At St. Margaret's Community Church I flourished. It was in some ways similar to the Jesus People, but gentler and more diverse. Being an actual church gave it a sense of stability lacking in the Jesus People. The baptism of the Holy Spirit was strongly experienced and felt there and very present during the services where there were frequent spontaneous prophetic messages, healings and many speaking and singing in tongues. The sense of God's presence and love was generally like a huge electricity that caught everyone in its powerful current. Often we would begin, all of us to spontaneously sing in tongues, and here was one of the unique features of St. Margaret's: the singing was always harmonious, beautiful and flowed with a divine order and rhythm and flow. It could be convincingly argued that God was our conductor.
I became particularly connected with a community house started by a seasoned missionary family that escaped shortly after me from the cult that had swallowed up the Jesus People. Two of their seven children became close and dear friends to me. I was there every Sunday after church for lunch and would spend the balance of the day hanging out with people there. Other kids like me were drawn there and we all became fast and close friends. Some moved in to the house. They were on the streets every day, witnessing and offering help to vulnerable people, inviting them back for a meal, a bed and in many cases a new life in Christ. I met people from all over the world and all walks of life. This was for a fifteen year old boy an incredible life education.
The leader, the family patriarch, did have an authoritarian streak and could often err on the side of intolerance and ignorant conservatism and often there was tension between him and his incredibly bright and open minded children.
At sixteen, my field of contact broadened even more and Big Bird (a woman seven years my senior) who had a resume in radical leftist revolutionary politics and whole earth vegetarianism and social and political activism took me under her wing and I became a regular in her community house. She also had a slight tendency towards authoritarianism as well as a sarcastic tongue that would be the envy of Joan Rivers. We were fond of each other but we also clashed. I met the most amazing people in her home and she taught me a lot about healthy vegetarian food, cooking and nutrition. She also sang like an angel and we often prayed together.
At seventeen I was a regular in a house in West Point Grey with a middle aged Christian woman, her teenage daughter and friends.
We were all connected to St. Margaret's and there was a lovely fluidity to our friendships. We shared everything in our teenage idealism and no one really bothered to claim anyone else as a best friend exclusive to others. We were all best friends and we kept letting the circle widen. Love, the love of God, was our rule.
It didn't last, of course, because it couldn't. My own problems with my family soon swallowed me whole. Unable to cope with a father who hated me, I moved back to live with my mother when I was seventeen, now living common-law with a violent alcoholic with a criminal background.
Even in that small town on Vancouver Island the sense of community continued. My friends visited me; other weekends I took the ferry to Vancouver where I stayed with them. And I made new friends in Victoria through a church I was attending there, with many connections to St. Margaret's.
It all ended when I was eighteen and was forced to move back to Vancouver on my own, unable to connect further with my former friends and stumbling forward to forge some sense of a life for myself.
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