The Virginian-Pilot
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VIRGINIA BEACH
The Sunday morning service wasn't to begin for another 10 minutes, but the assembling worshippers, clustered near the front of the cavernous Rock Church sanctuary, were on their feet, swaying and singing along with the pulsating music.
A half-dozen singers, backed by electric guitars, an electric keyboard, a saxophone, trumpet and drums, stood at the center of the blue-carpeted platform, eyes closed and hands raised:
Oh, how He loves us,
Oh, how He loves us,
Oh, how He loves us all ...
After several more minutes of sacred revelry, the music faded, and Bishop Anne Gimenez, the congregation's pastor and co-founder, made her way to the microphone.
"Praise Jesus!" Gimenez shouted as she surveyed the 5,200-seat auditorium, less than a fifth filled on this summer morning.
A slight woman in carefully coiffed hair and a navy blue suit, Gimenez, 79, appeared undaunted by the modest turnout.
"Praise Jesus!" she repeated, thrusting a hand into the air.
The congregation - a well-blended mixture of men and women, white, black, Hispanic and Asian - responded with exuberant shouts of "Hallelujah!" and "Praise the Lord!"
What the worshippers may have lacked in number, they more than compensated for in enthusiasm.
Four years after the passing of her husband and the church's co-founder, and two years after her own brush with death, Gimenez shows no signs of slowing down.
The 5,000-member congregation on Kempsville Road continues to draw seekers, though not at the dramatic pace of a few years ago. Like many churches, the average age of the congregation has grown older.
Rock, like other megachurches, also faces the challenge of preparing for the inevitable change at the top when the founding pastor dies or steps aside.
Despite the adversity, Gimenez and her flock are maintaining the fervent revivalism and Christian activism that have become hallmarks of the region's premier megachurch.
When they arrived in Hampton Roads as newlyweds in 1968, John and Anne Gimenez envisioned starting a small, Spirit-filled congregation that would minister to drug addicts and the downtrodden.
The worldwide ministry that grew out of that vision, Anne now says, "came as a complete surprise. We never planned for it to happen."
A former drug addict from Spanish Harlem, John had spent his teen and young adult years in and out of New York prisons before he accepted Christ at a Pentecostal church in the South Bronx in 1963.
He became a preacher shortly thereafter and met and married Anne Elizabeth Nethery, a fiery preacher in her own right, from Corpus Christi, Texas. Together they traveled the country, holding revival meetings in tents and small auditoriums.
During one East Coast preaching tour, they stopped in Portsmouth to appear on Pat Robertson's "The 700 Club," broadcast in those days from a small studio near the naval hospital.
While in town, they found an empty church building on Lens Avenue in Norfolk. A few months later, they began holding services in the rented space, and Rock Church was born.
Within three years, they had built a congregation of several hundred and erected a new sanctuary in Virginia Beach.
The flock continued to multiply, thanks in part to a weekly television broadcast of the church's Sunday services. By the mid-1970s, the church had added a Christian academy and a Bible Institute for the training of pastors and missionaries.
Twice during the next two decades it would outgrow its sanctuary and build bigger ones. The church moved into its present facility in 1997.
The Gimenezes' ministry included a growing network of satellite churches, many of them planted and led by ministers trained at Rock's Bible Institute.
Today the Rock Ministerial Family Fellowship counts more than 500 congregations throughout the world that look to Anne Gimenez as their bishop.
As the "prayer-and-praise" portion of the Sunday service drew to a close, the congregants settled into their seats. After a few welcoming remarks and announcements, Gimenez launched into a ringing commentary on the nation's moral decline and its need to turn to Jesus.
A few days earlier, she noted, impressive crowds had turned out at Chick-fil-A restaurants around the country to show support for the company's president, who had spoken out against same-sex marriage in an interview with a Christian news service.
"Hooray and hallelujah!" Gimenez said. "If the churches won't speak out with a loud voice, maybe it will take a businessman to lead the way!"
Members of the congregation leapt to their feet, applauding and shouting "Amen!"
"This church stands for a biblical definition of marriage as one man and one woman!" Gimenez shouted over the rising din. "That's the word of God!"
It was a familiar subject to the Rock Church faithful. The Gimenezes had addressed it from the pulpit often over the years - one of several hot-button issues that had become rallying cries for evangelical Christians in the political arena.
From very early on, the couple displayed a keen interest in Washington affairs and became vocal critics of government policies they believed had contributed to a moral decline in the nation.
Chief among their concerns: Supreme Court rulings banning school prayer and legalizing abortion, lax enforcement of anti-obscenity laws, and policies they saw as promoting a "homosexual agenda," which they considered a direct assault on the traditional family.
In 1980, they organized "Washington for Jesus," a daylong rally that drew an estimated 200,000 evangelical Christians to the National Mall.
It was billed as a nonpartisan prayer event, and no political candidates were endorsed or allowed to speak. But John Gimenez later would declare the election of Ronald Reagan as president that November a direct answer to the prayers at the rally.
The Gimenezes followed up with similar events in 1988 and 1996, although those rallies drew smaller crowds than the first.
In 2004, they expanded their sights, summoning believers to a rally billed as "America for Jesus." About 25,000 people showed up on the Mall to hear John Gimenez, entertainer Pat Boone and a host of others call the nation to repentance and pray that America would return to its moral roots.
"We did what God called us to do," John Gimenez said at the close of the event. "The rest is up to Him." Gimenez later would describe George W. Bush's re-election that year as another act of providence.
This week, Anne Gimenez will continue the tradition, leading an event in Philadelphia that organizers again are calling "America for Jesus." They expect it to draw at least 30,000 to the city's Independence Mall on Friday and Saturday.
"It's a solemn occasion and a call to prayer," Gimenez said of the event. "It's not about the election or who is in the White House. It's about America needing the presence of God. We're praying for a miracle."
In the 39 years he has attended Rock Church, Nick Alvis has seen plenty of changes. While not all have been for the better, he says, it hasn't dampened his enthusiasm.
"I feel like the way they worship is the way God wants to be worshipped," says Alvis, 61, a stockroom worker at Target. "It's where I want to be."
He recalls attending services as a child in a Methodist church where Sunday morning worship seemed "pretty cut-and-dried."
Then he started attending Rock as a young adult in 1973, and "everything just came alive. People were singing and shouting and praying in tongues," he said, describing a form of worship common in Pentecostal churches. "That was much more appealing to me."
Those early years saw rapid growth, and by the mid-1990s the church was running two Sunday-morning services, both filling the old 2,500-seat auditorium to capacity.
But by the time the church moved into its 5,200-seat sanctuary in 1997, Alvis recalls, attendance seemed to have hit a plateau.
"I've never seen it filled on a Sunday morning," he said. "Some people have come and gone. I haven't a clue where they went or why."
Anne's preaching, he said, "is as vibrant as ever" and is supplemented by guest speakers and younger preachers on the staff, including Gimenez's son-in-law, John Blanchard.
Ricky Ross, another longtime attendee, says he, too, has detected a gradual decline.
"The level of activity has diminished over the years," Ross, a 52-year-old high school teacher, explained.
When he and his wife first came to Rock in the mid-1980s, Ross said, "there was something going on all the time - prayer breakfasts, Christmas cantatas, service projects, activities for young people - things that were drawing people. We'd run into people at church who we went to high school with. It was great."
That began to change in the late 1990s, he said, and seemed to coincide with the move to the new sanctuary.
"There was a great expectancy" connected with the new building, Ross said. "People were sure it would bring a great influx." When it didn't happen, he said, "the enthusiasm began to wane," and people gradually drifted away. "It was never quite the same."
Gimenez and others present a different picture.
"We're growing, and we're going strong," Gimenez said. The church membership totals about 5,000, she said. While the church doesn't disclose weekly attendance figures, she estimates it is close to 4,000, including turnout at all services and activities.
The church supports an active youth ministry and a local food bank, conducts weekday Bible studies and sends groups on short-term mission trips. The youth group recently returned from a 10-day mission in Fiji.
"They have lots of activities for families, and that's really important for us," said Antoinette Charles, 28. She and her husband, Jason, and their two sons began attending about a year ago. "We love the diversity, and everyone is very welcoming. It's just a great place to be."
Giving also shows no signs of weakness, Gimenez said. Earlier this year, she noted, the church burned its mortgage papers after paying off a $5.3 million note on its sanctuary.
Most of the money came from the $5 million sale of property to the city of Virginia Beach late last year. The church had bought the 800-acre waterfront parcel off Indian River Road in the 1980s, with the intent of building a retreat center. The city wants to turn it into a park.
After the sale, the church still owed $387,000 on the mortgage, Gimenez said.
"So the church got busy, and from the first of December to the last Sunday in March, they gave $387,000, on top of their regular tithes and offerings," she said. "It was a pure miracle."
It wasn't the church's only recent "miracle," and certainly not the most dramatic.
In January 2010, Anne had just returned from an ocean cruise with members of the Rock Church Ministerial Fellowship. She had battled a blood platelet disorder a few weeks prior, but doctors had cleared her to go on the trip. She was sick during most of the time at sea.
By the time she returned to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., she was unable to fly home. She was rushed to a hospital, and doctors told her daughter, Robin, that she may not survive. Her organs were shutting down. Doctors could not determine the cause of her illness.
Back in Virginia Beach, the church was alerted and began praying earnestly for her recovery.
For 18 days she was on life support and in a medically induced coma. Eventually, she was diagnosed with myocarditis - a viral infection of the heart.
The crisis subsided, but when she awoke, she was paralyzed below the neck. After three weeks, she was moved to a hospital in Dallas and began physical therapy. Slowly, she began to learn to walk again.
Late in April, Anne returned home, and on July 4, she returned to the pulpit for the first time since becoming ill. The congregation greeted her with a standing ovation and shouts of joy.
"It's like I have a new lease on life," she said, recalling the episode. "I wasn't supposed to live, according to the doctors. But I'm a true miracle. I personally believe my life was spared so I could do the work I'm doing right now."
For now, Rock Church is determined to continue doing what it's always done, but its future is far from settled.
Church-growth experts say Rock and other megachurches - generally defined as those with weekly attendance of 2,000 or more - face the daunting challenge of maintaining the vision and energy when the founding pastor is no longer on the scene.
More than 80 percent of the nation's 1,600 megachurches are still being led by their founders, many of whom are in their late 60s or older, according to The Leadership Network, a church consultant group. Many have not dealt with succession.
Rock confronted that challenge in 2008, when John Gimenez died unexpectedly of a stroke at the age of 76.
Even before her husband's death, the church had set out a succession plan. According to Anne, the Gimenezes designated who would succeed them as bishop and pastor, and other leaders of the Rock Ministerial Fellowship have signed off on the plan.
"We haven't announced who it is, but the leaders know," she said. She said it would be another husband-and-wife team.
Speculation at the church has centered on the Gimenezes' son-in-law, Blanchard, and their daughter, Robin. Both have become increasingly visible in the church and its worldwide network - he as one of the church's executive pastors and a former youth minister, she as the church's business manager and music director.
By keeping it in the family, Rock would be following a well-worn path in megachurch-leadership transitions, a trail blazed by such iconic evangelical families as the Falwells, Schullers and Osteens.
She knows it's coming eventually, but for now, Anne says, she has no plans to retire.
"I'm 79, and I'm running around like I'm 30," she said. "I preach every Sunday, and I'm traveling all week long. It's what the Lord has given me to do, and I plan to keep doing it until He decides otherwise."
Jeff Sheler, 757-222-5563, jeff.sheler@pilotonline.com
Source: http://hamptonroads.com/2012/09/virginia-beach-church-remains-megarock
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