Towns change, churches follow
Published 12:36 am Monday, March 17, 2008
MARYSVILLE — “What does your baby Jesus look like?”
Last Christmas, Damascus Road Church sent out postcards asking that very question.
They also answered the question with an image they believe shows the reality of many people’s idea of the day Jesus was born: Mary, Joseph and the shepherds gathered around a flat-screen television, nestled in a manger.
If you don’t think the satire is funny, well, pastors at the church feel sorry for you. They say so on their Web site.
Damascus Road is one of Marysville’s newest churches, and it’s growing fast. It’s been a year and a half since it began meeting each Sunday at Allen Creek Elementary School, and there are about 100 adults and at least 60 children who regularly attend.
The Pacific Northwest has a reputation as the country’s least-churched region. Now, congregations such as Damascus Road may be pushing that idea aside.
“On one hand there is this nonchurched spiritualism that characterizes religion in the Northwest, but there’s also a strong cohort of people who identify themselves as Pentecostal or nondenominational,” said Dale Soden, director of the Weyerhaeuser Center for Christian Faith and Learning at Whitworth College in Spokane.
Pentecostals and nondenominational, evangelical Christians are more likely to attend church more often than those who are affiliated with other churches, and tend to be more intense in their worship.
According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Washington state is among those states with the highest number (23 percent) of those who consider themselves “unaffiliated” when it comes to religion.
But there are more evangelical Protestants (25 percent) in the state than there are unaffiliated people, even if by a slim margin. While Bible Belt states have higher percentages of evangelical Protestants (as many as 53 percent on Oklahoma and Arkansas), Washington state has as many Evangelical Protestants as Florida, more than most Southwest states, and more than every state in the Northeast.
The Northeast has fewer people who consider themselves unaffiliated, but the religious majority in those states is Catholic, who attend church less than evangelical Christians, according to a 2006 Gallup poll.
That poll concluded that church attendance is highest among evangelicals, with 60 percent attending every week or almost every week. Forty-five percent of Catholics attend church with the same frequency.
During the early 1900s, Seattle was home to the country’s largest church, Soden said.
Seattle First Presbyterian Church had about 10,000 members and met in several branches throughout the city, he said. Until his death in 1940, the pastor was among the first to bring innovation to churches in the Pacific Northwest.
It’s impossible to know how many churches now are forming in Snohomish County. They’re not required to register anywhere, and many churches are too small or informal to hire employees, buy buildings or even pay their own pastor. Some churches meet in homes, or are “daughter” churches of larger congregations that handle their tax records, such as Christian Faith Center, a King County-based church that now also has a campus in Mill Creek.
One thing is certain: as Marysville, Arlington, Smokey Point and other northern Snohomish County communities grow, more churches are cropping up.
“We want to go north,” said Christy Rice, communications director at New Life Foursquare Church in Everett.
New Life’s Marysville satellite church plans to hold its first service at Quil Ceda Elementary School on Easter Sunday. The Foursquare denomination, a large Pentecostal organization, targeted Marysville because it is the city with among the highest recent growth rates in Snohomish County, Rice said.
“Any place where you see growth, then having new churches will definitely be a reflection of that,” said Aaron Thompson, pastor of the Marysville campus.
Steve Schertzinger started New Hope Community Church, where “no perfect people are allowed,” about four years ago. It is a daughter congregation of New Hope Christian Church in South Everett.
Schertzinger said his church has grown to about 85 people because families who have just moved to a new area often are more open to making changes in their spiritual lives than they normally would be.
“When people move and make one change in their life, they’re open to other changes, and that means they’ll take the time to ask faith questions,” he said.
On a recent Sunday, Schertzinger told his congregation that the answer to any faith question is “yes.”
“That’s all we need to say,” he said, as church members nodded and mouthed the word. “So when God asks us a question, we’ll be ready with the right answer.”
At Damascus Road, Pastor Sam Ford suggests to his congregation that God’s question might be, “Will you start a small business?”
If Damascus Road intends to affect the culture of Marysville, Ford said, church members need to be part of the city’s daily life.
Church members are planning a coffee shop, a bakery, maybe even a brewpub.
“We’re just bringing the people together to where authentic relationships happen,” he said. “I don’t think a carnival with blow-up toys is what the city needs.”
Ford doesn’t know Marysville’s growth statistics. He started Damascus Road, with help from the Seattle-based Acts 29 Church Planting Network, because he fell in love with the city after teaching English at Marysville-Pilchuck High School for nine years.
He admitted that Damascus Road’s unapologetic style may be shaped, at least in part, by his high school students, whom he continues to teach part-time at Marysville-Pilchuck High School.
“If you spend all day with 17-year-olds, they’ll tell you pretty quick if you’re out of touch,” he said.
That might account for the church’s advertisements, some of which quite literally use bathroom humor.
“Church for people who pee” is one slogan, splashed across a photograph of a row of urinals.
“Our vision is not to build a big cathedral and say, ‘Here’s our church, come to us,’ ” Ford said. “We believe we’re supposed to be a ministry within this culture.”
That type of innovation is common among churches in largely unchurched regions, Soden said.
“Even if we accept the numbers as they are, we shouldn’t conclude that religion is not influencing and shaping the Northwest,” he said. “People say, we’re the least-churched region, therefore religion is not significant. That’s a big mistake.”
Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@heraldnet.com.
