a brewery and its promise to donate part of the profits to local charities that include Planned Parenthood. 

The pro-LGBT church, which also claims that Jesus was a Palestinian rabbi killed because of White supremacy, may seem almost too liberal to be possible, even for a post-modern progressive church. 

Unfortunately this church is not internet satire - it is all too real.

Pastor Christopher VanHall didn't start Greater Purpose Community Church with beer on his mind. For five years, they held services in a traditional church building, but it was only recently that they sold the building and changed their venue to a local food lounge, ostensibly to save on costs. Pastor VanHall noticed that the congregation tended to indulge during the service, and it soon became a staple. 

When asked about drinking during the service, he explained, "We don't want to dupe anyone, we don't want to have this bar, and say 'ok come on in' and boom you get a church service. We don't want that. They can have one or two, as a matter of fact, he joked, if they have two my sermon's always better."

Taking the idea of beer and worship and running with it, Pastor VanHall and the church leadership now have plans to relocate to a brewery, sometime in the summer or fall of 2019. "I thought to myself, 'wouldn't it be great if a church could figure out a way to make a product where they split the profits with local community service organizations?' We were like 'hey, we love beer, we love making beer, why not do a brewery?'" 

The location will be an abandoned bookstore that also houses Planned Parenthood, which also happens to be one of the local "community service organizations" that the pastor said he would be proud to support with 30-60% of the brewery's profits. On the subject of Planned Parenthood, the Pastor glossed over the realities of abortion as he gushed, "[Planned Parenthood] which we adore and support their efforts for giving health care to women."

Currently, a rainbow flag flies outside the food lounge where the church meets for sermons and Sunday jam sessions, a reflection of their support for the LGBT lifestyle. Affiliated with the Disciples of Christ denomination, the church prides itself on being inclusive of all races, all sexual orientations, all political views and even all faiths, though they do still claim to follow Christ. 

VanHall asked in a recently published video interview, "What would it look like to be a church that looked like the movement that Jesus started and not like the church that we know in America today?"

The church's radical claims that Jesus would support homosexual or transgender lifestyles and that He was a Palestinian-Jewish rabbi killed by White supremacists (the Roman Empire, for the rest of us) place the group's belief on the far left of the spectrum. To round out the group's beliefs, they are also environmentalists, feminists, LGBT affirming and fight for racial justice. 

As a radical social experiment though, in a few years time will we see a struggling brewery that sometimes hosts a few pseudo-Christian radicals, or will we have a church so far away from Christianity that gimmicks like luring worshippers into the pews with beer is its only way to stay relevant?

Either way, it will bear no resemblance to the church for which Christ gave His life to cleanse and to sanctify. "That He might present it to Himself, a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish".  (Ephesians 5.27)