All photos by Becca Lemire
A strip club called the Manor in Guelph, Ontario, is giving new meaning to the concept of sin and redemption. Following the club’s typical Saturday nights full of tits and booze, the club hosts a church service every Sunday afternoon. At 1 PM, a four-piece band gets up on the stage where women got completely naked the night before to play songs like “Worthy Is the Lamb” and “We Believe” while a a crowd of worshippers sings along, guided by a screen showing the words karaoke style.
Jack Ninaber, a nondenominational Christian pastor, was first given the idea to run a church service in a strip club by his wife when they were driving past the Manor in 2013. They’d been hosting a service once a week at their home nearby, but their crowd had grown to about 35 people, leading them on a search for a new venue.
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The stage at the Manor before it becomes a church.
He admits he thought that his wife Sharon’s proposal was crazy and laughed it off. But after watching a documentary the owner’s son Shawney Cohen had made, they learned that the strip club had a transitional housing facility attached to it and had a hunch that the bizarre venue might just work.
Sue’s Inn, the housing facility, is Manor owner Roger Cohen’s personal project to help the poor. As someone who grew up in poverty, he wanted to help people who were recovering from addiction, fresh out of jail, or simply unable to pass credit checks or put down a security deposit on a place to live. In all, there are 35 inhabited rooms directly attached to the Manor.
Roger told me that he had doubts about the Ninabers’ proposal for a church. “I thought they were crazy; I thought there were 101 reasons not to do it,” he said. “It’s a strip club! I figured there was going to be backlash from the community.”
After being in talks with Roger for several months, the Ninabers held their first service at the Manor last Easter Sunday, with about 75 in attendance. As you might imagine, there are a few details that must be taken care of when converting a strip joint into a church. The posters of scantily clad women on pillars had to be covered up with images of Jesus, the pole had to be sanitized, the mirrors embossed with images of strippers were covered with curtains, and a pool table was covered and decked out with mini-sandwiches, Bundt cakes, and oranges.
Naturally, a service like this attracts people who might be black sheep in other congregations. One of them, Tiara Corrigan, was asked not to come back to her Catholic church after she had a son out of wedlock. After getting out of prison for arson, she needed a place to live—so she found herself moving into Sue’s Inn. When a room opened up on the ground floor (Corrigan is in a wheelchair), she was in luck. After Ninabers delivered flyers around the inn for their church, her interest was piqued and she started attending. “At first I didn’t notice the pole, but one day I was looking and was like, ‘There’s a pole there,’” she said.
A guest speaker delivers a sermon
On a recent Sunday, following the opening musical numbers a guest speaker took the stage, playfully swinging around the stripper pole before saying anything. He’s clearly enthusiastic; he had been walking around the club with his hands in the air singing along to the music (sometimes with his eyes closed), visibly vibing with God. As is par for the course here, he then shared his personal story about struggling with alcohol and drugs.
”What we hear from people who come here is that they feel like people look at them differently when they go to [other churches],” Jack said. “Maybe they don’t have anything to wear or they have tattoos or they feel judged—people look at you weird.”
The Manor owner Roger Cohen
I quickly learned that church at the Manor was a judgment-free zone. When I went, about 30 people were there wearing jeans, sitting wherever they wanted (even in the VIP area), one woman had her dog with her, and there were entire families there with their kids (I can’t say I ever thought I’d see children in a strip club). Jack has been called “one cool fuckin’ pastor” by one of the attendees before and I can see why. One guest arrived late; instead of glaring at her, the crowd welcomed her and Jack’s wife Sharon said, “Hey, how are you?” into her mic. And rather than assuming that people understood the lyrics to some of the more cryptic gospel songs and bible passages during the service, the Ninabers put an emphasis on explaining in layman terms. “I love this song because it reminds me of just breathing in the holy spirit,” Sharon explained after finishing up singing a track. “God, I’m breathing you in and I’m breathing out all that other crap—because you can say crap on this stage… we’re real.”
When I asked Jack about whether he ever questioned hosting a religious service in what’s quite literally a den of sin, he said, “It’s a nonissue for us. People make up the church, not great, grand buildings… It’s never been about rules for us.”
The shower stall
The church’s time at the strip club hasn’t been without incident, however. Even before it started, the Ninabers had to make a visit to City Hall—the Manor couldn’t be zoned as a religious institution, so they had to fight to get it zoned as a “social service.” Then came the noise complaints that brought out city officials when baptisms were taking place in a one-person pool in the Manor’s parking lot over the summer (Corrigan was one of the people baptized). They also have an ongoing feud with a church across the street, some members of which have criticized the Ninabers’ service for not being a “real church.”
But along with all the criticism, there have been some victories. In addition to working with the Ninabers on getting the proper zoning, Roger made a change to the club this October. He saw how much time the ministry was taking to cover up the posters in his club and decided to install permanent frames on the walls so they can easily pop images in and out. The Ninabers are working on getting their own biblical-themed posters to put in the frames on Sundays. (There’s still some covering up they have to do, such as the clear shower stall dancers use for bachelor parties, which on my visit was covered with a tapestry of Jesus and a disciple.)
Roger and Jack Ninaber in front of the shower stall.
After the ministry finished up around 3 PM, I watched the club evolve back into its original form—a sign about bachelor parties appeared in the club’s boxing ring, a poster bearing a blonde woman with a boob job and hot-pink G-string popped into place, the gospel-karaoke TV switched to an advertisement for “Whiskey Wednesdays.” And when the dancers started coming in around 7 PM, their weekly gift from the ministry was waiting for them—a vase of flowers in their change room.
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