Emerging Church Case Study: Evergreen Community, Portland

I have attempted to research the movement known as the emerging church. This movement seeks to create a church that is relevant and engaging in our postmodern society, eschewing the traditional paradigms of what a church is. In my searches, I found an example of such church in Portland. It is called the Evergreen Community.

Like most churches, they meet every Sunday morning. Unlike many churches (some of which might be horrified at this concept), they meet in a pub. They explain that this location is indeed central to their mission:(link)

Why do you meet in a pub? Well, it’s pretty cheap :) Honestly, our desire was to do our worship gatherings in a place that was both affordable and that fit with our philosophy of involvement in the life of the city of Portland. Also, being accessible to those we are trying to integrate into our community was pretty high on the list… And the pub does all that. It really breaks down barriers for people who wouldn’t think about walking into a more traditional church building. It has the added benefit of tending to keep away those who probably wouldn’t fit with our community anyway and might feel more at home in a more “traditional” community.

They describe what typically goes on therein:

A welcome by someone wherein we talk about an aspect of the community- one of our core values or something we are trying to do or be.

We’ll have a few moments of quiet, centering prayer… often accompanied by a reading (usually the whole group, in unison) of a Psalm.

After that, the fun begins…

We generally work through books of the Bible, but occasionally spend some time focusing on different topics. But even when we’re covering a topic, we tend to base it on a section of Scripture- we tend to work verse by verse through the whole passage.

And we talk a lot. For us, the sermon is (at least this is the ideal) the work of the community. We are teaching each other. Whoever is leading that morning still has a role in keeping things on track, doing the majority of the talking, but we do our darndest to get others talking to each other as well. In this way, as a community, we wrestle with the Scriptures.

We prefer this dialogical approach over the more traditional monologue of one person speaking sermons and feel it helps people learn and stay involved better.

However, they emphasize that their Sunday worship is definitely not the extent of their church. They have a set of core values listed, which make their priorities clear. If I can attempt to summarize these:

1.  Mission – The church is set up to be a mission to others – “we are here for the church which is here for the world”.
2. Justice – “The Evergreen Community aims to be a group of people who honor God the way that He wants to be honored, not necessarily in the way that is most comfortable or convenient for us. And that means actually doing something for the poor, because that’s what God wants, even if it pulls us far outside of our comfort zones.”
3. Community – The church “experience” is to move in a progression. Only at the beginning are we to be necessarily concerned with whether the church is something for us; it is imperative that progress beyond that to being something for other people.
4. Hope – “Drawing a picture for those we meet of who they could be, of the person God created them to be… and rather than pushing them towards that out of guilt or obligation, pulling them towards it out a sense of love and hope.”
5. History – “We also want to see ourselves not as a disconnected community, but as a group of people who stand in the stream of something much larger than ourselves: the Church down through history. As a result, we want to look back to that history and draw inspiration, resources and role models from it, while recognizing that we aren’t necessarily bound by it.”

And their community is fostered by their smaller size (I think about 130 people). They reflect this attitude like this:

Will you become a mega church and sell out? Our vision from the beginning has been to remain small as a community but grow through multiplication. Our goal is not to build one large church dynasty because it becomes impossible to remain personal and non-programmatic. Therefore, we seek to remain small enough as a community to where we can know and take care of one another, but at the same time we seek to grow through continually starting new communities where more people can gather and seek to love and serve each other and the neighborhood in which we meet and live.

The Emerging Church is something that interests me greatly; I shall in this too continue my research.

Tags: Evergreen Community