Better Than Brunch: Missional Churches in Cascadia

By Jason Byassee, Ross A. Lockhart and Darrell L. Guder

What could be better than brunch on a Sunday morning? For most people in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, the answer of gathering to worship the Triune God and be sent as witnesses would not be top of mind. And yet, across the Pacific Northwest the authors discovered deeply rooted missional communities worshipping God and serving their neighborhoods, offering evidence of unexpected Cascadian treasure in clay jars. Join the authors on a treasure hunt throughout the region as they identify new patterns of post-Christendom Christianity that will inspire and challenge your understanding of church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Dec 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781725281196

Jason Byassee

Jason Byassee teaches preaching at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia, where he holds the Butler Chair in Homiletics and Biblical Hermeneutics. He is a longtime contributor to Christian Century magazine and the author, most recently, of Northern Lights: Resurrecting Church in the North of England (2020).

Book preview

Introduction

Treasure Chest

In the summer of 2019 , an organization called Gold Hunt buried a treasure chest resembling something from the set of a pirate movie, filled with twenty gold and eight hundred silver pieces worth one hundred thousand dollars somewhere in the Greater Vancouver area. Participants could purchase a map for thirty-five dollars or upgrade to a map with some clues for fifty-five dollars. Part murder mystery, part Amazing Race reality show, this geo-caching game included a video-based storyline and invited people to form teams to fan out across the city solving riddles in the hope of striking it rich.

Around the same time the authors of this book were involved in our own treasure hunt in the region. We’ve been on the lookout for clues of the Triune God’s activity in the Pacific Northwest region of North America known as Cascadia. Cascadia is a geographic region running South to North following the outline of the Cascade mountains including the American states of Oregon and Washington as well as the Canadian province of British Columbia. Cascadia as a region has shared environmental, cultural, economic, and political (even separatist!) shared values. People take this concept of Cascadia so seriously they’ve even made their own flag, known as the Cascadia Doug (named for the Douglas Fir tree), should these two states and one province ever decide to take this courtship to the next level.¹ Most importantly, this region is home to us. Not home by birth, but like many Cascadians it is home by choice. Some people were born in this Pacific Northwest paradise of soaring mountains, lush rainforest, and sparkling Pacific Ocean waves. The rest of us just got here as fast as we could!

As Christian pastors preaching Sunday-by-Sunday as well as seminary professors teaching weekly in the classroom, we’re all too aware of something else that is special about this part of North America. It is also the most secular corner of the United States and Canada. People here sure love creation without paying much heed to the Creator. Secularism is not unique to this corner of the continent, of course, and much work has been done on documenting the decline of the mainline Protestant denominations in both countries since the mid-1960s. A recent study by two Canadian scholars, Stuart Macdonald and Brian Clarke, narrates the steps of mainline Christian denominational decline in the final decades of the last century right across the country. In Leaving Christianity Macdonald and Clarke describe the contemporary context this