Support
This page exists for me to be able to convey a bit about what I’m doing and how others might be able to support me.
Who I Am
I am working bi-vocationally in Portland, Oregon. I’m working 3/4 time for Hachisoft, doing software development. And then on top of that, I’m devoting 15-20 (though often more) hours per week to helping get a missional church plant off the ground. This page is mostly about that.
If you’ve never heard of missional before, the idea is to do church in such a way as to realize that as Christians, we are missionaries wherever we live. This is especially important in a place like Portland, which is one of the top 5 least churched cities in the US.
So to help facilitate that, I’ve joined a missions organization called Christian Associates International(CA). CA has existed for 40 years and has been starting new churches in Europe during that time(it has no expanded to also church planting in North and South America as well as just launching a church plant in South Africe). As Portland’s ethos is quite close to Europe, it has been quite useful to have a wellspring of experience to draw from as we experience our own challenges in Portland.
Introducing Sacred Roots
The project that we are doing here in Portland is called Sacred Roots. We currently have just under 20 people involved. We have all intentionally moved into a similar part of town so that we can embed into communities and befriend people who would never step foot in a church. We find people who used to be Christians, people who are opposed to the idea of Christianity and people who are just apathetic towards religion in general. What is interesting though is that when I have discussions with people I’ve befriended, most of them will say “it’s not that I’m not spiritual, I’m quite spiritual. I just don’t trust organized religion.”
As such a large part of our task is to learn how to be a church that is welcoming to these types of people and how to teach others how to talk about Jesus in this type of context. It’s a daunting task but it’s also an exciting one. We are starting to see fruits of conversations and ground work that’s been laid for a few years now!
How You Can Help
The biggest way anybody can support me in this venture is prayer - the more prayer the better! Portland is a dark place spiritually, and I’ve seen a number of church plants fall by the wayside. So if you are interested in praying for me and would like to be kept up to date on prayer requests for me and for Sacred Roots, you can do so by signing up below.
The other major way in which I can use support is financially. My goal is to raise roughly $1500/month in support. Some of this will go to me as a salary to make up for the fact that I’m not working full time. Some of it will go to supporting my missions agency and some will go into an administrative fund for me to be able to travel to network and learn from other church planters and missionaries in various conferences and help finance needs for our community in Portland. If you are interested in learning more about how to support me financially, sign up below and I will contact you with more information.
