It is the church where grandmothers come in jeans and congregants enjoy a coffee break in the middle of Sunday worship service. Worshippers can dance spiritfully in the aisles to the soft-rock strains of contemporary Christian music.
Congregants sing along with the simple but catchy verses projected on a big screen.
The informality blends gracefully with the upbeat contemporary music and the low-key Pentecostal worship at the Vineyard Church in Stafford. The formula has propelled the church from 40 members to more than 1,000 in five years. In addition to the Stafford church, there are Vineyard churches in the Heights, Spring, Kingwood, Clear Lake, Bear Creek and Pearland. The informal attire, the music, the coffee break are all enticements to a new postmodern generation that grew up without a church home or had bad church experiences growing up, Waggoner said. But it also attracts many Christians searching for a new, challenging spiritual life.