We are kicking off CHRISTMAS WITH NORTHWAY tonight at the Colonial Theatre at 7:30pm.
The buzz continues as the Berkshire Eagle picked up the story with a front page article in todays paper! It is now also one of the most viewed articles on their site!
Here is the article:
Northway Church opening in Pittsfield
Announcement planned at Colonial service.
By Scott Stafford, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Tuesday, Dec. 22
PITTSFIELD — The Northway Church, a fast-growing church founded in 2002 in New York’s Capital Region, will announce the opening of a new branch in Pittsfield at tonight’s Christmas service at The Colonial Theatre, the church’s pastor said.
Founded by Pastor Buddy Cremeans, Northway is known for delivering a multimedia production, complete with a nine-piece rock band and a pop-culture theme, based around his religious message.
The formula seems to be working. Since he started the non-denominational evangelical congregation in 2002 in a former Gold’s Gym in a Clifton Park, N.Y., strip mall, the church has grown from about 600 members after the first year to more than 2,000 members and two locations. The second church is on Central Avenue in Colonie, N.Y.
Cremeans said he anticipates opening a new branch for the Berkshires in Pittsfield in 2010. A new pastor, Paul Howlett, has agreed to run the new congregation, Cremeans said.
A Pittsfield location has not yet been secured, but a Jan. 17 “vision meeting” for the new church will be held at Reid Middle School, Cremeans said.
Cremeans said about 10 members of his church have been traveling from the Berkshires to the Northway Church in either Clifton Park or Colonie for the past couple years and frequently asked when it would be coming to the Berkshires.
When Northway Church made its Berkshire debut for a Good Friday celebration at the Colonial this spring,
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it drew more than 800 people. “We were just blown away,” Cremeans said.
Cremeans said the vision is to “meet people where they are to share the greatest message ever. We want to be the church for people who don’t like to go to church but are open to faith.”
The style of using contemporary music and culture, he said, is “leveraging culture.”
“If you’re not leveraging culture, then you’re not connecting,” Cremeans said. “That’s what Jesus did. What we’ve found is that people are open to faith and to God, they may have just had a bad experience with religion.”
The Northway Church will also be blitzing the Capital Region with an hour-long Christmas show on several Time Warner Cable TV channels.
But why should people trust the Cremeans message when there have been so many other “TV preachers” who tried to leverage pop culture as part of their message and turned out to be scam artists?
“One of our basic tenets is integrity,” Cremeans said. “I take it very seriously — that God is going to hold all of us accountable. You can’t get too isolated and you’ve got to surround yourself with people who are not afraid to say anything. You must have a culture of truth-telling and I welcome that.”
Free tickets to tonight’s 7:30 service are still availabe at the Colonial Theatre box office.
