We go to three churches at the same time

Eastridge Church, Seattle, Washington
For most of the almost four years we’ve been blogging about churches, we’ve been one-time visitors -- and visitors only. We’ve mostly gone to churches with no intention of returning on a regular basis. We started slowly in 2014 by visiting just a few local churches near our home in Sonoma County, California. In 2015, we visited churches throughout California (by theme, as some of you may recall). We spent 2016 traveling from state to state, visiting at least one church in each. When that trip was over, we moved to Fresno, California, early in 2017. We felt we already had a home church  at The Bridge, though we still visited other churches most weeks.

Over the past month, life has changed for us. Last week, we moved to Seattle, Washington, and we’re looking for a new church home. When we visit churches now, we’ll usually be thinking, is this where we want to stay? Even if we find the perfect (for us) church in the next few weeks, we plan to keep visiting churches through the end of this year. But we need a home base. If you’re a praying person, please pray for our search for a church home.

Don’t expect these posts to change a lot, though. We don’t expect to announce either, “Eureka! We’ve found our church!” or “Yuck! We won’t be be coming back here!” This blog is about first visits, and we always want to be kind. If we don’t want to return to a church, it wouldn’t be kind to announce it to the world, and if we really like a church on a first visit, we’re unlikely to decide to stay until we’ve visited several times --- and we don’t plan to write about those visits.

So enough preliminares. This week we visited the West Seattle campus of Eastridge Church, a multi-site church. The much larger Eastridge campus is in Issaquah (about a half an hour’s drive away). The church’s third campus is in Addis, Ethiopia (yup, the one in Africa). We were delighted that we’d visited on a Sunday when we got to hear a lot about that third campus.

The teaching time, televised from the Issaquah campus, was Pastor Steve Jamison’s interview of Doug and Tasha Myers (who lead the Addis congregation). Doug and Steve have a long relationship.

When Doug was 12 years old, he felt the call to missions while listening to one of Jamison’s sermons. Years later, Doug went on to work as a youth pastor under Jamison. During that time, the church leadership asked Doug where he thought he should be, and he said Africa. They asked what was keeping him from Africa and he said school debts. So the church made a commitment to pay off those debts.

Doug and Tasha have served years in Africa. As missionaries with the Assemblies of God, at first they followed traditional methods of ministering in rural areas. The emphasis had been on training local pastors for ministry, all in native languages, but they had a vision for a different kind of ministry.

Addis, Ethiopia is the headquarters for the African Union, a 55-nation organization that deals with economic issues, treaties, health concerns, etc. Representatives from all over the world, from the Americas, Europe, and Asia, to work with the Union, and the official working language for the African Union is English. So Doug and Tasha have begun an English language international congregation in Addis. The ministry is growing, so Pastor Jamison challenged the two congregations to raise $50,000 for the congregation in Addis.

We enjoyed worshipping with the people of the West Seattle campus. During the singing time, people were encouraged to come forward with prayer requests, for physical healing, work, financial needs, decision making.

After announcements, people were encouraged to chat over coffee, strawberries, melons, bagels, donuts and other treats before returning to the sanctuary for the message. John introduced himself, though he was a visitor as well. He is here from India to visit his daughter.

I met Andy and asked him why he attended this church. He said his wife wanted to go to a community church. I asked how long he’d been attending there, and he nodded at his daughter, who was 12, and said they’d been attending since she was little.

After the service ended, we were able to spend a little more time chatting with people. Mindy chatted with Heather, who’s Pastor Jamison’s executive assistant, while I talked with her husband, Brian. I asked what he liked about the church.

He noted that the West Seattle campus had the advantages of a small church, so you can get to know people. (Craig, the campus pastor, said during the service, “It’s good to have a critical mass in the room.”) Brian said they also benefit from the large campus in Issaquah. (For instance, the kids from West Seattle will be bussed over to the Issaquah campus to share their Vacation Bible School.)

We loved being in one place, West Seattle, and yet feeling a part of the church a half hour and half a world away. That's how the Church Universal works.

We go to church at Fig Garden

The Well Community Church (Fig Garden campus), Fresno, California
This may be hard for you to imagine, but sermon collections used to be a thing. People published books of acclaimed sermons from preachers such as Charles Spurgeon or even anthologies of several preacher's sermons. I had to purchase some sermon books for seminary, but back in the day, ordinary people bought them, and churches without pastors could read those sermons during their worship services.

Video has, of course, changed all that. Churches can bring the preacher into the church virtually by projecting it on a screen. Lots of churches make this technology part of their culture. Churches divide into a number of “campuses” (locations) and share the same sermon, either live or prerecorded.

Which raises a question: we aim to go to a different church every week, but did we go to a different church if we went to worship services at different campuses of the same church? Last April, we visited The Well Community Church in Fresno -- North Campus. This Sunday we went to The Well Community Church in Fresno -- Fig Garden Campus.

So did we go to a new place or did we cheat? (And can we cheat on the rule of going to a new church every week when we make up our own rules?)

Anyway, on Sunday morning, we went to Fig Garden, and they used a prerecorded video for the sermon. (We were sure it was “Memorex” rather than live, because Mike the on-screen preacher kept saying “tonight.”)

Still, I think it’s an interesting question. Are multi-campus churches just one church, or are they more? Do people who attend always go to the same campus or rotate around? From the way people greeted friends, my bet would be people stick with one campus. We were greeted with a hearty hardy firm handshake by the ushers at the door.

The campus has its own pastor who introduced himself at the beginning of the service. “Good morning! I’m Josh, and I have the privilege to serve as campus pastor.” Josh was live and in person, and he announced some things that were happening at The Well. The night before, the church had hosted other churches for the city wide 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting, and the night before they had also hosted a dessert for some missionaries. Those same missionaries were introduced at the end of the service we attended.

Along with everybody else, we were encouraged to fill out attendance cards as part of a “conversation.”

“I’m Chris, one of the pastors on staff. We’re going to bring back an old hymn, ‘Come Thou Fount’.” (Is it really an old hymn that needs bringing back when it’s covered by Mumford and Sons?) The worship team consisted of four men: two on guitar, one on bass, and one on drums. It was interesting not to have a keyboard of any kind, but I enjoyed the singing.

It was time for the sermon and time to watch the screen. “I’m Mike, one of the three teaching pastors... The Three Musketeers, The Three Stooges, depending on the week.” He introduced a new series on I Thessalonians (which Mike mostly referred to as “First Thess.”)

Mike began by “bragging on our artistic team.” Art is evidently an important component in the ministry; there are rather abstract paintings on the wall in the foyer, and some nice more representational stained glass. He told about how the teaching pastors tell the artistic team the Scripture themes they’ll be teaching, and the team runs with it (after asking follow up questions such as “What is the Greek word for ‘hope’?”)

As he started the sermon, Mike talked about the importance of setting in the stories, and he turned to the Book of Acts for the story of the founding of church in Thessalonica.

Mike talked about persecution the early church faced, saying that we don’t have to face such things in modern America. He said his one experience of “persecution” in his decades of faith was when a professor said he wouldn’t work with him because he was a Christian.

Nonetheless, there is still persecution and suffering for Christians in the world, as the missionaries who came forward at the end of the service know. They serve in a country closed to missions. So I can’t say anything more about them or their ministry, but I can say the Fig Garden Campus of The Well is a church -- even if it is a part of a bigger church -- because all of it is part of the One, Apostolic Church, and we were glad we visited.