Third Places and/as Sacred Spaces: Innovation among Neighborhood-rooted New Seattle Churches

Seattle is home to a number of new churches that are embodying their belief that the gospel is good news to neighborhoods. Seeking to incarnate the Kingdom of God, they fashion themselves as a tangible assets to their community.  Several do this by providing a "third place"-- a space that is open to all and fosters community and advances the well-being of the neighborhood. Here are some of the church-connected third spaces in Seattle.

Aurora Commons 
This 'neighborhood living room' includes a public kitchen and lending library, as well as various programs. It was started by Awake Church along one of the city's most troubled streets, Aurora Avenue.









The Collaboratory

Billing itself as an 'incubator for social change' this space includes a co-working office, a learning kitchen, an events venue, and a community park and garden. It was started by Valley & Mountain in collaboration with Community Arts Create.

Pilgrim Coffeehouse 
Still seeking funding, this coffee shop along Aurora is an initiative of Epic Life Church.

The Green Bean Coffeehouse
This coffee shop in Greenwood--now in its third (re)location--was started by Sanctuary. 












 Fremont Arts Abbey
Officially a (reduced-rate) tenant of Church of the Apostles, Fremont Arts Abbey curates and offers creative performances and fulfills a portion of COTA's mission to serve the community.

Kakao and 415 Westlake
Kakao is a chocolate and coffee shop is located in the heart of South Lake Union. In the same building houses 415 Westlake, a venue for cultural and fundraising events.  Both were started by Union Church.



The Maple Leaf Living Room

Launched as Lux Coffee Co, but rebuffed by zoning issues, this space was started Lux Communities in a church building in the Maple Leaf neighborhood.

Port & Anchor
A community center and cafe inside the large church building serves as an art co-op and source for counseling services started by Emmanuel Church in Phinney Ridge.
















Q Cafe

A coffee shop and event venue located in Interbay and started by Quest.  (Unlike the other churches on this list, Quest's identity is less neighborhood-rooted and more strongly linked to their multi-ethnic composition.)


If you know of other third places/sacred spaces in the city of Seattle, please comment!

Check out the links below to learn more and catch some of my interviews about my research among new Seattle churches. 

Here's the King 5 News coverage of my research and several churches included in the study here.
Here's my interview with Marcie Sillman, of Seattle's NPR affiliate, KUOW, here.  
You can listen to the Rose City Forum interview here. 

Identity and Practice in New Churches: My Dissertation Proposal in Brief

I'm officially ABD (all but dissertation) which means I'm being asked regularly what my dissertation is on.  Here's a shortened version of the "statement of the problem" from my prospectus. 

At the beginning of the 21st century in the U.S., despite historically low confidence in organized religion and the rise of the “Nones,” new churches and new forms of church are springing up across the country. Many of these assert the centrality of missional identity and practices of Christian witness, but the effects of such missional priorities on the faithfulness and spiritual vitality of these churches are uncertain. As a project in “practical ecclesiology” this study of new churches will utilize both sociological and theological methods to explore the dynamics between ecclesial identity—a church’s corporate self-image and implicit ecclesiology—and practices of mission, community and spirituality. My thesis is that some of the resources needed by Western Christianity in 21st century are being developed by the newest cohort of churches, but that uncritical adoption of their practices and perspectives in pursuit of effectiveness is theologically (and practically) perilous.

The project will develop in three moves. First, using survey and qualitative work in Seattle churches founded after 9/11/2001, it will offer an interpretive typology of the ways in which corporate identity and practice are related in ecclesial life, thus making a contribution to congregational studies research, which has given limited attention to new churches. Second, departing from the productionistic logic prevalent in church planting literature, this project will contribute to this field by offering robust theological assessment of the types and practices of new churches, drawing upon scholarship in Christian witness, Luke-Acts, missional ecclesiology, Christian spiritual formation and missional spirituality. Third, and finally, this project will draw from the ecclesial practices and the theological literatures to make constructive and practical proposals for church leaders seeking to lead the Western church into missional faithfulness and spiritual vitality in the 21st century.

Theologies of Church Planting: Comparing Malphurs and Murray

Two frequently recommended texts in the burgeoning church planting literature are Aubrey Malphurs’ Planting Growing Churches for the 21st Century:  A Comprehensive Guide for New Churches and Those Desiring Renewal and Stuart Murray’s Church Planting: Laying Foundations.  This essay seeks to engage with the theological proposals evident in these two books by identifying the foundational theological ideas and assumptions in each, contrasting them, and offering fresh critical reflection.  

Mission-Shaped Church 1: Summary

Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions in a Changing Context is a rare example of a denominational report written by a committee that actually has gained a wider audience and affected considerable change.  First published in 2004, this report was written to address the challenges facing the Church of England in a changing context.  This post reconstructs the report’s the major argument in the terms of a practical theological project, and a follow up engages critically with a central theme with significant implications: what the report dubs “the incarnational principle.”

Neil Cole's Organic Church: Summary & Review

Neil Cole believes “that church should happen wherever life happens” (24).  As founder of the Awakening Chapels network and Church Multiplication Associates which claims 700 churches in 32 states and 23 nations, Cole is a leader in what is most-often referred to as the house church movement.  He dislikes the “house church” designation—citing the fact that many of the churches in his movement meet in parking lots and bars not houses and the connotations “house church” carries of disillusioned and disgruntled defectors from the mainstream church—preferring instead to call them “organic churches” (22).  This brief essay will explore some of the key theoretical and methodological proposals found in Cole’s most widely read book, Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens (2005) and offer a critical insights.

As the title suggests, Organic Church is as much about ecclesiology as church planting methodology.  Cole finds the list of characteristics

Ed Stetzer and David Fitch on the Missional Church

It's a good discussion.



Ed Stetzer & David Fitch - a missional conversation from Missional Tribe on Vimeo.
There are two more videos, click Continue.

Ed Stetzer's Planting Missional Churches: Summary & Review

As an updated and renamed version of Stetzer’s 2003 text, Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age, Planting Missional Churches seeks to ride the wave of enthusiasm among evangelicals for all things “missional” and seemingly targets an audience of young conservative (male) would-be church planters.  As a result, the writing style is down-to-earth, pastoral and practical rather than deeply theological or academicly sophisticated.  With twenty nine chapters, there are few, if any, aspects of starting a new church that Stetzer doesn’t treat.  Given that each chapter can not be addressed, this summary will focus on the five “major messages” of the book which Stetzer identifies in chapter one.  He links each with a key word: missional, incarnational, theological, ecclesiological, and spiritual (2-3).

Missional
According to Stetzer, being missional means assuming the posture of a missionary—one sent—as Jesus was—to “seek and save the lost.”  Stetzer’s opening chapter seeks to establish church planting as the most appropriate missional response to what he portrays starkly as a North American church in decline and growing ranks of non-Christian Americans.  Being missional, for Stetzer, means taking action to reverse these trends, and he presents planting new churches as the proper remedy, touting it as both the “most effective method of evangelism” and the biblical response to the church’s “decline” (14).  Chapter two is devoted to “redeveloping a missional mind-set” and invokes classic quotes from Newbigin, Bosch and Kahler to present the church as the sent agent of a sending God, and as the instrument of the missio Dei, a popular term which Stetzer invokes but leaves disappointingly unspecified.    

Ecclesiology & Ethnography - US Conference 2012 Reflections

Twenty-four hours after we closed the Ecclesiology and Ethnography Conference at Luther Seminary, here’s is what I’m left with:

Mostly questions.  Of course, often questions can be more generative than answers.  As my high-school history teacher, Lowell Hagan, taught me: the kinds of questions you ask determine the kinds of answers you can get.

Among the questions, this first one was particularly poignant for me at this stage in my work:

What has been the method implied in my practical theological projects to date…and what method do I intend to use in my future work?

In other words, the conference compelled me to be more reflective and intentional about the methods evident in my theologizing.  As a practical theologians, we share the basic assumption of the Ecclesiology and Ethnography proposal that the social sciences have a place in the work of theology.  Pete Ward, who edited the book whose release was timed with this conference, Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, summarizes its proposal as the conviction that understanding the church requires viewing it as simultaneously a theological and social/cultural entity and that as a result both qualitative and theological methods will be needed.  More precisely, the proposal asserts that instead of using both varieties of method sequentially, the research needs to be simultaneously theological and “ethnographic.”

Whose Mission? What Church? Hoekendijk, Blauw, and the WCC on the Missionary Church

This post explores the way the church and mission are related and developed in three documents written between 1951 and 1967: “The Church in Missionary Thinking” by J. C. Hoekendijk (1952), The Missionary Nature of the Church by Johannes Blauw (1962), and The Church for Others, published by the World Council of Churches (1967).  In conclusion, I offer reflections on the resonant and discordant perspectives therein.

In “The Church in Missionary Thinking,” J.C. Hoekendijk lamented how ecclesiology had, in recent decades, swallowed up mission.  It had done this, he points out, by using such concise verbiage as that offered by Dr. Durr: “Mission is the road from the Church to the Church” (324).  Indeed, the church had, in his view, both eliminated the world by making it a “a sort of ecclesiastical training-ground” and dealt with the kingdom by either subsuming it within its ecclesiastical bounds or relegating it to far off in the eschatological distance (324).  Hoekendijk labeled this way of thinking church-ism, and asserted that younger churches had assimilated it to the point of expecting an independent church to be a “Church-free-from-the-Mission” (327). 

Streams of Living Water and Me

Reading Richard Foster's Streams of Living Water was a watershed moment in my ecclesiology.  Whereas I had formerly lamented the shattered nature of Christ’s church, I now relish the pluriform expressions it takes, still with sobriety about the brokenness of this diversity.  There is little question that I am most at home in the Evangelical Stream, having grown up and been educated in thoroughly evangelical schools.  Yet, I have had significant experience and exposure within several other streams as well.  My mother (and much of her family) are best characterized as Charismatic and I myself spent the better part of two years worshipping at a Charismatic Anglican church in Wheaton, IL called Church of the Great Shepherd, pastored by Dr. Lyle Dorsett.  Most of my pre-college years were spent in Foursquare and Christian Missionary Alliance churches, with a strong Holiness tradition.  My last 8+ years in Presbyterian churches have convinced me of the importance of Social Justice to the Gospel of the Kingdom, which is now central to my faith.   Despite a strong introverted tendencies and appreciation for the contemplative stream, I have never found great resonance with it’s practices, though I deeply long for moments of contemplative union.

Evangelism after Christendom: Review and Reflections Pt. 3

According to Bryan Stone:

Evangelism, as a practice of the Spirit, is therefore  utterly pacifist in nature.  The pacifism of evangelism is not passive but arises from an eschatological trust in the Spirit who goes before the evangelist (229).  Apologetics, if an attempt to make faith compulsory on the basis of reason, fail the test of pacifism (232).  Instead, apologetics are primarily an act that seeks to reveal the beauty of holiness.  Thus the primary tasks of evangelism are “confession, proclamation and public exemplification” rather than argument and persuasion (232).  This task occurs in and through

Evangelism after Christendom: Review and Reflections Pt. 1

If you haven't read Bryan Stone's Evangelism After Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness, consider these next three posts a primer to this significant contribution to the theology of evangelism.  

Stone’s overarching thesis is that faithful evangelism is most fundamentally accomplished in the “beauty of holiness made real in the church” (12). Laying the foundation for this thesis, he identifies evangelism as a veritable practice—a virtuous activity whose ends are intrinsic. Moreover, evangelism is a constitutive Christian practice (47); the whole Christian life can be described as evangelism and the absence of evangelism, broadly defined as witness, is effectively the absence of Christianity. Stone asserts that most of what has been written in recent decades on evangelism is misguided due to a focus either on pragmatics or apologetics, both of which are grounded in non-Christian narratives. The primary logic of evangelism is that

The Goal of Ecumenism: Why and How to be One

I. Introduction

Paul rebuked the Corinthians for claiming the names of Apollos and himself rather than Jesus, with a stinging question: “Has Christ been divided?” (1 Cor. 1:13). One look around the ecclesiastical landscape with churches and denominations bearing different names invites the same question: Does the present state of the church present Christ as divided?
 

The ecumenical movement began with the assumption that, indeed, something is wrong about the present state of the church’s unity. What then is the task of ecumenism? All share the conviction that “it is not the task of the ecumenical movement...to create unity between the churches, but rather to give form to the unity already created by God.”[1] This paper will consider the two dominant positions regarding the proper form of ecumenism, namely, “reconciled diversity” and “organic reunion.”

Unity and Purity in Johannine Ecclesiology: Searching for Johannine Insights for Churches in Crisis

I. Introduction

Many mainline churches are currently on the brink of a fracture over the issue of the place of homosexuals in the life of the church, among other issues. My own denomination, the PC(USA), commissioned a “Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church” whose very name highlights the nature of its inquiry: “How do we mediate between the mandates of scripture that the Church model both unified peace and behavioral and doctrinal purity?”

This is not a new question, but one as old as the Christian church itself. This document is an attempt to seek the wisdom of the experiences and texts of the Johannine community in answer to this question.

II. Why Ask John?

As we seek Johannine wisdom on this subject, one might wonder, “Why ask John?” In answer to this, let us consider the story of John and his community.

That the World May Know: Newbigin’s Eschatological Ecclesiology of Mission and Unity

I. Introduction

What if we placed our thinking about the church within the grand narrative of God’s ongoing redemptive work in the world? What if we defined the church not by what it has been, or even by what it is, but by that end to which it moves? The answers to these questions can be found in the ecclesiology of Lesslie Newbigin. Newbigin, who began articulating a vision for the church while he was a missionary in South India, has had enormous and irreversible impact on contemporary ecclesiology. His insights were instrumental in the early decades of the World Council of Churches, and even show up in the documents of Vatican II.

This paper will attempt to encapsulate the major elements of Newbigin’s ecclesiology.