What do a pop up cafe, a low income housing
project, a soup making business, and an improv
troupe all have in common? Well, in one corner of
Northern Virginia and Maryland, all these groups call themselves
expressions of church. Does that sound a little weird?
It might, since most of us hear the word church and we conjure
up a mental image that likely includes a mass of
people gathered on a Sunday morning and a preacher given a
sermon and offering plates and some pageantry
and music and nice clothing. And while these images
are familiar, the church itself has long advocated
for a little different understanding of church. In
fact, one of the first songs I ever learned invites us to sing,
I am the church. You are the church. We are the church
together. The idea is that church is not
an event nor a place. Church is the community of faith,
it's people. As the song goes, the church is not a
building. The church is not a steeple. The church is not a resting
place. The church is what? It's it's the people. I know someone out
there just did a bunch of hand movements to coincide with those words.
The innovative ministries that I mentioned a moment ago, the
pop up cafe, the housing complex, the soup
makers, and the improv troupe have all leaned
back into the understanding of church being
a connection of people. I'm Ryan Dunn, and I had
the good fortune of participating in these unique expressions of church
recently. And in this episode of Compass, I'm gonna share those
experiences as well as the thoughts of those who helped to give
life to these expressions of church. And I hope
we can give you a sense of what it's like to participate in these
expressions as well. These experiences may get us
rethinking what it is that we think about when we think
church. All that is coming up on Compass.
We saw it as a need. We started, trying to work on
what it was going to take to be an outreach in the community, and we
decided the church is not the building. The church is the people outside. And
so we wanted to be out in the community and, have
a better impact. So the congregation for a number of
years has been, you know, trying to get out and be engaged. And when
you go out in the community, you actually see things that you don't normally see,
especially if you do it intentionally. That was Jean Cross, who I
met while making sandwiches in the all purpose fellowship hall of
Central United Methodist Church in Ballston, which is a neighborhood
in Arlington, Virginia. I know it's Jean and a group of friends, some
who are official members of Central UMC in Ballston, and others
who aren't, get together early on Friday mornings to make sandwiches
for the local homeless shelter. There's a lot of kidding back and forth
in this group and a lot of coffee. At different times, the
Friday morning group has done different feeding activities. For a while
during the COVID lockdown, they ran a bodega out of the back of the church
facility. At another time, they did a breakfast cafe. When you once you get to
know and you get to know the stories, you get a better connection with the
folks and you can understand what their problems are and what we need to be
working on as a, you know, society so that it's,
it's it's kind of a it's a way to live out your faith
basically. Several years ago Central UMC had a
problem. Their building was about a 100 years old and in need of
repair, like a lot of repairs.
And so we recognized that we had a building that was crumbling
very literally, and we said, well, what could God
do with what we have on this corner of Stafford and Fairfax
and what the people need, which is housing? This is Central UMC's
pastor, Sarah Harrison McQueen. So I'll use the
phrase that our lay leader used many years ago when she told the
story, because this is a 17 year story that I'll tell you in 17 seconds.
She said the congregation went from an attitude of serve
us to service. And that at its core is
what got this congregation to be willing to say goodbye to
their 100 year old building to allow for
a multi use building that includes folks who they
never would cross paths with otherwise. The church's property sits in a
pretty well trafficked area of Arlington. It's a busy street. There's
an IHOP across the street and a sports bar next door. The local high
school is about 3 blocks away. There's a pretty consistent flow of
people walking by and a non stop flow of car traffic whizzing by.
There's a lot of people to get to know in the area. All these people
have their own unique needs, of course. But one need the church members
kept hearing through their connections in the community was a need for
affordable housing. Carmen Romero is the
CEO of True Ground Housing, a non profit affordable
housing developer in Arlington. She summed up the need.
Really, in the nation, there were 7,000,000 affordable homes behind.
Half American renters are rent burdened. Low income
renters are severely rent burdened, paying 50 to 80%
of their income on housing. In Arlington, that's very
much the case. Many churches would balk at blowing up their facilities.
But what about when those buildings are old and no longer suitable for the
church family or for the community? The leaders of Central
UMC made that connection. Their buildings didn't work for the
good of either their faith community nor their neighborhood. So they
started a project of tearing the building down and starting over. In
place of their antiquated facilities, they were going to right
size their worship space and fellowship spaces. They also wanted to
make sure that their facilities would be multi use. So there are a
lot of adaptable features to their spaces, like movable
chairs, open spaces, a commercial kitchen. The more
traditional church facilities are on the ground floor. On the second level,
our classrooms for Kin Haven, a member governed preschool.
So Kin Haven has reserved 16 spaces for children with the
childcare subsidy in Virginia. And so they've already enrolled
six students from APA properties. So they're looking
for 10 more students that that'll come in at that subsidized rate,
and then we'll have room for up to a 100 students total.
Above all this is Unity Homes, 144
affordable housing units, community rooms, a business center,
laundry facilities, and a really nice terrace that one of my co
producers, AJ Thurman, got really excited about using for
hosting barbecues. Carmen Romero summed it up. It's a
way for 2 nonprofits, that are serving the community
to amplify each other's mission. Here, we have some tree
United Methodist Church who is gonna have a new church facility, a new
daycare, and TrueGround is going to be able to develop a
144 units in an area of high opportunity where we couldn't otherwise have
access to land. Projects like this always come with a case of
nimbyism. That is people who say that developments like this
are good, but not in my backyard. Pastor
Sarah. This process challenged some of our neighbors
to be willing to have neighbors they wouldn't have
otherwise. And so there was a group who wanted to
use historic preservation as a way to stop an affordable
housing project, but thankfully, we made it through that process
with a compromise where we retained some of the
historic elements that we hadn't originally planned to keep. Ultimately, God. There are
so many ways that this process unfolded that only God could have foreseen.
You know, we have a very small congregation.
It's 2017 when we did our capital campaign. We needed to raise
$500,000 in order to hire architects and to begin the
legal process of getting approval for this project. That's a
big ask for most churches, but particularly our church.
And we worked with a fabulous campaign consultant. And on
the day of the commitment Sunday, we had hoped
to get, a good response. And we got more than
50% of our goal on that day pledged. And I
burst into tears when she told me because that was so far outside of what
I expected. One of
the features of Central UMC's renovation is a commercial
kitchen. This kitchen has helped to give life to another
unique expression of church. My name is Alyssa
Dintem, and I am the pastor of Provision Church, a
new United Methodist church plant here in Northern Virginia. We
launched on January 1st 2023. Yeah. So Provision
Church is a missional faith community and we live out that mission through Provision
Kitchen. We operate what we call community cafes. They're they're
basically day centers where folks who are housing insecure
can find a safe place to linger for as long as they
want, find nutritious and delicious chef curated meals
and light snacks, and then they also have access to
help to navigate some of those really hard resources that
they need to survive. So over the course of the week, we operate
3 different cafes. Right now, we're standing in our Ballston
Cafe, which is our only indoor cafe. We're here on
Wednesdays, and then we have 2 outdoor cafes that we operate in the
Springfield area, so not far from here, but on Thursdays Fridays.
Provision Church uses Central UMC's commercial kitchen to prepare
food for the pop up cafes. Instead of a worship event being
the central point of the community life for Provision Church, the
cafes are the central events of their community life. Because
Jesus because Jesus I mean, at the end of the day, that's isn't that the
answer all the time. That's what we do at Sunday school.
Jesus said, feed my sheep. And then Jesus also said,
tend my sheep and you kinda have to do both of those things if you're
gonna live and walk and try to follow the way of Jesus and so
we gather at tables because that's what Jesus did. To have meals with
people because that's what Jesus did So that we can learn more
about what it means to be in community, not just with God,
who we love, but with our neighbors, who we need to know better.
Much like Central UFC, as provision church members got to know
their neighbors, They asked questions about what their neighbors needed
and in listening, they found that their neighbors needed assistance in navigating
some of the administrative and social barriers to get what they
need. They needed companionship and an advocate
In the hierarchy of church staffing hiring,
often churches start with hiring a pastor. Provision Church is
no different there. Pastor Alyssa was the first employee. But from
there, the church might hire an administrator or a worship
leader or a youth pastor. Provision Church hired a social worker.
Specifically, they hired Jesse Lee. My role as
director of community connections, which
originally was to basically pull, resources
from different, organizations within the community, and
then it kind of turned more into case management. As I hung
around at one of the cafes, Jesse helped 1 cafe participant
locate a muffler for his van so he could use it at his handyman
business. Jesse also helped another participant get times
and locations for citizenship classes. Another participant got
help in putting together a transportation plan for getting children home from
school while she went to a counseling session. But Jesse notes that the
biggest rewards come when it's not just the church staff helping people.
They help each other. One guy said, you wanted to go to
detox. And, another
guy said, I'll take you on the bus.
And they're both unhoused, and they're, like, using all the resources
they can to help each other. And they got so they took him on
the bus, and then they got off at the wrong stop. The guy
who he's a really huge guy, like, £300,
to, like, mostly muscle, carries the guy into an
Uber that he pays for, to take him the rest of the way to
the detox program. Now in some ways, this begins to
sound like a social service. So I asked people, what makes provision
church a church? Pastor Alyssa offered this. I think
most people come because they think they're gonna get a free meal, and
they do. That's that's why we offer it. Right? But what
they show up here and they receive, and they then begin
to participate in is a community. We have
folks who a year ago didn't know each other, like,
literally didn't know each other, and right now if there wasn't a cafe, still would
have no reason to know each other, but when somebody is in
crisis, they come along each other, come come
alongside each other in a way that you
only do because you feel like you know someone and you trust
them really well. And the space of the cafe offers that to people.
Once community and connection are established, it quickly turns
spiritual. Jesse told me this story. I can tell you a
million stories, but something that was really special to me was
we were just chatting at the cafe in Springfield,
and this other guy next to me was
having some separate side conversation while I was having some other
conversation. He turns and looks straight at me and says, I wanna get
baptized right now. I you need to take me to the
church, and I need to be dunked. He he used that word.
And, that was just really cool to have a community
member kind of just have that, like, oh, I need to have
this happen right now moment.
Speaking of being in the moment, improv comedy
is an experience of total immersion in the moment. There is no
script. There's only impulse in reaction. One of the rules
of improv is that there are no bad ideas. I wish we
embrace that ethos a bit more within the church, especially in
relation to people. The Vine Church in Dunloring,
Virginia lived through that perspective.
1, 2, 2, 3. 1, 2,
3. What did you put on top of that? What did you
put on top of that? Well, I'll never. Well, I'll
never. That is the improv church crew getting
ready for one of their monthly sets. Here's how the
night goes at improv church. This scene is the
worship space of the vine church from the outside. The church building
looks fairly stereotypical church building. It's a brick
rectangle with a steeple, some stained glass inside the
sanctuary. The pews have been removed though. Platform serves as a
short stage. A cool feature that I enjoyed was the
mocktail slash coffee bar near the side entrance. On
the particular evening, our team visited improv church. There are
about 60 people in attendance. Vine Church's pastor,
Katie Phillips, begins the gathering in performance time
describing what this evening is about. So here's what's gonna
happen tonight. We're gonna use a form of improv comedy that's called
a long form. It's called an Armando. And in Armando, you go to see it
in comedy clubs across the country. Normally, they find a local celebrity
who comes up and gives a monologue, tells a true story about their
life, and then the improv comedians use that as inspiration for a night
of comedy. Right? Partway through the show, the
monologist comes back up, gives another short monologue, and the
improvisers do a couple of other scenes. Because you're an improv
church, instead of a local celebrity giving a monologue, we're excited
tonight to welcome a pastor to give a sermon. What? A
sermon. A sermon and
comedy, and one night, you're lucky. You're lucky. A short sermon or homily
follows. Tonight, it's given by a guest preacher, Reverend Jonathan
Page. But, hey. We're gonna, read a scripture
today, from the gospel of Matthew. So,
Matthew chapter 5 verses 38 through 42.
What I wanna preface this with is that for a long time,
this has been one of my least favorite passages in the entire
body. Then hilarity and hijinks ensues.
First up, we have the Chanel model doing their
lovely dance down the runway, and we've heard this one is
really special. Oh, yes. It's giving
playtime. It's giving it's giving
colors and primary color.
Thank you so much, Chanel Model. The skits
or acts include some elements or visualizations from
Reverend Jonathan's sermon. He preached on the portion of the Sermon on
the Mount where Jesus talks about how if we are struck on the right cheek,
we should turn and offer the left cheek as well. Or if we're forced to
walk 1 mile, we should walk another. There's a skit that
includes a fight club scene with people being joyfully struck.
There's another skit where a family begrudgingly takes
on a hike and picks up more hikers on their group as
they add on mile after mile. Pastor Katie is one of
the improv performers, but she also easily moves into a
pastoral role when inviting improv church congregants
into receiving communion. This dual role that Katie plays
has an impact on the congregation in providing a personal sense of
connection to the improv events. It also has a fascinating
effect on Katie's fellow performers. This is improviser Peter
Bergen. It's great to see my friend Katie, who I know is a great improviser,
great at something else, and that's being a pastor. And what I think she's great
at is making church and religion
accessible while not making it
stuffy, but the message never gets compromised. Like 1st, we wanna invite you to this
communion table. This is a worship service. We know it's different probably than other
worship services that you have been to, but, this is
Vine Church, and we fundamentally believe that God is
good, that God calls us and invites us into a
community, and that in this work of sharing and learning and growing
and caring for one another, that we get to learn and experience more of who
God is. The improvisers concluded with one last segment, which
included audience participation through suggested lines.
The night was fun. I enjoyed getting a look behind the scenes in an event
like this. I wondered though, how was this perceived by
some of the congregants? Was it a performance for them? Was it a fun
night out? Or was it church for them? We spoke
with Jeremy Hancock after the event about his perceptions
of improv church. Yeah. I think you still get all the same elements of church.
You get a little bit of a a little bit of a sermon. You get
communion and a lot of stories in between that all
ultimately get connected. And I think ultimately, it's a way to
connect with with people, and that's what, you know, what church is all about on
Sunday mornings. A congregant named Cara added this. I think
the the upfront mini sermon, kind of grounds
what this is all about. And then we we bring it back to
that, in the middle with another short,
sermon by the an ordained minister. And then
the communion, of course, is the way that we remember that we're all
connected to God and, that that
this is another way that we can worship our Lord. Some people within the
larger church may still question whether or not Improv
Church is church. I think Improv Church participants
might suggest that the event is part of
church. It's a way to begin a pathway towards discipleship
and belonging in the community of faith.
All of the ministries we've explored thus far invite
participation without strings attached. In order to receive a meal
from Provision Church, there's no requirement that you attend a worship
service or hear a sermon. In order to live at Central
UMC's Housing Unit, there's not an addendum that you must also
attend Sunday service at Central UMC. Improv Church
is not for Vine Church members only. The
ethos at work here suggests that a pathway of discipleship
begins when people start to form relationships with
disciples. In one of Provision Church's pop up cafes, I talked with a
volunteer named Kathleen. She offered her job description.
I have to sit with people. I try to start conversation. I try to smile
as much as possible and be welcoming and learn people's names.
They really have a philosophy of personhood and value and
giving people worth, and I just try to manifest that. I don't actually
do a ton. Maybe I'll pass somebody a meal or, you know, go get some
extra supplies. But mostly I just try to make a lot of eye contact
and make people feel valued and like I care about them. Improv
church uses the allure of laughter as an opportunity to hang
out with people and invite them to do what disciples of
Jesus do. I spoke with pastor Katie at the end of the night
after the crowd had cleared and the mocktails had been bust
away. But I think the things that have surprised me is that this has been
a place that members of our congregation have invited
their spouse who otherwise is not interested in coming to church, or
their teenager, or their young adult, kiddo,
or their neighbor. Whereas the people who are bought in, who are church
members, but who have not necessarily found the
gumption to invite their people to something and or the things they've invited
them to haven't been a good fit. Improv church seems to be. So we
have a number of folks who this is where they worship with their spouse,
or this is where they worship with their kids, and then they come
alone on Sunday or to other expressions of worship. The
other thing that has been surprising is the comedians. I've, in the
beginning, was asking a favor of my friends and was like, I wanna give
this a shot. Like, what do you think? And we'll buy you dinner, and we
give them a $50 Visa gift card, which is, like, not worth their time,
but something. Right? And they were like, yeah. We'll we'll do
this. But some interesting things have happened. So we have more
than one of the improvisers who attend now, Vine Church, one who
joined in membership. I've officiated at the wedding
of 2 different couples who are part of comedian couples who are part of Improv
Church, and just kind of been invited into faith conversations
with folks for whom attending church is completely
countercultural and seemingly ridiculous otherwise.
So that has been has felt really extraordinary to
me. We have, one of the improvisers after the 3rd
show sent me a text, like, at midnight back home
after cleaning everything up. And the text message said, this is the
3rd time I've heard you talk about this Jesus guy. I'm starting to wonder if
there's something there for me. In the vein of hilarity and hijinks,
here's my transition to our next topic.
It takes a number of ingredients to pull church together, but
maybe these various ingredients make church robust and exciting.
Kind of like a good soup is the right blend of
various ingredients. So let me tell you
about Coop's Soups. Boom. Transition. As you can see,
it gets a little messy. I'm happy to be here. We make big shapes
like this. And, hopefully, it all comes together. It doesn't
matter what every week we do this. All these things get all thrown out
and then all of a sudden becomes an awesome soup. So That's Doug,
one of the soup preparers who joined us for the preparing of a
tomato lentil curry in the basement kitchen of a church in Maryland.
It's here that we'll have our experience with coop soups. The way
the soup started was it started in a dinner church in our
apartment, and I started making soup because it's easy to add a
potato to if you hear someone else is coming. It's also
pretty relatively low cost. All the ingredients
don't necessarily stretch a budget too far.
And then now that I've been in the process of making soup a while,
one of my favorite parts of that process is when all the ingredients
are in the pot and there's nothing else for you to do and they
do their own thing and turn into soup as we know it. And I
just think that's such a beautiful metaphor for, like,
our relationship with God that there's times when we're working
in accordance, and then there's times when God is doing something, and we can
kinda take a Sabbath rest. And the work will do
itself, and there's a moment when we need to step back. That is
Reverend Kristin Cooper, the founder of Coop Soups. We spoke just
after she and a group of volunteers prepared several gallons of
tomato lentil curry soup for a feeding ministry in Maryland.
Preparing soup for those in need is part of what Coop Soups does,
though there's something more to it as well. God, grace, thank you
for this day, this opportunity to encounter your
grace in the soup making process as we interact with
tomatoes and cilantro and lime juice and
also to encounter your grace in the faces of those we are going
to cook with and those that are in spirit here with
us that will be eating the soup beyond just today.
We ask that we grow more into your love
today and beyond. And you say all this in
Jesus' name. Amen. You don't need to be a member
of any particular church to be on Coop Soup's prep team. In fact,
I met participants who didn't profess any kind of religious belief. They
just wanted to participate in something meaningful that was helping other
people and creating community. Probably a central
part of our ministry is being at the farmer's market. So this
is where we really practice loving God and
loving our neighbor. And we believe that in that process of
getting to know our neighbor face to face in the farmers market setting
that we're that God is communicating to us and,
encouraging us to to listen and discern to the spirit,
and then we respond in accordance. We have a
customer named John who has been with us from the
beginning. So we launched in 2019. And in 2020,
he, came up to us at the market and he said, I just looked at
your website for the first time, and I saw that you're a church. And I
have nothing good to say about the church, and I have everything good to say
about what you're doing here. And his only experience of us
was how we treated and related to our neighbors at the farmers
market space. There's all these touch points, like, at the farmers
market when we're talking about our week, in the soup making process,
in the connecting to, like, our local farmer and what's in season.
There's just all these moments of encountering God's
grace and being invited, again,
into deeper intimacy with God's love. And
I believe that can happen in a traditional church setting and outside
of a traditional church setting, but God is
beyond both settings. The preparation is
something of a holy process as well. Provision Church's
Alyssa Densham noted that Jesus often met others around a meal.
Pastor Kristen noticed that as well. In that process of making soup, it's
just a really natural way to get to know one another and create a
space of belonging. So I think it's something as practical as, like,
when you're chopping a onion, you're not making eye contact. So
there's, like, an invitation to kind of be a little more relaxed and a
little more vulnerable. There's also the you
hear a lot of people's health stories and stories around food
and family food traditions. And so it's just this natural way to get
a whole picture of, like, who is this person in front of you? And what
excites them and what what's their history? And then we
always eat the soup. So anytime I make soup with somebody, we
always sit down and eat the soup. And that's really important to us because
it again is about the like, this is about slowing
down. It's worth noting that Coop Soups cares deeply for
people, but they also seek a holistic care for the environment.
The tomatoes, which form the basis of our curry were all second
tomatoes, meaning that they were tomatoes that weren't going to market
and would otherwise go to waste. Coop soups has connections with several
area farmers who will donate produce like this so that Coop
soups gets cheap ingredients and something good comes out of a product that
would otherwise be thrown away.
In a way, that's a bit of what these expressions of church are
doing. Traditional church models can be wonderful, and they work for
many people, but they don't work for everyone. It's true that
these innovative approaches to church won't work for
everyone either. Pastor Katie of Improv Church told me
about meeting with her church council and being upfront that Improv
Church would include words and scenes many would find startling
in a church setting. They gave her the go ahead anyways,
recognizing that the culture inside the church was not reflective
of all the niches of society. We have this incredible
opportunity and invitation to be, inviters,
to be tellers, to be sharers, to be witnesses, to be
community with folks in a unique way around the truth of who
Jesus Christ is. So I really thought through,
like, what is worship at its core? And so I went back to, like,
Seminary 101, like a fourfold pattern of worship. So all of
the expressions that Vine does here that are worship services, yoga
worship, diner church, dinner church, improv church, like in
any of the different things that we've tried in Biblers follows a 4 fold
pattern of worship. So we we try to be really thoughtful about this work of
inviting and what it means to share the word. Right? And how we,
then respond to that and how we send people forth. We're sending you
forth with that. If you're interested in learning more about any of these
ministries, links are in the show notes for this episode at unc.org.
I'd encourage you to reach out to the respective leaders of these ministries. They
were all super responsive to me and willing to talk about the strengths
and struggles of what they do.
If this episode was meaningful for you, we've got a couple more
Compass episodes that you're likely to enjoy. Our most recent
episode to this one, episode number 140, is a talk with Reverend
JJ Warren about church in digital spaces. Or
you may also get something out of episode 111, which was a
standalone episode I did about why people are leaving churches.
Again, my name is Ryan Dunn. Thank you so much for joining me on this
journey. For this episode, I need to give a big shout out to
AJ Thurman who ventured over to Virginia with me and is responsible for
all the recordings that you heard. I'm gonna shout out Ricky Barrow too, who's
working on pulling all of our somewhat random video clips
together into complimentary videos for each one of these
ministries. So be on the lookout for those on umc.org.
Compass is a production of United Methodist Communications. We do
new episodes every 2 weeks. So I hope you'll join us
again in 2 weeks time for another journey into the
surprising ways we might notice God in our day to day
lives. In the meantime, peace to you.