Flood Sacramento, a local Christian church which seeks to touch the lives of young people through unconventional means, will use coffee, live bands and discussion groups to worship.Cup-A-Joe, a cafe located on the corner of 16th and P streets in midtown Sacramento, was sold to Flood Sacramento on March 1 and will change its name to Cafe Flood on April 1.

Flood Sacramento said it hopes it will be a way to reach the Sacramento community which according to Flood, has one of the largest concentrations of adults ages 18-35 in the nation, and convince them to come to church.

Flood, the movement, began in San Diego in 2000 as a way to get students involved in church. Pastor Sean Randall, part of the original movement, said church culture was not working for a lot of students who wanted more freedom in how they worship, so Flood was created as a way for students and young people to feel more comfortable and welcome at church services.

Pastor Ryan Walton, who followed the church here from San Diego, said the church has had a more difficult start in Sacramento because the community in general does not seem drawn to the idea of church, so the cafe in midtown will be a way to introduce people to the idea of Flood in an everyday setting.

“We’ve found that we need to be more one-on-one in Sacramento than we did in San Diego,” he said. “In San Diego we were trying to reach 3,000 students so the shows were much more grandiose.”

Flood Sacramento began in September 2004 and has grown from 20 members to more than 160 with the help of Club Flood at Sac State. Lindsay Holiday, the club president, said the group has been working to raise awareness among students and working to get them to come out to church services and events.

The church holds services every Sunday and members do community service one Saturday each month for homeless or elderly people, Holiday said.

45 percent of club is Sac State students

Randall said the club has been successful at getting students involved and nearly 45 percent of participants are Sac State students.

He said it has been more difficult getting community members to come out because they assume the services, held at Sac State, are only for Sac State students.

Cafe just one aspect of creative ministry

He said the cafe will be another way to let people in the Sacramento community know they are welcome at services and to get them involved in the church.

Holiday said the cafe is just another way to connect with people and with the community and it shows the innovation of the church leaders who perform church services in a less conventional way.

At Flood all of the traditional Christian rituals are performed, including communion, baptisms and prayer, but in a style that fits better with student culture, Randall said.

The rituals are one of the few things that are traditional about the church.

Church services are not held inside a standard church building, and there is no choir, no piano, no hymn books and no pulpit.

Instead, a band with guitars and drums sings in a candlelit room while the words to the songs are displayed on a projector screen using PowerPoint slide shows.

No dominant dress code at the service

Additionally, a dress code at Flood events is non-existent. Traditionally, church-goers dress in their Sunday best to attend church services, but that is not the case for members of the Flood congregation.

Some members of Flood wear their Sunday best, but others attend in flip-flops, jeans, T-shirts or tank tops. None of the members feels awkward because the pastors also wear different variations of clothing. Some wear suits while others dress in sweatshirts and jeans.

“Young people aren’t going to church because they feel like they’ll be judged by their clothes or their look and we wanted to change that,” said Randall, who was wearing flip-flops, jeans and a paisley button-down shirt.

Students attracted by fresh approach

Phuong Tran, Club Flood treasurer, said she got involved with the group because she liked the new approach to church.

“People have a set image of church,” she said. “They expect to go early in the morning, wear certain clothes, have a set routine; but with Flood we meet at night and dress how we want.”

It forces people to break away from what they’ve been taught is the correct way to worship, and allows them to be free just to worship, Tran said.

Travis Kane, a Sac State student, said he likes the more personal approach taken by the Flood staff. He said he joined the church when he moved here from Washington State.

“I had been looking around for a way to get more involved and I saw their booth set up in the quad and decided to see what they were about,” he said. “I had always been looking for something that gave me the sense of community that I get from coming here.”

He said his family had raised him Presbyterian, but he felt the hymnals and sermons there were presented for an older generation, and he never felt the people there genuinely cared about him. He said that his family supports him going to the less traditional Flood services because it keeps him worshipping.

Rebecca Adler can be reached at [email protected]