PORT ST. LUCIE —The Grapevine, A United Methodist Church, has been meeting for worship a little more than a year, and its worship attendance has already doubled. Now, members are starting a new worship service to accelerate growth and attract "a whole new group of people," said the Rev. Vance Rains, the church’s pastor.

The reason for The Grapevine’s rapid growth, Rains says, is a missionary attitude among church members. "We are like missionaries, indigenizing our worship for the cultural context," he said. "We have concentrated on substance and our expressions are very negotiable. We’ve allowed the culture to inform us in…language, dress and music."

Although the church officially launched Jan. 23, Rains said he has been holding worship services since Oct. 3, 1999. "On our first Sunday, we had 125 people, which is double what we expected," he said. "We had 260 last Sunday. The church has grown way more than we anticipated — way faster."

The Port St. Lucie neighborhood around the church is primarily a blue-collar community, according to Rains. Many residents commute to West Palm Beach to work, and while the family structure seems traditional — a married couple with children — Rains said there are many stepfamilies. Most residents have relocated from other communities, and many from other states have no extended family structure nearby.

The Grapevine is reaching people predominantly in their 30s, according to Rains, and "most have been out of church for a while."

"Most of them have had a bad experience with church," he said. "Most…feel the church is out of touch with real life."

With the high number of people in the community who have been divorced, Rains said he has met many from Catholic or fundamental backgrounds that are carrying "a lot of guilt" and dealing with low self-esteem because of their churches’ teachings against divorce.

Rains says The Grapevine uses "every possible means" to communicate the message of the gospel in ways that are relevant to the community. Instead of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, The Grapevine gives away the New Living Translation because "it has much simpler language," Rains said. "For the blue collar community, it’s a much better choice."

The church’s music is a combination of classic rock and country because that is "what people listen to on the radio," he said. Worship regularly features drama and video, and sermon topics are taken directly from popular culture. Rains is starting a new series based on the "Survivor" television show. The first is "Surviving 24/7," which deals with "how to survive real-life stress from a spiritual standpoint," he said.

Communion is also a weekly event because postmodern generations, people born after 1962, are "more yearning for experience than knowledge," Rains said, adding that Communion is a way for them to experience receiving Christ.

The new worship service, called "Grape Stomp," will take place Saturday evenings at a local gym. The gym was the only building available, and the church can only use half of it. A curtain will separate the service from basketball games.

Because of the noise and environment, Rains said he expects it to be very different. There is no facility for a nursery or children’s church, so entire families will worship together.

"It’s a very family-oriented, chaos-filled type of worship," he said. "We’re calling it ‘Grape Stomp’ to embrace the chaotic nature of it."

He hopes it will attract shift workers and others who "don’t see the value of worshipping only on Sunday morning," he said. "If we have to learn to do worship in a new way — to do it in a gym — so be it."

To make sure the church stays focused on its mission and ministry, Rains holds regular focus groups. He invites 20 or more members of the church to meet for a few hours on Saturday.

"I ask them, ‘Who do we understand ourselves to be as a community and a church?’ ‘How do we express that in worship?’ " he said. "We want to know, ‘What they [people in the community] worried about?’ and how we communicate that God has something to say about those issues."