Mission Igniter

Posted by Jim Gray

Editor’s Note: Portions of this article is a repost of what was featured this morning in The Columbian , written by Bob Albrecht

A few month ago we posted a video interview with Brett Aljets from Whipple Creek Church.  This morning The Columbian, a newpaper based out of Southwest Washington state featured Brett and his story:

The vision is simple, the application unique. Brett Aljets, head pastor of Whipple Creek Church, describes it thusly: “We don’t want to be a church for the city or of the city. We want to be a church with the city.”

Abstaining from the politics of religion, Aljets oversees a 9-year-old church community in Hazel Dell that transcended denominations to welcome two other area churches into its congregation for the Christmas season. Whipple Creek’s first off-site ministry was housed at a skate park. Churchgoers every three months fill trash cans with socks, underwear or gift cards that are emptied at a public elementary school. The church provides financial support and volunteers to a Rose Village laundromat that washes needy families’ clothes for free once a month.

The Whipple Creek approach is outward-oriented, not a “holy huddle,” as Aljets put it, and reflective of Aljets’ dream: He wants to put a new face on Christianity.

“We always say what the church is against,” Aljets said. “What is a church for? It’s for Jesus and Jesus was for people, particularly the disenfranchised.”

Whipple Creek is a finalist this month for a $250,000 Pepsi Refresh Project grant that Aljets said would go a long way toward breaking ground on the center Whipple Creek envisions.

“It won’t be church-y,” Aljets said. Voting runs through the end of the month.

On the Pepsi Refresh website, Aljets wrote, “We seek to be a community that if we weren’t here, we’d be missed.”

Here is the link to vote for the Pepsi Refresh Grant

Posted by Jim Gray

Editor’s Note: The following is part of an article featured in the Christan Standard

As president of Visioneering Studios, which he founded in 2002, Mel has provided architectural insight to ministries across the United States and around the world, including Southeast Christian Church (Louisville, Kentucky), Christ’s Church of the Valley (Peoria, Arizona), and Saddleback Church (Lake Forest, California). Visioneering Studios received “Best Church Architect” Solomon Awards in 2007, 2008, and 2009 and is the only national architecture and design firm wholly owned by a Christian ministry, the Provision Ministry Group.

What drove the passion to get into “architectural evangelism?”

Getting a taste of it by working with Gene Appel and Barry McMurtrie. That taste of kingdom impact and eternal significance was enough for me to want to shift from corporate profiteering to kingdom building. It was the idea of walking away from lining another developer’s pockets to creating an environment that could actually change an eternal destination. It’s pretty compelling.

Did you ever have a desire to be “in the ministry?”

From the time I became a Christian in high school, I was a frustrated evangelist, missionary, and pastor because I didn’t have the speaking skills. I was too chicken to be a missionary, so it was the idea of following God-given wiring. Personally, I had never been able to make that connection between drawing and eternal impact. God had to kind of open the door, tear the curtain, for me to see the connection.

How does architecture evangelize?

Let me talk about how it can de-evangelize—in other words, scare people away. I’ve become convinced church walls really can be seen as one of the biggest obstacles between Christians and non-Christians, between the lost and the found, between the body of Christ and the community. Part of our job, even as we’re designing and building walls, is, ironically, to metaphorically tear down walls that exist between the ekklesia that’s meeting on Sunday and those who are so desperate for eternal life they’ve never heard about.

Aren’t the walls an indicator that “the church meets here?”

At one level, conservatively, we’re going to try to not let the walls get in the way. For example, not just tossing up things that are beacons to Christians or the rechurched but basically communicate “members only” to the unchurched. More aggressively, when we talk about architectural evangelism, it’s the idea that if you’re going to be called to be “fishers of men” you should put some bait on the hook.

How do you bait the hook?

One of the things in our contemporary, especially suburban, car-oriented society is people have this deep hunger for connection, authentic relationship, community. A lot of times they perceive it as hunger for horizontal connection, and we believe we can provide that while producing the deeper need for a vertical connection to the Creator and his creation. What that looks like is what we call “destinations that lift the sprit.” In other words, compelling environments that are a uniquely appropriate solution and response to the community and the context we’re working in—an opportunity to create a postmodern version of Jacob’s well, where someone could come for a drink and encounter living water, eternal truth, and a relationship that leads to a shift in their eternal destination.

To read the rest of this article, see the original here.  You can find out more about Mel McGowan here.

Kevin Palau talks with Dr. John Sowers about his organization, The Mentoring Project. In part one, we hear some of John’s story and his & Donald Millers’ vision on how the church can rewrite the stories of the “Fatherless Generation”.

See more about this interview on Kevin Palau’s blog

Here’s our new friend Dr. Andrew “Andy” Jackson in an interview with Mark Driscoll

Catalyst Voices – Ryan Meeks from Catalyst on Vimeo.