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Canyon Ridge Christian Church attracts those once reluctant about religion

For Ali Frazee and her husband, Josh, the erratic life of a military family means looking for a new community support system even before unpacking in a new home.

Frazee is a 25-year-old, full-time UNLV student who has transferred schools three times. When she and her husband moved from Alaska to Las Vegas 2½ years ago, she was pregnant. And, her husband was preparing to deploy.

Although they had never before been to a “big” church, she says, they were members of Canyon Ridge Christian Church “since the moment we set foot in Las Vegas.”

Her father-in-law, a pastor at a church in Washington, gave them the name of the church. They drove around and found it.

By the time her husband deployed, Frazee remembers, her new son, Kale, was about 6 weeks old. Ever since, people from her church have pitched in, often watching Kale from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., feeding and caring for him. They’ve brought meals. They’ve said their prayers during deployment. When Josh has returned, they’ve baby-sat some more, allowing the couple to have date nights.

“The people we met through Canyon Ridge fill in the gaps,” Frazee says. “So, whether Josh is gone or whether he’s working, we always have people willing to provide support for us.”

Now on its own 40-acre campus at Lone Mountain Road and Jones Boulevard, the church calls to people who don’t have a church family, according to the Rev. Kevin Odor, senior pastor.

“We did not come to Las Vegas to reshuffle the deck,’” he explains, quoting the church’s original “lead church planter,” Mike Breaux.

Rather than luring churchgoers away from other congregations, “we were trying to go after people who weren’t going to church at all. And that is still the heartbeat of our church.”

Canyon Ridge began as an offshoot of the valley’s Central Christian Church in January 1993. Odor moved his wife and three children from Ohio to join Breaux in seeding the new church originally on the west side of town, as the parent church prepared to move to its current location in Henderson on New Beginnings Drive not far from Russell Road.

Central Christian gave its blessing to members who “felt led or called” to join the new church, Odor recalls. On its opening Sunday at the YMCA across from Meadows mall, 726 people attended the service.

“We averaged 600 people a week in our first year as a church,” the pastor says. “It’s a very healthy baby, as they say. Most churches are not started with that kind of intention and preparation in planning and, as a result, they are started with less momentum.”

These days, an Easter or a Christmas Eve service can pull in an attendance of about 15,000, Odor says. An average weekend runs about 6,500. The church’s collegelike campus includes an auditorium; a building referred to as “Base Camp” for youth programs and kids from preschool- to high-school aged; and a chapel under construction, due for completion in August or September, according to the Rev. Mark McKinney, campus pastor. Services in the auditorium make use of a big screen, plenty of technology and a touch of rock concert charisma.

McKinney says he will play a major role in the church’s new satellite campus in Centennial Hills, slated for opening the weekend of Sept. 21. Arbor View High School will anchor Sunday services — just as Canyon Ridge held services for four years, as a younger church at one stage of its history, at Cimarron-Memorial High School.

“The hardest thing in this -town, I’m learning, is that there’s a lot of people who’ve moved here who may not have extended family or relationships,” McKinney says. “And we believe that satellite campuses can provide places where people can come and have family. It may not be their blood relatives. But it could be family to come alongside of during hard times.”

Outreach to places as far away as Nicaragua and Southeast Asia, along with an emphasis on leadership development, and an impressive online presence, may be helping the church’s momentum. But there is another success ingredient, according to Odor: “Big enough to celebrate and small enough to care.”

“One of the things that we’ve learned as a church of size is that it doesn’t matter how many people you’re in a church service with to worship God,” Odor observes. “But you do need to be known. So being known in a serving group or in a small group lets people know your name. And you pray for each other, and each other’s burdens and lives.”

He estimates that 250 small groups meet off campus, encompassing about 2,500 people with a focus on healing or learning. About 100 groups meet on campus, engaging about 1,000 participants.

Among those activities is Celebrate Recovery, a Christ-centered recovery program that “helps people with hurts, habits, and hang-ups,” Odor says.

People with various addictions come together on Friday nights, including many engaged in other 12-Step work.

“With the 12 Steps, you name God as a higher power,” Odor says. “And when we do Celebrate Recovery on Friday night at our place, we just go ahead and talk about who the higher power is, instead of leaving it vague.”

Other activities range from grief support and marriage classes to the group of high school girls getting some extra support from Frazee.

As for why the church has grown so successfully, volunteer Jason David — who says he has attended Canyon Ridge for a few decades — has his own theory.

“This church takes its teaching right out of the Scriptures,” he says. “And once you start plugging into God’s word, one of the things that the Scriptures say, I believe, is that God’s word always bears fruit. And fruit’s a good thing.”

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