Penny Pincher
Charleston Vineyard Church branches out
By Elizabeth Bush
Mar 11, 2009 - 11:02:21 AM

The Charleston Vineyard Community Church,now meeting on Sundays in the Daniel Island School, has grown to about 60 members. Newcomers are welcome.

David Bateman can sell you real estate, or even paint your house. Both are side businesses for the Charleston area resident, who lives with his family off Clements Ferry Road in the Peninsula subdivision. But he can also offer you something more. A chance to encounter God in an engaging and perhaps unconventional new way.

It’s called Charleston Vineyard Community Church, a growing congregation that David and his family started just under three years ago. Its primary goal is summed up in a simple catch phrase often printed on church flyers and brochures. Looking for God, but tired of religion? We are too.

"That was coined by my teenage daughter and it’s always stuck," said David. "That really boils down to what we’re about."

Previously, David was head pastor at Isle of Palms Baptist Church, but in 2006, he felt a new call stirring within.

"We just got to a point where we wanted to do things a little bit differently," said David. "So we were wrestling for quite a while about how to do that, because we were doing okay at that church. We lived two blocks from the ocean! We just kind of had that angst inside that something needed to happen."

The wrestling continued, said David, until he and his wife, Laurie, stopped in at Daniel Island’s Queen Anne’s Revenge one evening for dinner. Divine treasure soon flowed right onto his bread napkin.

"I just had one of those ‘God’ moments right there in the restaurant," recalled David. "So I took out the piece of paper that the bread comes in and just started writing things down! What I wrote down I just really felt like was too loud to be audible. The feeling I got was, ‘if you want to break out, you have to break free.’ And it was kind of the last step that needed to happen inside of me for us to be able to make that big step."

The family moved out of the parsonage at Isle of Palms Baptist and purchased their current home in the Peninsula, all without any promise of income, said David.

"I talked and preached about walking by faith," he recalled. "And now it was like, okay, how are we going to do this?"

But the Bateman’s leap of faith paid off. Both David and Laurie were very interested in the Vineyard Church concept, which promotes joining together to bring the love of Jesus to a hurting world. In the fall of 2006, they formed a couple of small groups with other families to begin living out their new message.

"It was a sum total of 12 people," said Laurie, laughing. "Including the children!"

The groups led them to the next phase of their church’s development, services at Ready, Set, Jump! on Clements Ferry Road. They met in the cake room on Sundays, with the adjoining jump castles a great draw for the kids. The seemingly unlikely place for worship turned out to be just what they needed to get their new faith ministry off the ground.

Vineyard Pastor David Bateman share a life applicable message with members of the congregation.

"It was good because it definitely did not have that church feel to it," said David. "We were trying to do things a little outside the box, and this sort of forced us to."

In two years’ time, their Vineyard membership grew to about 60 or 70 people and the space at Ready, Set, Jump! began to feel a little tight. The Batemans knew it was time to begin praying about a new location. Soon an opportunity opened up at the Daniel Island School, where Laurie cares for a special needs child during the day. Another church had been meeting in the school’s multi-purpose room on Sunday mornings but had decided to move to Park Circle. The opening was perfect timing for Vineyard members, who held their first services there in early March.

"We wanted an atmosphere for people to connect with God and each other," said David.

David, Laurie and a team of volunteers set up shop each and every Sunday morning at the school. The Bateman children, son Stephen, a college student at University of South Carolina, and daughters, Sarah, Shanleigh, and Summer, also help out. There is a "Vineyard Café" that serves coffee, a "Kids Kingdom" ministry that meets in the gymnasium, and full worship service in the multi-purpose room that includes prayer time, engaging music and life-applicable sermons.

"We want people to have that Wii mentality," said David, of the popular electronic game that encourages interaction. "I preached on this a couple of week ago. How is that different? You actually get to try it. And that’s what we want it to be like. We want people, however they feel comfortable, to get engaged. We’re trying to mix it up so that they realize that God can work through each of us."

The church most certainly practices what it preaches. The Vineyard faithful left gifts of hand sanitizers and Kleenex for teachers at the Daniel Island School one recent Sunday. They also have adopted the Russell Dale Community Center in North Charleston, a place they go to help children with afterschool activities. It all comes down to one main mission, said David.

"What was Jesus about?" he asked. "He was about seeing people loved and people set free and people being healed….That’s really what we’re trying to do. Show the love of Jesus in simple and surprising ways."

The fact that they don’t have their own church building yet allows them to focus on what’s really important.

"It’s a long term dream, but not having our own building right now helps us keep in mind that the church is people and not a building," said David. "…So I hope in the next couple of years that we’ll be able to get a daughter church started somewhere, but for now, we’re just trying to keep ourselves going in the right direction. It’s been really cool how God has provided for us all the way through….We’re just excited to see what he has in store for us."