How can we be an authentic church in the 21st century?
Our Story
In 2006 a group of people began to dream about what a new expression a community of Jesus followers could look like and asked, Who is God calling the church to be in,
“How can we be an authentic church in the 21st century?”
“How do we shape our communal life to be a blessing for the flourishing of all humanity?”
Instead of unquestioningly repeating religious structures that had not significantly changed for centuries nor people felt were encouraging transformation, we began, as much as possible, with a blank canvas. Looking at the conversation Jesus had with his followers the night before he was crucified and drawing upon what brought growth and health in the lives of people and communities, the team chose to develop a church around three risks that Jesus gave his friends: to be externally focused (go into the world), internally alive (love one another) and eternally connected (remain in Me).
This openness to risk led to experimenting with the idea of a rhythm,
placing people over programs
and seeking to be more of a living organism than an organization.
We experimented with our Sunday morning worship focuses. Our month looked something like this:
One Sunday became devoted to dialogue. Encouraging people to view conversations with one another as acts of worship as they turned into a circle of 6-8 and spent time listening to one another’s perspective on scripture, who God is, and who God invites us to be.
One Sunday focused on acts of worship. Believing that our response of living faith in community should not be a side project but central to our understanding of God’s character. We prayed about how we could partner to love our city and suddenly saw doors open for opportunities of meal provision, environmental care, visitation and support in the larger community.
The next few Sundays focused on teaching, singing, praying, and breaking bread.
The slowly changing (at that time) light-industrial neighborhood of South Lake Union was selected to be the focus of our life together and the name Union surfaced as the name of the community, serving as a triple entendre communicating the primary geographical location, to come alongside, and our desire to be in union with one another and with God.
Unable to find space in South Lake Union, Union launched on Capitol Hill in October 2007 at Pravda Studios. From there, Sunday gatherings were moved to Seattle Parks Department’s Lake Union Armory (now MOHAI) until moving into the present location at 415 Westlake in November 2010. The streets were nearly empty as we prayed that God would pour grace upon the community to which we had moved.
After exegeting the neighborhood, we decided that what was most needed in a space were a venue and a café where people could work, connect and where a cross-section of people from low-income housing to Microsoft and Amazon employees would mingle, living into the original vision of having a place primarily for the neighborhood and not just the congregation. Hence, the church community would share the space but the building would not be called a church.
Union has experimented and grown from the beginning, seeking not to claim “market share” but to create a context where people can question, doubt, risk, discover, heal and grow as Holy Spirit leads, not being forced into a cookie-cutter-like expectation of being the church. The result is an increasingly diverse community that does not agree on all matters but, embracing grace, genuinely seeks to live following Jesus, love one another, and seeks the welfare of the city that it “may be on earth as it is in heaven.”
