Joining God in the renewal of all things by engaging in practices that ground us in the love of God.
We have a conviction that the Creator God is at work to heal and remake the whole world. Our own lives are a part of that renewal project and God invites us to join in with Him in the ongoing work of making all things new. We want to be followers of Jesus known for their kindness, generosity and service to others. To follow Jesus and join Him in His mission is to become agents of renewal in our neighborhoods, industries and our city as a whole.
But as with any worthwhile pursuit, it takes practice.
We believe that living into the way of Jesus takes practice – and that our faith is much more than something we add to our already busy, stressed out lives, but rather, it is a way of life.
So many of us want to live in the way of Jesus—pursuing a life that is deeply soulful, connected to our real needs and good news to our world. Yet too often our methods of spiritual formation are individualistic, information driven or disconnected from the details of everyday life. If Jesus of Nazareth demonstrated and taught a revolutionary way of love that is actually possible, alive with healing and hope, then we need a path for experiencing that revolution in our everyday lives.
So many of us want to live in the way of Jesus—pursuing a life that is deeply soulful, connected to our real needs and good news to our world. Yet too often our methods of spiritual formation are individualistic, information driven or disconnected from the details of everyday life. If Jesus of Nazareth demonstrated and taught a revolutionary way of love that is actually possible, alive with healing and hope, then we need a path for experiencing that revolution in our everyday lives.
To swim upstream, we need each other.
Some today would say the church is irrelevant, impotent, obsolete. We disagree. Yes, we too are familiar with the ways in which the church in North America has been misshaped by the dominant culture of consumerism and individualism and perhaps a premature target that ends with a "prayer" instead of a life-long pursuit of God's ongoing renewal in our lives and in our world. And yet we believe that opting out of church only reinforces this false narrative. If we truly want to live into God's story in the kingdom of love, we will have to swim upstream. We will need each other to reengage our faith as a profoundly earthy, bodily and communal experience in the midst of an age of post-modernity, frenetic lifestyles, anxiety, fragmentation, disembodiment, and loneliness.
We aim to do this through shared practices and community experiments.
- Communal Practices remind us daily and weekly of God's story we are living into and connect us deeply to communion with the triune God and with each other.
- Formational Practices heal us and form us more and more into His likeness as we grow in faith, hope and love.
- Missional Practices connect us to God's healing work in the world as we practice presence, pursue reconciliation, fight for justice, embody compassion and seek the good of all.
Our Story
We believe in the power of story. As a community we have welcomed our stories as agents of personal transformation as we have sought to understand how our life experiences have shaped us and the story God is writing in and through our lives both individually and as a community. Our stories never begin with us but are part of intersecting and connecting stories before us and long after us. This is true of our faith community as well. We are a continuation of many rich stories over the past 30 years and we hope that there will be many stories that continue long after this current iteration of our community.
This part of the story together begins in 1999 when Rose and Rich Swetman became the co-pastors of an existing congregation.and began to explore what it means to be an incarnational missional community. In 2004, we leased our first building in Shoreline and began working to be a positive presence in the community through the creation of mission groups, partnering with non-profit organizations already at work in the community and stepping in to serve as there were needs. We began to ask the question, "If we left the neighborhood, would we be missed?" During this time, Rose Swetman completed her doctoral dissertation, The Practicing Church, as we sought to serve the low-income, marginalized, and disadvantaged as a response to following in the way of Jesus. Out of this, Canopy Scholars was birthed, a local nonprofit serving underserved youth and families in the neighborhood.
In 2012, Jessica Ketola joined Rich and Rose Swetman on staff and began Leadership in the New Parish at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology in partnership with the Parish Collective. During this time, our leadership spent time reimagining what it might mean to innovate as a church on mission into the neighborhood. Jessica served as Executive Director of Turning Point and Senior Associate Pastor. In 2014, Jessica and her family moved into the Richmond Highlands neighborhood in Shoreline to live intentionally to be a part of a fabric of love in the neighborhood. We continued to explore what it might mean to be the church and the presence of Jesus in the everyday contexts of our neighborhoods, schools and work places. How could the gospel be reinterpreted for our day and for our time as good news to our actual neighbors?
In May of 2016, Jessica Ketola stepped in as Lead Pastor and relaunched the faith community in her neighborhood home in January of 2017. Gatherings were centered around hospitality and around the table. Since then, we have been on a journey to embody love in our neighborhood and to reimagine and rethink what it means to be the church. We long to see the kingdom of God come to our neighbors and to the least of these. We long to be transformed by the love of God and to see the transformation of our communities.
And the journey continues as we wrestle with how to more fully live into being rooted communities embodying the compassion of Jesus in the neighborhoods we live in while we link arms across neighborhoods and work toward the renewal of our city.
This part of the story together begins in 1999 when Rose and Rich Swetman became the co-pastors of an existing congregation.and began to explore what it means to be an incarnational missional community. In 2004, we leased our first building in Shoreline and began working to be a positive presence in the community through the creation of mission groups, partnering with non-profit organizations already at work in the community and stepping in to serve as there were needs. We began to ask the question, "If we left the neighborhood, would we be missed?" During this time, Rose Swetman completed her doctoral dissertation, The Practicing Church, as we sought to serve the low-income, marginalized, and disadvantaged as a response to following in the way of Jesus. Out of this, Canopy Scholars was birthed, a local nonprofit serving underserved youth and families in the neighborhood.
In 2012, Jessica Ketola joined Rich and Rose Swetman on staff and began Leadership in the New Parish at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology in partnership with the Parish Collective. During this time, our leadership spent time reimagining what it might mean to innovate as a church on mission into the neighborhood. Jessica served as Executive Director of Turning Point and Senior Associate Pastor. In 2014, Jessica and her family moved into the Richmond Highlands neighborhood in Shoreline to live intentionally to be a part of a fabric of love in the neighborhood. We continued to explore what it might mean to be the church and the presence of Jesus in the everyday contexts of our neighborhoods, schools and work places. How could the gospel be reinterpreted for our day and for our time as good news to our actual neighbors?
In May of 2016, Jessica Ketola stepped in as Lead Pastor and relaunched the faith community in her neighborhood home in January of 2017. Gatherings were centered around hospitality and around the table. Since then, we have been on a journey to embody love in our neighborhood and to reimagine and rethink what it means to be the church. We long to see the kingdom of God come to our neighbors and to the least of these. We long to be transformed by the love of God and to see the transformation of our communities.
And the journey continues as we wrestle with how to more fully live into being rooted communities embodying the compassion of Jesus in the neighborhoods we live in while we link arms across neighborhoods and work toward the renewal of our city.
