Furniture salesman turns "unchurch" pastor

By Mags Storey  |  Ontario Correspondent

Pastor Jeff Edwards has a heart for Canadians who are searching for God but are turned off by the institutional church. PHOTO: COURTESY JEFF EDWARDS

NORTH BAY, ON—When pastor Jeff Edwards turned a derelict Main Street movie theatre into a church and youth centre he received a mixed reaction from some local Christian leaders. Not for the flashing strobe lights, hover-hockey and pool tables, or even the iguana in the foyer—but for the name: “Unchurch.”

“Some people just don’t get it,” Edwards says. “Some have been offended or thought that we were somehow anti-church. But we are trying to reach the un-churched and the Lord told me to call it that. Once I’ve heard from the Lord on something, ain’t nobody changing my mind.”

An American who grew up in Ohio, Edwards dabbled in drugs as a teenager and still has a tattoo from a brief jail stint for breaking into a grocery store. In the late 1970s, while hitchhiking in South Carolina, he received a ride from someone who invited him to join a “cell group.” It was there that he became a Christian.

“I’ve always been an entrepreneur,” says Edwards. “In my early 20s I held a multiplicity of jobs and even sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Then I got a job selling furniture in the inner city.

“We went from a turnover of zero to 50 million in the first two-and-a-half years.”

By his early 30s, Edwards owned and operated stores in several states. “The only thing I had going for me was my mouth and my drive,” he says. “I made a lot of money—and I spent a lot of money.”

While living in Texas, he heard evangelist Jerry Savelle and found his life profoundly affected by the message Savelle taught.

“The simplicity of the message was a relationship with the Lord,” he says, “and a having victorious life in Christ—taking authority in the name of Christ, having dominion, being more than conquerors and knowing nothing can separate us from the love of God.”

Edwards began volunteering with Savelle’s ministry, and four years later was offered a job on staff. He soon became operations manager, and then national director of Savelle’s Chariots of Light motorcycle ministry.

It was during a motorcycle tour to Southern Ontario in 2001 that he says, “Canada just got into my heart. Every time I’d get around Canadians I’d just start crying, and I knew Canada was in my future.”

When a Christian businessman invited him to visit North Bay, Edwards says he felt God “compel” him to leave his
life in Texas and move his family north.

In 2005 he started holding Unchurch services in North Bay, and in spring 2008 he opened a second Unchurch in Sudbury, growing the ministry to a combined congregation of some 80 people. The former movie theatre, now renamed The Eden Project, is open as a youth centre twice a week.

Edwards also has a radio program, assists with a church plant in Wyoming and takes occasional mission trips to Costa Rica.

“People think I’m crazy,” he says, “but I firmly believe that you have to flow with the Holy Spirit and you have to be sensitive to what God wants to do.”

Edwards has invited other Christian churches to use the building and invited fellow clergy to preach from the pulpit.

“If you and I can agree on Jesus Christ we are okay,” he says. “We want this facility to be a gift from God and a facilitation of the gifts of God.”

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