People gather to take part in a recent Experience Life Church service. The church rents the skating rink at the Sportsplex, located at 7116 82nd St. (Photo provided by Experience Life Church)

A new church in Southwest Lubbock has attracted more than 800 people each week to its services in a skating rink since its inception in September 2007, but church leaders say they don’t want to focus on the number of people attending but on attending to their spiritual needs.

“There’s so many people that are burned,” said Tim Beal, minister to families and students at Experience Life Church. “They don’t have a church home.”

Beal said that when his friend and former student, Chris Galanos, decided to form a new church, they went door to door asking people what they did and did not like about church, and what their needs were.

One key ingredient that those who were not attending church said they were not getting was a sense of community that a larger church sometimes cannot give, said Beal.

Experience Life Church’s response to that was splitting members into smaller cell groups that meet weekly outside of church. Each cell consists of 7-14 members; when a group reaches 15 members it splits into two groups and continues growing.

“We do them by life stages,” said Beal. Groups can be sorted by age, into single moms, single adults, young marrieds, marrieds with kids, adults without kids and empty nesters, to name a few, he said.

“We’ve got them meeting all over Lubbock and Wolfforth,” said Beal.

The church is non-denominational.

“I think we as people have really messed up what the Bible says,” said Beal. “Our goal isn’t to please a certain denomination, it’s to please Christ.”

A big focus at the church is unity.

“If we could become unified (as Christians) we could change the world in a week,” he said.

Beal said the church is renting the skating rink at the Sportsplex located at 7116 82nd St. on Sundays for services at 9:30 and 11 a.m. Beginning in September, he said the church will begin to host a Saturday service at 5 p.m. as well.

“We really were just looking for a building in Southwest Lubbock,” said Beal. “We just wanted to put a church in a building.”

The church features music that people might want to listen to as they drive in their cars, Beal said, and church leaders are more concerned about the people than about their appearance.

Sunday morning attire is typically shorts and flip-flops, he said. Messages tend to be more about how to apply Biblical knowledge, he said.

Beal said he was involved in more traditional churches before Galanos asked him in November to join him. But he said he is hooked on the way the new church operates.

“It’s way different than anything I’ve ever done. But again, I don’t ever want to go back. I’m sold on this,” he said.