Catholic cross was inspiration for evangelicals

By LAUREEN McMAHON

When Whistler resident Craig Smith strolled by Our Lady of the Mountains Catholic Church on Lorimer Road some time ago, he chanced to look up at the cross perched high over the church.

Christine Lamb / Special to The B.C. Catholic A sign of faith in their future - Whistler Community Church members gather on a snowy day in January to raise a wooden cross on the building site of a new church they hope will be ready for the Winter Olympics.

Smith, a member of the Whistler Community Church, a Christian evangelical community, began to reflect on how Christians are taught to lay life's problems at the foot of the cross.

"I realized that our church community, which was struggling through the difficult planning stages of building a new church, could depend on the cross to draw the strength we needed."

On January 14, after Smith ran his idea by his fellow WCC members, a wooden cross, a sign of hope and new life for all Christians, was erected on the building site for a new church which they hope will be completed by 2010, the year of the Winter Olympics.

Smith was happy to discover that, while he hadn't known it at the time, his community had put up its cross near the start of this year's Week of Prayer for Christian Unity which is dedicated to strengthening relationships between Christians of different denominations.

The Week of Prayer, observed in the third week of January, brings Christians from across the world and from many denominations to pray together, inspired by Christ's prayer, "that all of them may be one, Father, just as You are in Me and I am in You.... May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that You sent Me and have loved them even as You have loved Me (John 17: 21-23).

"It was, after all," noted Smith, "the beautiful cross on a Catholic church that made me realize that our evangelical community should have a cross on which to focus our thoughts and prayers."

Smith enlisted the help of his fellow church members, including Steve Legate, to bring the cross project to fruition.

Legate arranged for some logs to come from Continental Log Homes in Mount Currie and was soon busy notching, sanding, and arranging for them to be trucked to the building site where they could be assembled.

The raising of the cross was planned for Jan. 1, but it took a little more time to get things ready, said Smith.

Finally, on a very cold and snowy day, the community banded together to lift the three-metre high cross into place on their 1.74-acre property in Spruce Grove.

Now that they have asked God's blessing on the site, the cross will undoubtedly "be a reminder of what God wants for our community," said Smith.

The WCC is one of Whistler's oldest faith communities, with a rapidly-shifting population of members and visitors. Meetings began in 1979 at the old Skiers' Chapel in Creekside, and Sunday services are today held at the Myrtle Philip Community Centre in a gymnasium used by the community centre and the school.

The faith community, under pastor Tim Unruh, is supported by the B.C. Conference of Mennonite Brethren, which has about 100 churches in B.C.

Smith hopes the new cross will also inspire local residents and visitors to work together to welcome the world in three years to the Olympic events. Building fellowship, he said, can be compared to building a bigger fire.

"As we add logs to the fire (gather more people together), the fire burns brighter. Take the logs away and the fire dies down and sometimes even goes out!