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Sunday services are generally held in large, rented-out venues such as high-school auditoriums and downtown dance clubs. Or in the strobe lights, which are as integral to the C3 experience as beer is to a football game.Ĭ3 doesn’t look or sound like a traditional church, not least because most of its locations don’t have a single physical church. In the United States, wherever there’s a large urban population of young people-in Atlanta Los Angeles San Francisco Portland, Oregon and so on-there’s probably a fast-growing C3 church where believers revel in the bright, pulsing, polychromatic glory of God. Its goal is a million weekly members but, for now, C3’s weekly services are attended by more than 112,000 people worldwide. Nearly 40 years and one rebrand later, C3 has “planted” more than 550 churches in 64 countries. Its contemporary music and laid-back vibe soon attracted so many people that it expanded to a warehouse and partnered with neighborhood churches, becoming known as Christian City Church. The inaugural meeting of the church, then called Christian Centre Northside, saw 12 people gather on Easter Sunday in a small surf club on Sydney’s northern coast. C3 was founded by Phil Pringle and his wife, Chris, in Sydney, Australia, in 1980. C3 NYC is one chapter of C3 Church Global, an international “movement” of evangelical Pentecostal churches catering to young people. Kelsey-Pastor Josh to everyone who knows him, which, from what I can tell, is a lot of people-is the lead pastor of C3 NYC, which holds Sunday services in five New York neighborhoods (Bushwick, Williamsburg, downtown Brooklyn, Gramercy, and Long Island City).
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When you picture a house of worship, does a concert venue come to mind? A nightclub? What about a converted warehouse? No? Then you’ve never seen Josh Kelsey, the public face of the hippest chapter of what might be the hippest church on earth, come onstage to preach the Gospel. Wait, wait: have you ever seen a pastor crack jokes about Williamsburg’s gentrification and being a dolphin with “porpoise” while wearing Nike high-tops, acid-washed jeans, and an Apple Watch? When you picture a house of worship, does a concert venue come to mind? A nightclub? What about a converted warehouse that’s only hours removed from hosting a rave, the kind of nightlong hedonistic vortex where strangers looking for drugs befriend strangers willing to part ways with theirs? Have you ever been to a church where the Jesus music is so loud that some congregants-young, hip urbanites all-wear earplugs? Where the Christian pop-rock stirs people into such rapture that they jump up and down, both feet leaving earth, both hands raised ecstatically skyward, as if in a mild-mannered mosh pit? Where half the pastors, band members, and congregants have nose piercings and the other half have forearm tattoos, and a teeny-tiny beanie is the accessory du jour?