#Blessed: Millennial’s and Spirituality with Galen Watts

About Galen Watts

Galen Watts is an academic, writer, and speaker whose work focuses on the changing character of religion in late modernity. He has just recently completed his Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. He is presently revising his dissertation into a book tentatively titled, The Religion of the Heart: Spirituality and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity. In it, he argues the West is currently experiencing not merely secularization, but vast religious transformation. A new experience-centered approach to religion/spirituality–which Galen calls “the religion of the heart”–has risen to prominence. The religion of the heart has longstanding roots in the West, but we can trace its rise to the 1960s, when the New Age, Charismatic Christian, and Human Potential Movements emerged on the scence. Today, it informs much of what goes by “Spiritual but not Religious,” and even much Charismatic Christianity. You can find out more about his research at www.galenwatts.com.

About #Blessed

Straight off its successful world premiere at Hot Docs, #BLESSED makes its broadcast premiere as part of CBC Docs POV, Saturday July 18 at 8 p.m. (9 AT, 9:30 NT) on CBC and the free CBC Gem streaming service.

The pastor seems possessed with righteous fury, addressing worshippers in a voice so loud it scarcely needs amplification. But this sermon differs from your typical evangelical experience.

First, this Aussie-accented spokesman for Jesus has a sartorial holy trinity of his own – t-shirt, tattoos and torn jeans. And his words are sometimes more about demographics than the Divine.

“FYI, city of Toronto,” Pastor Sam Picken screams. “Stop treating us like adolescent babies! 30 is the new 18? Are you kidding me? Shut up and stop procrastinating on your destiny!”

In #BLESSED, documentarian Ali Weinstein tells the story of the Australian-based church, C3, that has set up more than 500 houses of youth-targeted worship worldwide. It follows the progress of the charismatic Pastor Sam, who already started two branches of the church in Toronto and is on the verge of beginning his third as the film begins.

The success of C3, which was founded in 1980 in Australia, speaks to a receptiveness – and possible vulnerability – of a generation whose most common shared experience has been disappointment. They get degrees and may not get jobs. If they do get jobs, they may still feel unfulfilled. And the most connected generation in history may also be the loneliest.

And yet, C3’s sales pitch is personal and individual. Congregants are made to say to each other, “You are different than me… and that’s a good thing.” At prayer meetings, though Pastor Sam’s voice rings loudest, everyone says their own personal prayer out loud, creating a cacophony of pleas to Jesus in many different tongues.

Weinstein’s cameras follow Galen, a PhD cultural studies student who expresses mixed feelings as he interviews followers about what they get from this fast-growing franchise of music, spiritual aphorisms and affirmation. There’s Mona, who, with her history of childhood sexual abuse, seems to find solace in a chaste relationship with her boyfriend David, a prospective C3 pastor himself. There’s Conan, who candidly admits he doesn’t believe in the supernatural version of Christ’s story, but attends the church because “the people who believe in God seem transformed on another level.”

And there’s Aimee, a hairstylist whose embrace of C3 saw her lose contact with friends and family, and end a same-sex relationship, before she realized she was still as anxious and full of self-doubt after “accepting Christ” as before.

While Sam and his team have given church a modern rebranding, it becomes clear as the characters’ stories unfold that what these youth are searching for is not new at all. It is in fact fundamental — the age-old need to be part of something bigger than oneself. But how will C3’s new converts react to its conservative Christian values hidden beneath its shiny new packaging?

“Most of us have strong feelings about religion, so I expect everyone watching will come to this film with their own ideas about what to expect,” says Weinstein. “It would be nice if people walked away having seen something different than they expected, maybe rethinking at least one small part of how they perceive a church like C3.”

 SYNOPSIS: 

C3 is an Evangelical church that opened in Toronto in 2013, quickly amassing a large following amongst the city’s young, hip and tattooed. #BLESSED offers an intimate look inside this fastgrowing millennial church and follows the process of selling salvation in the 21st century as Pastor Sam and his team grow the church from two locations to three, living out their mission to save as many Torontonian souls as possible.

While following Sam as he works to set up his newest church, the film also tells the stories of several of the church’s young members, who let us in on what compelled them to search for salvation. Aspiring pastor David works on a new and chaste relationship with his girlfriend Mona as he prepares to go to C3 College in Australia for a year. Former party girl Aimee’s life does a 180 as she turns from coke and a relationship with a woman to a celibate and churchcentred life. And Conan throws himself further into the church community while struggling to believe. We also meet Galen, a young academic studying C3, who wants to get to the bottom of what is making this church so attractive to millennials and raises questions about the church’s tactics.

Though millennials are incessantly in touch with the world, constantly oversharing and overconsuming on their phones, it’s no secret that this generation is lonelier than ever. C3 offers messages of love and community to its followers, along with a weekly rock show and traditional Evangelical values. Much like the other viral church start-ups of the 21^st century, this church is tapping into something very real and apparently very needed in the hearts of millennials. While Sam and his team have given church a modern rebranding, it becomes clear as the characters’ stories unfold that what these youth are searching for is not new at all. But how will C3’s new followers react to the church’s conservative Christian values beneath the shiny new packaging?

GALEN

Join Tasha Simms as she speaks with Galen Watts about his appearance in the new documentary #Blessed. Galen is a PhD candidate studying millennials and spirituality, and he’s doing extensive field work at C3 for his thesis. At 29 and appearing a lot like the urban, racially diverse millennials that mostly make up C3, Galen acts as a guide for viewers of the film who like him are coming to it from the outside, fascinated by what lies behind those high school doors on Sunday. Galen grew up in Toronto with a Chinese mom and British dad and like so many of his millennial Canadian peers, his childhood was devoid of religion. Watching his peers’ search for meaning through various self-help and spirituality programs made him want to study how his generation is finding their way back to religion. Galen offers an important perspective in the film as someone who can contextualize and help us understand the various factors at play which are helping to create C3’s success story.

PASTOR SAM

Pastor Sam Picken is a captivating and complex character. At 34, Sam is a golden boy for C3 Global having proven his success at planting churches with the rapid expansion of C3 Toronto – his brainchild. In many ways, he reads like the head of any new start up, quoting self-help books in his sermons and in his staff meetings and strategizing about branding and growth. He is married to Jess Picken and they have two young children, with a third on the way. Sam and Jess moved from their native Australia to Canada back in 2008 to help the leaders of C3 Canada expand. In 2012, they got in a car and moved to Toronto to plant a church here. After just 5 years, he has already amassed a dedicated and highly efficient team of over 500 volunteers and 7 staff that revere him. Looking at the well-oiled machine that C3 has become, it seems like a lot of companies would do well to have half the leadership and business acumen that Sam does. He’s a hustler. He works his charm while tirelessly pushing toward his goal of spreading the reach of the church he loves; he is literally a man on a mission.

DAVID

David Layton looks like a skater, not like a pastor-in-training. Thoughtful and soft-spoken, he talks about how making church “cool” is part of why he wants to follow C3’s leadership. When we meet him, he has just begun a relationship with Mona, someone he met at church, and he is preparing for a year away in Australia at C3 College. With David and Mona we learn what it’s like to be in a new relationship in your early 20’s as a Christian where sex is off the table. David remains attuned to his calling throughout while navigating his evolving relationship with Mona.

MONA

Mona Sim has already seen a lot during her 21 years. When we first meet her, she is introduced to us as David’s girlfriend, and together the couple discuss the challenges of tyring to remain celibate in their new romance. But as we get to know Mona a little more, we hear about a past that led her to find meaning and connection at church in the first place – she escaped the violence of her childhood home and then experienced homelessness for a period, and now that she has found a sense of community and family at church she feels that the difficulties she’s endured in life are part of God’s plan for her. As the film unfolds, Mona continues to find more strength in her identity at church.

AIMEE

Aimee Burke found out about C3 from a client as she was cutting her hair. Skeptical at first, but desperately seeking some way out of the cycle of parties and drugs her life was centred around, Aimee attended one Sunday – “it absolutely blew my mind – everyone there looked like people I could have partied with last night!” Aimee threw herself into church life and found she was able to start healing the pain of her childhood traumas through her newfound faith. But the longer she attended C3, the more she felt her expectations for healing and spiritual meaning were being overlooked, and she begins to question what the church is really offering its congregants.

CONAN

When we encounter Conan Yu, he has been attending C3 for just two months and is full of passion for this new group of friends he has. Conan grew up in an Evangelical home, but felt he never connected to the faith in a way that was expected of him. He questioned the legitimacy of what his church was teaching him and walked away from church for several years. But at 28, after trying to find community elsewhere in nightlife and romantic relationships, he decided that without religion, his life was devoid of purpose. A friend took him to C3 one day and he became captivated with the scene there. As the film unfolds we watch Conan plant his roots deeper and deeper at church, joining various connect groups and even making it onto the worship team (the band that performs each Sunday during service), all while continuing to struggle the core question of whether or not he believes in God.

BACKGROUND & C3 CHURCH

About half of Canadians (48%) describe their current religious identity as Christian, down 20 points since 2011. 25% of those self-identify as Catholic, down from 39% in 2011, while 23% belong to a Protestant group, down from 29% in 2011. Other religious identities, mostly due to immigration, have increased by 4 points to 13%, though no one religion in particular appears to be driving this growth. Church and service attendance continues to plummet. In 2006, 17% attended once a week or more often, and that figure has dropped to 11%. Six in ten (60%) don’t attend at all, compared to 37% in 2006.¹

There is one particular group of Christian churches, however, for whom the trend has been reversed. Often described as “hipster churches” because of their largely urban millennial congregations, their slick stylistic approach and social media presence, these churches have made significant inroads with one group of people who are usually the least to be associated with Christianity: Liberal, progressive, urban people under 40.

Globally, Hillsong is the biggest and most well-known, with over 100,000 people attending services each week at one of its churches located worldwide. In Canada, C3 is the largest with “eleven congregations across Canada,”² most of them out West. C3 Toronto ballooned from eight people in 2012 to over 1,500 people regularly attending the Church’s five Sunday services³ and over 8,000 following its very active Instagram account. But what’s even more impressive is the demographic that the church is attracting: a diverse group of millennial hipsters, who tithe 10% of their income to the church and Snapchat their experiences of the divine each Sunday, steadily spreading the church’s brand to their social media contacts, making Jesus hip again.

C3 is part of a growing phenomenon of Christian churches that come across as slick, hip and appealing to people usually labeled urban hipsters. These are people generally considered to be liberal and progressive, so it comes as a surprise that some of C3’s “fine print” is undeniably conservative. C3 Church Global’s website lists bullet points under “what we believe” such as “Marriage was instituted by God, ratified by Jesus, and is exclusively between a man and a woman. It is a picture of Christ and his church.” And “sex is a gift from God for procreation and unity, and it is only appropriate within and designed for marriage.” However, it appears many local pastors avoid addressing these potentially off-putting topics directly.

C3 Church Global is an evangelical Christian movement founded by Phil and Christine Pringle in Sydney, Australia in 1980 under the name of Christian City Church International (C3i). In 2008 the name was changed to C3 Church Global. From its very beginning C3 experienced rapid growth, regular attendance expanding to 400 people within four years, while also spreading to other cities in Australia.

As of August 2018, C3 Church Global is a community of over 520 churches in 64 countries. Planting churches, reaching “lost people” “so God can be found and lives transformed for eternity” is C3’s primary concern. Their official vision is to create local C3 Churches in cities all around the world: 1,000 locations by the year 2020. Phil and Christine Pringle continue to be the lead pastors, overseeing a team of “global directors” who shape C3 as a whole and set visions and goals for the church, and “regional directors,” responsible for specific areas around the world, e.g. C3 Canada, C3 South East Asia, C3 Europe, etc. Each local C3 Church is led by a team of senior pastors, usually husband and wife, who manage their church together with a local board.

C3 Church Global, like other Evangelical churches, expands by creating so-called “church plants” – a team of C3 pastors physically moving into a geographical area previously not served by C3 and establishing a new community, classic missionary work if you will, or by admitting previously independent evangelical communities who wish to become C3 and who align with C3’s goals and values.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

I was amazed when I first read about C3. The idea of an evangelical church housed in a downtown high school gym, attended by a fast-growing group of my peers (only more Instagram-ready) was fascinating to me. Yes, we’ve had a couple Fords elected to power, but the youth in downtown Toronto seem to me to be amongst the most progressive and leftleaning people in the world. The millennials here don’t seem to me like a group that would flock to an organized religion of any kind, let alone one that is so often associated with conservativism and, well…America. Yet there was clearly something happening within this new church that was stirring the souls of the Toronto youth.

I went to church in February 2018 because I needed to see with my own eyes what was at the heart of this phenomenon. I was initially struck by the slick production that goes into each service and the powerful charm of C3 Toronto’s lead pastor, Sam Picken, but also the genuine sense of joy and community that was pervasive there. As I continued to go and started to film, I was struck even more by just how committed to the church all the people I met were. These young adults, between the ages of 20-30, were waking up at 5:00am every Sunday to come to church, set up a full band, perform in three back to back shows, worship, and then tear down by 3:00pm. And that was just Sunday! C3 puts on events throughout the week, all of which are orchestrated by the hundreds of volunteers that make up the church. I hadn’t seen anyone my age that committed to anything before, and I wanted to understand why these young people had made C3 central to their lives.

After filming there for nearly a year, I have a better understanding of what was driving so many of my peers to this church. Seeing the devotion not only to the faith on offer at C3 but also the community and the camaraderie they provided reminded me that we live in a society in which many of our most basic human needs and desires aren’t being readily met. We all have to work hard to find the communities that can sustain our need to feel a part of something important and to feel meaningfully connected to other people. C3 not only provides a place for people to go and commune each Sunday, but they get you involved quickly and make you feel needed. That and they also offer a relationship with Jesus, of course!

Even though I consider myself an atheist, the people I met while shooting #BLESSED were all incredibly relatable to me. Whatever propelled their search for God – whether they were feeling alone in the big city, looking for purpose beyond what they found at their jobs, or trying to mend a broken heart – their stories encapsulate the many ways that this evangelical church is holding a mirror up to the experiences of millennials in Toronto today; exposing the loneliness we live with and the lack of meaning on offer to us elsewhere.

#BLESSED is produced by Notice Pictures Inc. in Association with the Canadian Broadcasting

Corporation, with the Participation of the Canada Media Fund and the Assistance of Rogers Telefund, The Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit and Ontario Creates Tax Credit Program.

TEAM BIOS

WRITER/ DIRECTOR

Ali Weinstein is a documentary director and producer based in Toronto. Her directorial debut MERMAIDS, about a group of women who strongly identify with the powerful aquatic archetype, premiered at Hot Docs in 2017. MERMAIDS has screened at many international festivals since and has been broadcast in Canada, Israel, Brazil, France, and Germany. In 2018, Ali co-directed THE IMPOSSIBLE SWIM for TSN as part of their Engraved on a Nation series. She has two films at this year’s Hot Docs Festival – she directed #BLESSED (CBC Docs POV) about the stunning success of an evangelical church amongst Toronto millennials, and she produced Lulu Wei’s THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE THIS PLACE, ANYPLACE (CBC Docs POV) about the redevelopment of the iconic Toronto block where the world famous Honest Ed’s store once lived (produced through the inaugural Telefilm Talent to Watch Program). She holds an MFA in Documentary Media Studies from Ryerson University, and her previous work includes two years as Associate

Producer at Primitive Entertainment. Ali is also a proud board member of Breakthroughs Film Festival, Canada’s only festival devoted to showcasing short films by emerging womenidentified and non-binary directors.

NOTICE PICTURES INC.

Notice Pictures Inc. is the formal union of the team that made the award-winning projects The World Before Her and Diamond Road. Filmmakers Nisha Pahuja and Cornelia Principe have worked together on and off for over a decade and have forged a strong and fruitful working relationship. 14 & Muslim, which premiered on CBC’s Docs POV in 2019, was their company’s first release. Currently in post-production on the feature documentary Send Us Your Brother.

PRODUCER

Cornelia Principe is an Emmy©-nominated, award-winning producer with over 25 years of experience. Currently releasing #BLESSED (2020) and recently releasing the award-winning feature PREY (2019). She is currently in post-production on the documentary Send Us Your Brother with director Nisha Pahuja. Other credits include: 14 & Muslim (2018); How To Prepare

For Prison (2016); The Motherload (2013); the award-winning documentary The World Before Her (2012); Grinders (2011); The Rise and Fall of the Grumpy Burger (2006); Poverty, Chastity, Obedience (2002); and the 2008 Gemini award-winning documentary series Diamond Road. 

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

Nisha Pahuja is an Emmy©-nominated filmmaker based in Toronto. She is currently in postproduction on the feature documentary Send Us Your Brother about masculinity and gender inequality in India. Her previous credits include Diamond Road (2007 Gemini award Best Documentary Series) Bollywood Bound (Gemini nominee 2001) and the multi-award winning The World Before Her about women’s rights in India.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER

Stephanie Weimar is an award-winning director and creative producer based in Toronto. She has created hours of documentary programming for APTN, Arte, NHK, Discovery Canada and the Smithsonian Channel. Her work includes Mothers, a documentary following the lives of three teenage moms in Inuvik, which was nominated for Best Documentary at the Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival; her experimental doc Region Around The Heart about the search for home; the doc series Watchers of the North featuring the Canadian Rangers; her award-winning feature My Brother’s Vows following her brother’s path to become a Catholic monk; and the groundbreaking Polar Sea 360, which won a Grimme Preis. She was the writer and creative producer of the doc series Arctic Secrets, as well as one of the directors of the documentary series Equator: A New World View. Currently she is directing Writing the Land, a doc series about Canadian literature.

EDITOR

Robert Swartz is an award-winning editor who has collaborated with some of Canada’s finest documentary filmmakers.  He has edited films for Primitive Entertainment (‘Four Wings and a Prayer , ‘There is a House Here’), Barbara Willis Sweete (‘The Young Romantic’ , for which he won a Gemini Award for Best Editing), Larry Weinstein (‘Toscanini: In His Own Words’), Sheona McDonald (‘When Dreams Take Flight’ , for which he won a CSA Award for Best Editing),  Susan

Fleming (Meet the Coywolf’, ‘Remarkable Rabbits’), Moze Mossanen (‘Romeos & Juliets’ ), Ali Weinstein (‘Mermaids’, ‘The impossible Swim’) and Alan Zweig’s last three feature documentaries including ‘Hurt’, which won the Platform Prize for Global Cinema at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival as well as a CSA award for best feature length documentary.