On a strip of Wilshire Boulevard, not far from where the rapper Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down in a drive-by shooting some 20 years ago, a black plastic pool had been placed on the sidewalk outside the El Rey Theater. It was a balmy December afternoon, and the theater had been transformed into an assembly for Zoe Church, a two-and-a-half-year-old evangelical congregation that got its start in a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard.
Today was Baptism Sunday and nearly a dozen adults signed up, cheered on by a crowd of mostly 20-somethings who were gathered behind a metal barricade. Chad Veach, the 38-year-old founder of Zoe, who moved to West Los Angeles from Seattle in 2014, chewed gum as he danced to a pop gospel playlist blaring overhead. “Let’s go!” he shouted, clapping. A pair of muscular men dunked a woman in the waist-high water. She surfaced, arms pumping the air, as a friend snapped photographs that were later posted on Instagram.
One man behind the barricade was so moved that he called for the preacher to purify his soul right then. He slipped a black Zoe T-shirt over his jeans, covered his nose and waded into the pool. Afterward, he looked dazed, swaddled in a black towel.
Zoe — pronounced “zo-AY, like, be-yon-SAY,” as Mr. Veach often says — is one of the newest in a wave of youth-oriented evangelical churches making their homes here. While most are content to have a church and a campus or two, Mr. Veach is claiming nothing less than Los Angeles County and its population of 10 million. “We’ll have many locations,” he said of Zoe. He is opening a San Fernando Valley campus on Sunday and plans one more per year for the next decade or so.
“#Instagram built our #church,” he said one afternoon at his office here a block from the El Rey Theater. “Isn’t that fascinating?” https://t.co/kOVYf2a1P1 #religion #california #christianity #usa #socialmedia
— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) March 22, 2018