There Was Room at the Inn
Ottawa’s Bikers’ Church opened its doors when so many remained closed
On the outside, Capital City Bikers’ Church is hulking, uninviting, intimidating. Towering brick walls, and lots of stairs to climb before reaching the main entrance. Built in the late 1950s, it was French Roman Catholic. Our Lady of the Holy Spirit. But those doors closed in 1995. The bells departed. So did the Virgin Mary.
Inside, we find the unexpected. At the far end of the room, behind the pulpit, there’s a massive work of stained glass rather than sculpture. Not Christ on the cross, the Catholic norm. This is Christ arisen, alive once more, with a rainbow and glory rays around his feet.
Instead of pews, there are round tables up front bearing tablecloths, flickering candles, and boxes of tissues. Then come the rows of chairs. As you enter, the no-cash-required coffee bar on the left offers bottomless cups. Would you prefer tea? Juice? Today there are plump, donated submarine-style sandwiches in plastic wrap. Beef or ham?
Parishioners find a table, depositing food and beverage in front of them, greeting their neighbour. Some arrive with insulated travel mugs. Others, with drive-through Tim Hortons. There are tidy seniors and middle-aged guys in tank tops. Black women in their sequined Sunday best. And biker leather.
Waiting for the service to start, a pair of young men shoot pool in an alcove, near a couple of dart boards. Phone charging cables dangle from electrical outlets.
Rob McKee, the pastor of this church, delivers his sermon in boots, jeans, and a black t-shirt. He’s a big man with a big beard. And yes, he rides a Harley.
Bikers’ Church is a melding of two rivers. A decade ago, two Christian communities embraced. A church started by bikers for bikers that held services Thursday evenings. (On weekends, the open road beckons.) And Vanier Community Church, then a precariously small congregation with a giant building on its hands. As the years passed, the Bikers’ name recognition prevailed. Gradually, two distinct websites, Instagram pages, and Twitter accounts united.
This melding is unique. Somehow, the ambiance is pitch-perfect. In the words of Manitoba trucker Sheldon Beckman, it feels “like going to a bar without the booze.” A community of friendly people who don’t “look down on you.”
Melissa McKee – warm, gracious, and five-foot-nothing – is a spiritual shepherd here. While husband Rob leads, she manages an army of volunteers. On Sunday mornings, she can be found in the information booth across from the coffee bar.
A former florist who had her own shop for a decade, when COVID hit Melissa was a contract employee making travel arrangements for a couple dozen federal government workers who were always on the road. She had no way of anticipating the magnitude of the approaching earthquake.
As a Catholic Church with pews, she explains, this space sat seven hundred. But COVID rules reduced the permitted occupancy to as few as five people. In order to broadcast religious services over the Internet, Rob and Melissa needed to be present. So did the usual team of musicians. So did people with technology smarts. All of which made in-person worship impossible.
“We had to close the church,” she says. “That was devastating to a lot of people. Because we’re not a normal church” in orderly suburbia. This is the inner city. We serve a very different clientele. We’re right smack dab in the middle of a very broken, impoverished community that relies on us heavily for moral support, emotional support. We feed tons of people, we clothe people. Most people know you can knock on the door here at any given time, and we’re able to feed you and clothe you with something.
When the government told everyone to lock down, “it felt so wrong that we would be treating people this way.”
In May 2020, more than 250 churches sent a letter to Ontario’s Premier, Doug Ford. During the past 1500 years of Christian history, never before had congregations been forbidden to gather together to celebrate Easter, as had just happened in Ontario, it read. Houses of worship needed to reopen soon.
Premier Ford’s idea of being responsive, of conceding some ground, was to permit drive-in church services. From May 19 onward, parishioners were allowed to attend outdoor services provided they remained inside their vehicles, which were required to keep two metres (six feet) apart.
Four Toronto-area rabbis were not amused. “So-called ‘drive-in’ religious services, which your government has now reluctantly permitted, is of no benefit to us,” they told the Premier in a letter of their own. We are “an Orthodox faith that does not permit driving on the Sabbath.”
Melissa remembers Black Lives Matter as a turning point. On June 5th and 6th, in response to the death, in police custody, of an individual in a foreign country, thousands of people protested on the streets of Ottawa, Toronto, and London, Ontario. Canada’s Prime Minister joined them. So did the mayor of Ottawa and two police chiefs.
Someone, somewhere had hit the pause button. Protecting hospitals was no longer the top priority. Social distancing requirements had apparently vanished. Taking part in a possible super spreader event was now admirable.
News outlets chose not to mention that these protests were wildly illegal. They failed to point out that prominent people were brazenly flouting COVID rules in a manner that should have been unthinkable. Rather than calling out the red-hot hypocrisy, the media went along for the ride.
“I was working for the federal government at the time,” Melissa remembers, Nobody on my team was allowed to go into the office. The entire world was shut down. We couldn’t open the church. But it was OK for Justin Trudeau to go to this march, to participate in that. While the rest of us were having to tell our kids, ‘You can’t go to school. You can’t have your birthday party. You can’t see grandma and grandpa.’ It didn’t make sense to me. And that’s when we decided: We’re done.”
She mentions one of their parishioners with whom she kept in touch by text message. Prior to COVID, he’d drop by twice weekly, she says, “He had a really, really bad crack addiction. Many addictions. That was the worst of them. He came here all the time. He came to be fed. He came to be loved. There were times where he’d get clean and sober, he’d hold a job. But then there were times when he was messing up.
“He texted me one day and said, ‘Melissa, I’ve got to be in church today. Can I please be one of the people that’s allowed into the church today? I don’t want to relapse, I don’t want to mess up.’
“So I showed my phone to Rob, and I said, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ Rob looked at me and said, ‘Tell him there’s room for one more.’
The intent wasn’t to defy the government, but to do the church’s duty. When other parishioners rang the doorbell they, too, discovered there was room at the inn.
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