Episcopal Village to debut regional mission events in Portland
Episcopal News Service. June 4, 2010 [060410-03]
Pat McCaughan
When Jon Myers planted a church, he settled into a rented house in Seattle near "the most diverse zip code in the country" and started by getting to know his new neighbors.
With the blessing of Bishop Gregory Rickel of the Diocese of Olympia he moved to an area known as Beacon Hill, which boasts a view of Washington's Mt. Rainier, Amazon.com headquarters "and lots of economic and cultural diversity but no Episcopal church," Myers said during a recent telephone interview.
That was a few months ago. Now he hosts weekly gatherings of a core group of about ten people "talking about shared vision and who we want to be as a community."
The vision "looks more like a series of small house church communities spread across the neighborhood and surrounding areas" than the traditional process of buying land, owning a building or renting a big space, said Myers, 31.
Considered a diocesan pioneer missioner, Myers holds a master of divinity degree from Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle and is in the process of being ordained an Episcopal priest.
He calls his church planting experiences "Guerrilla Gardening in a (sub) Urban Jungle: or Planting an Episcopal Church in Your House" and will share them at a Portland gathering in June. The June 10-12 conference is the first of several regional mission events planned by Episcopal Village, which he founded with the Rev. Karen Ward.
Episcopal Village, a grass-roots community organization, offers training and practical resources to help parishes and dioceses become, among other things, missionaries in their own backyards, said Ward, abbess and vicar of Church of the Apostles, an Episcopal and Lutheran "contextual" mission congregation.
Herself a church planter, Ward said the event aims to draw on local experience and expertise to assist congregations in connecting and reconnecting with their locale. It will be held at St. David of Wales Church in Portland and hosted by the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon. A similar event is planned for Sept. 24-25 in Baltimore, said Ward, EpV director.
Among other things, the agency teaches both clergy and laity to do "neighborhood field reconnaissance" as a way of syncing the church with the community's rhythm of life. "A lot of churches aren't really connected to those in their own zip codes," she explained.
Also key is the question of how the church might speak to whatever its context is, whether homelessness, prostitution, or even the isolation wrought by modern technology.
"You see folks with I-pods in their ears, in their own worlds, walking past one another," Ward said. "People are lonely and isolated and the church can be a way to help people form community around Jesus."
"It all flows from the Eucharist," she added, saying EpV blends the ancient and the modern. "We're very traditional in some respects but are trying to interface with the neighborhood, its hopes, dreams, pains, sorrows, and hurts. How can the church be part of bringing God's redemption, renewal and hope into this kind of context?"
Ward considers the Episcopal Church "as sitting on a treasure chest and we don't realize what we're sitting on. It's time to open it up and let people realize who we are."
The average age of parishioners at Apostles' Church, which she planted about seven years ago in Seattle, is 20-something—a statistic she'd like to see replicated elsewhere.
"The culture is so open to what we have to offer, we're trying to throw open the doors and sound the bell, like a Johnny Appleseed or a Paul Revere, only sending tweets, 'the young people are coming, the young people are coming,'" she said. "They could be hanging from the rafters in our parishes if people just realized what we have."
Scattering seeds, redeveloping congregations
The Rev. Sara Fischer says she has been "scattering seeds" in her Portland neighborhood while "redeveloping" St. David's, a church whose membership had dwindled into the teens.
After hosting a series of community meetings, she drew up redevelopment plan incorporating core values expressed at those meetings.
"Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a farmer who scatters seeds and doesn't know what's going to come up," she said. "Well, a lot of what we've been doing in the last year is scattering seeds, trying different things."
Fischer will share the parish's story during the June Episcopal Village event. "The themes in our story have to do with music, peace, sustainability, bringing people together who care about the environment and living in a sustainable way."
After a year, the congregation has grown to about 60 on an average Sunday, she said. The church is typically abuzz with music programs, a Saturday "tool library" that lends drills, hammers and saws, and such community groups as the Portland Peace Choir, a Portland chapter of Dances of Universal Peace, an artist-in-residence whose work is the art of reconciliation, and nonviolent communication classes, all of which use space at the church.
On a recent weekend, St. David's hosted Village Building Convergence, a ten-day Portland community refurbishing and rebuilding effort.
"A lot of it is expanding your definition of church," Fischer said. "I don't think of what we're doing as something in addition to church or instead of church. I think of it as how we are church. Everything we do does emanate outward from our Sunday celebration of the Eucharist. A lot of it is about inviting people to come and share with us.
"They don't always share Eucharist but we are always very happy to share our space and share conversation with parts of our space."
The church is still in learning mode, but "we want to offer a different type of service on Sunday evenings," she said. "I'm not sure what we do on Sunday morning will ever work for the kinds of people using the space throughout week." But, she added: "The Episcopal Church does have something to offer them, we just haven't developed it yet."