CREDIT: Ted Jacob, Calgary Herald Michael Ward has turned Central United around. Now it's a church offering help, love and warmth to lost souls who come in off the streets.

One Sunday, as Central United's pastor Michael Ward was preaching his message, a thoroughly stoned congregant at the back of the church suddenly slipped off all his clothes.

The two older women seated beside the man carefully fixed their gaze on their pastor; and without missing a beat, the pastor continued preaching.

Two ushers approached the man, and one of them whispered, "Excuse me, but in this church, we wear clothes." To which, the young man replied, "That's your problem."

During the next hymn, the naked man let himself be led into the foyer, and life went on.

"It made me rethink our greeting to new people -- 'We hope to see more of you,' " Ward says.

"An old lady in the balcony said she was missing all the action, said she'd have to start sitting down below."

That's the church Central United has become, Ward says proudly: A church hosting 20 or 30 recovery groups weekly. A church that helped found CUPS, Inn From the Cold and Wood's Homes. A church that provides space for noon-hour jazzercize and the Friday prayers of downtown Muslim businessmen.

"Some of the finest, most gentle men I've met," Ward says of Central's Muslim visitors.

"They go into the washroom, sit on the counter to wash their feet, then spread out their mats in the fellowship room and pray."

Recovery ministry is only a small part of what Central United does, Ward says; but that's what it's best known for: Alcoholics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, a Native Recovery Circle, and a range of co-dependency groups. It's known for its Sunday evening Celebrate Life Recovery service, a registered AA meeting, emceed by pastor Wayne Lewry and starring blues pianist Guy Plecash and his Cracked Pots.

"It's a weird and wacky place," Ward laughs again.

"We're in the middle of downtown, there's no parking, you have to fight your way through drunks and addicts to get here.

"But every week we role out God's red carpet of unconditional love and salvation in Jesus Christ. And people come because they see lives transformed. They want to be part of a church that makes a difference."

Central United's history is a story of recovery, for the church, for Ward, and for his volunteers.

Born into a Toronto United Church family, Ward, 54, planned on a business career in the States, only to be stymied by U.S. Immigration -- the first of his many scuttled plans. So a pastor suggested the ministry. Married in 1974, he graduated from Toronto's Emmanuel College in 1977, then pastored for three years near Swift Current, "saddle-bagging" to four distant missions each Sunday.

In 1980, old friend Ross Bailey invited Ward to be his associate pastor at Central United, a long-in-the-tooth church built in 1905 to replace Rev. John McDougall's 1875 Calgary Methodist. Central's problems were challenging: a congregation shrunken from a post-war high of 3,500 to a couple of hundred, a shrinking budget, a fragile building, all isolated within an increasingly hostile inner city. For Ward, the challenges were exciting.

A year later, Ward was hit by the first blow. His wife left him and their two infant daughters.

In 1982, Central's planning committee finally came up with a plan to save it. The site would be redeveloped, with the old church enveloped in a high-rise office tower. It would reap millions of dollars from the deal.

The proposal sparked a civil war -- "ugly stuff, friendships and families torn apart" -- and when it was voted down, things turned worse. In the midst of the fray, the senior pastor and support staff resigned, leaving Ward alone in a hornets' nest: "People said to me, we're not leaving yet, but we're not giving any more until we see what you're doing."

The next seven years were filled with pointless arguments and bitter meetings. Ward stuck with the fractious congregation only because he had no sense God was calling him elsewhere. But in 1990, he hit bottom: "I said, 'God, you've got to do something, or I'm out of here.' "

Seeking relief, he signed up for "Hour of Power" host pastor Robert Schuller's Institute for Christian Leadership at the Crystal Cathedral in L.A. There, Ward heard Schuller quote Mother Teresa of Calcutta: "In love's service, only broken hearts will do." And conference speaker after speaker proved the point: "They shared their care for the heart-broken, their own brokenness. They wept. I wept. Everybody talked about mission. Not the needs of members, but the needs of the people out there."

As Ward knelt for communion on the Crystal Cathedral's marble steps, he prayed, "Father God, I give up; if serving you takes a broken heart, then I'm qualified." And he came home on fire, he says, convinced that, "If things were going to change, I'd have to lead." His direction was as paradoxical as the scripture, "Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it."

Ward challenged his congregation: "What if we go for broke and give our life away? What if we stop worrying about church growth, and start worrying about mission growth?"

His message: Everything at Central would be outreach. What wasn't outreach would be allowed to die. The church lost more members. Ward lost four close friends. But he anchored his vision in the purpose of the church's founder in 1905, George Kirby: "Mission. We were picking up a thread this church dropped in the 1960s."

The Sunday evening Celebrate Life Recovery Service was not part of the strategic plan, says outreach pastor Wayne Lewry.

Lewry, with 24 years experience as a church growth minister, came to Central from California in 1991, to discover ministry gifts he didn't know he had.

"We planned a baby-boomer service for Sunday night, and for the launch, we invited downtown yuppies, kids from Sunday morning and all sorts of outside guests. The first service was a terrific success," Lewry says.

"But when you get ahead of God, you're quickly deflated. The second Sunday evening, there was no one there."

Meanwhile Lewry, a recovered alcoholic with two prison terms on his record, was attending his own recovery group. The guys in his group changed his ideas of what was needed -- those and the folks who started walking in the door Sundays, looking for warmth, safety and love: "the homeless, addicts, alcoholics."

Ward had prayed, "Lord, send us the people nobody wants." And soon Lewry was asking, "Why did you have to pray that prayer?" Yet almost absent-mindedly, Central began harvesting

12-step programs -- not by committee, not by program, but by people showing up.

One of the people who walked in the door was a scruffy heroin addict named John Robson, with 20 years' prison experience under his belt for bank robbery.

Robson was "transformed by God," Lewry said, throwing himself into ministry after ministry, volunteering wherever there was a need. He became an adopted member of the Lewry home, particularly befriending their middle son, David. In the bitter winter of 1996-97, Robson was in the forefront of the discussions that led to the founding of Inn From the Cold, becoming its first executive director.

Robson died of cancer in 1999 and was buried out of Central -- one of the 1,000 people the church buries yearly who have no one else to bury them.

Lewry has heard the Christian criticism of AA and other 12-step programs: the higher power acknowledged by the recovering addicts is not Jesus Christ. But Lowry is not fazed.

"I've had fundamentalist pastors ask why I'm not preaching about hell to these people. And I tell them, 'These people are in hell -- I'm trying to get them out,' " Lewry says.

"The only people whose butt Jesus regularly kicked were the religious people. If we're going to err, err on the side of love."

As a result of that error, the accidental Sunday evening service now draws more than 300 people.

The first priority is "loving on" the people who wander in.

"The hardest thing is to convince these people God loves them, God smiles on them, God isn't sitting back waiting for them to screw up," said Ward.

"We tell them, God loves you the way you are, but loves you too much to leave you there."

Central has a reputation as both liberal and conservative. Liberal because everyone is welcomed -- "We've got a lot of gays; we've got transgendered folks," Ward says. Conservative, because Ward won't back down from the idea that everyone is broken and in need of healing.

Jazz pianist Guy Plecash says "us recoveryites like our music loud and obnoxious," but his Cracked Pots are real professionals, and the Sunday night service is dynamic.

"It vibrates; I walk out of here, three or four inches off the ground," says Plecash.

The laughter at Central is more apparent than the wounds: "On his deathbed, a co-dependent sees everybody else's lives flash before his eyes," Plecash quips.

"We recoveryites tell lots of co-dependent jokes."

Plecash said his combo has introduced Lewry's sermons with the "David Letterman" theme, making him laugh so hard he couldn't speak for 10 minutes.

"Wayne has a real history of his own," Plecash says.

"Sometimes he'll stop in the middle of a sermon and realize that he's been talking to himself again, and the whole place cracks up."

What amazes Plecash is how recovering church members themselves turn to ministry.

"We've got a growing grief ministry; it's big," he says.

"There's a girl here who'd lost her husband, and she spent two years at the back of the church, just crying and crying.

"When she was ready, she started ministering."

Helping people free themselves from addiction is the modern ministry of the church, Ward believes.

Ward has been approached by ministers who ask seriously, "How can you do ministry without committees?" And he just shakes his head.

"It's messy, chaotic. The beautiful thing about this church is, I don't know half of what goes on here," he says.

"We're not an administering church; we're permission-giving. If you have a call, you're free to minister. Get some help, ask for some money, and then go out and make your mistakes."

Over the years, Ward pared his board from more than 70 in 1982 to a bare dozen today. For a regular congregation of over 800, there are four pastors (lead, outreach, spiritual formation, creative ministries), and they need new youth and family pastors.

Most remarkable, 60 to 70 per cent of Central's members, well over 400 people, volunteer in some sort of ministry. Inn From the Cold alone draws 60 volunteers, and the recovery ministries many, many more.

Ward won't discuss relations with the broader United Church of Canada; he doesn't often find time for local presbytery meetings. And he is amazed at dying mainstream Protestant denominations trying to cure themselves with more administration.

"How can they think the answer is becoming more entrenched in their power? More centralized?" he asks.

"Here we train leaders -- I'm a leader, not just a minister, and I'm unapologetic. But leadership raises up leaders.

"People point to me as the guy who runs Central United. I don't run this church; I've been run over by this church. I've got the tire tracks on my back to prove it," he says with a laugh.

"What we try to do here is sow God's love lavishly, with joy and abandon -- that's how God does it."

jwoodard@theherald.canwest.com