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Awakening to the Needs in Seattle

December 13, 2017
Christy Bauman, holds her daughter Selah, outside Awake Church.

Christy Bauman, holds her daughter Selah, outside Awake Church.

Chris Meehan

Faith in God has always been important to Christy Bauman, who grew up Catholic and then attended an Assemblies of God congregation.

She earned a master’s degree in counseling from a Reformed seminary and also traveled the world and wrote Unearth, a book about being a missionary.

All of those connections helped to shape and deepen her faith. But it was the way members of Awake Church, a Christian Reformed community in Seattle, Wash., responded after the death of her first child — Brave Bauman — in December 2011 that brought the bedrock message of Christ’s love home — both to her and her husband, Andrew.

“It was so hard to lose a child. I’d never had to be part of something like that before,” said Bauman, a therapist in Seattle. “But the people in our church stood with us, and we all went through the grief together.”

Ben Katt and Andy Carlson, Awake’s pastors at the time, came to the hospital and baptized the Baumans’ baby. As Christy and Andrew walked into the crowded church with the small, white casket for the funeral service, Awake members were there, many weeping along with the parents.

And at the cemetery, after the parents dropped handfuls of dirt into the grave, church members filed up and did the same.

Being part of Awake gave her something new. “I had never felt the kingdom of God so palpably,” said Christy in an interview after a recent Sunday service at the church that meets in a Chinese restaurant in a gritty part of Seattle.

“I’ve had the opportunity at Awake to know God and to be God’s hands and feet in ways I’d never experienced before. Even though I’d been to other churches, and even though I wrote a book on missions, I had not been involved in this kind of embedded spirituality before.”

Awake is a church that sees its mission as creating a community of believers who, sustained by the grace of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, seek to make changes in themselves and in the neighborhood in which they live and worship.

A church plant that began as a dream in 2007 and was officially started by what was then Christian Reformed Home Missions (now Resonate Global Mission) in 2008, Awake is both a place for worship and a place that lives out its beliefs in many ways — for instance, by reaching out to people experiencing homelessness, substance addiction, and sexual exploitation along Aurora Avenue, the main street cutting through Seattle.

Home to such industry giants as Amazon.com, Microsoft, Boeing, and Starbucks, Seattle is a city of contrasts. It is a city of soaring highrises, bustling night spots, and condo complexes, but it also has, according to a recent estimate, more than 3,000 unhoused women and men who seek shelter, food, and clothing along such thoroughfares as Aurora Avenue.

“There were six or seven of us that decided in about 2007 to step into the brokenness down here,” said Jay Stringer, a pastor, writer, and mental health professional.

Early on, they would visit seedy motels along Aurora and speak with and offer food to the people living there, many of whom were on drugs or working in the sex trade.

This work convinced them that God was calling them to plant a church there. Besides being an ordained minister with Awake, Stringer has been a psychotherapist in a community mental health clinic.

“Working with people involved in the sex trade, I realized how important it is for us to care about some of the darkest issues in the world,” said Stringer. “I realized the gospel is the truth and that it calls us to show this truth to the world.”

As part of his work, at church and in his profession, Stringer has gotten to know pimps and prostitutes as well as men who buy sex. He sees his work as a ministry that uncovers motivations and tries to bring healing to men and women who are bruised, battered, and too often destroyed by the industry that makes sex a commodity.

“I’ve realized that without entering into brokenness and death, without paying attention to the suffering and whatever else is going on, you trivialize the cross,” said Stringer.

On a recent Sunday, Ben Katt, founding pastor/planter of Awake till 2015, took on the once-familiar job of preaching at Awake.

Now serving as the Western U.S. regional leader for Resonate Global Mission, Katt began doing work with other churches in 2015, helping them explore how to move forward in more imaginative ways in their neighborhoods — and that led eventually to his current role with Resonate.

In his sermon, Katt gave an overview of the things he believes churches, especially those working in cities and other densely populated areas, ought to do in following where the Holy Spirit is leading them.

“We live in a world of constant change. In our lifetime, we will experience driverless cars and trucks,” he said.

 “You have to ask, ‘How much will driverless trucks affect the industry?’ Jobs will be gone for many truck drivers and the jobs of many people who cater to truck drivers will also be gone.”

Disruption, Katt added, is also happening in the American church. “Hundreds of churches are closing, seminaries are shutting down, and millennials are leaving the church in droves,” said Katt, standing in an elevated area that serves as seating for diners during the week.

While these changes sound bad, Katt said, “I find these shifts intriguing” because they can invite “us to pay attention to how God’s Spirit is on the move.”

Katt then spoke about the Tower of Babel that ancient people built in hopes of making it tall enough to reach the heavens and make a name for themselves (Gen. 11:1-9).  But God, seeing their arrogance, “came down and scattered the people,” Katt said.

In scattering the people and giving them different languages, though, God was not necessarily punishing them, said Katt. “He was sending them where they were supposed to live. He sent them into scattered spirituality. So too God has scattered the church in important ways.”

In recent years, God has sent people into new and challenging places in urban areas, such as Aurora Avenue in Seattle, where they mix with one another and with others to learn about God together.

“We are free to open our eyes to see and address the suffering of others, especially in our everyday lives. We are free to dismantle the bricks we’ve used for building” churches, towers, and temples, said Katt.

“We are free to discover our true names and to pay attention to Christ at work in our lives....We need the presence of God to unsettle us and to guide us along.”

Tad Williams, a long-time church member who once worked on overseas water-hygiene projects and is now a stay-at-home dad, explained that the church started Aurora Commons, a drop-in center for the homeless, in 2011 across the parking lot from where the church meets.

“We have done this to provide security and safety and to care for the people who come in off the streets. We want to be present day-in and day-out to the needs of people in our own city and to learn from those who are right in front of us,” said Williams.

“I see people down here [at Awake and at Aurora Commons] who are truly shattered, not by their own choices but often because they have been forgotten and pushed to the fringes.”

Following the service, Andy Carlson, pastor of Awake, and Karen Cirulli, a cofounder of the church and director of community engagement for Aurora Commons, took two visitors on a tour of the neighborhood.

Next to Aurora Commons is Fremont Fellowship, a building that houses Alcoholics Anonymous meetings all day. A man named Mike came out of the AA building, walked up to Cirulli and talked about a spiritual experience he had recently.

“I don’t want to lose it,” he said. “But guys on the street are picking at it, telling me it isn’t real.”

Cirulli put a reassuring hand on his shoulder and talked to him for a couple of minutes, telling him to have faith and to stop in to the Commons the next day, Monday, if he wants to talk more.

Up and down Aurora Avenue are many motels that once bustled with activity serving the needs of travelers driving through downtown Seattle before the coming of freeways.

Also out here are glass repair and auto repair shops, a rental store, a few factories, and fast-food restaurants. In addition, there is a village of tiny houses, standing in a fenced-in gravel lot, about three blocks from the church.

Built as homes for the homeless, the 25 or so 12-by-eight-foot houses each have locking doors and windows, heat, insulation, and an electricity outlet. A large rest room on the grounds is also available to the residents.

This is a solution, but a very small one, to the city’s growing homelessness crisis, said Cirulli.

 Modest but increasingly expensive homes are in neighborhoods along Aurora Avenue. Many Awake members bought homes in the area when they were much more affordable, and even now some church members have had to move out because of skyrocketing costs.

Walking along, Cirulli said, “At Awake we have had to trust in the Holy Spirit and to use our imaginations to follow the Spirit. We know that life is messy, but we need to honor each person and to allow the Spirit to guide us.

“We need to dive into the grief and bear one another’s burdens. At the same time, we need to have joy in the Lord. If we don’t have that, we won’t have the peace to grieve together.”

Next to her, Andy Carlson looked around, at the vehicles passing on the street, the aging motels, a scattering of homes.

“My heart is really drawn to this neighborhood. I walk these streets all of the time,” said Carlson, who supplements his pastor income with his job as a woodworker. “We are in the thick of it down here.”

But, he added, there are times he gets weary from the work, especially with people who live on the edge and have to deal with a raft of difficult problems.

“I can get tired of seeing people killing themselves with drugs or being killed. You can feel the weight of evil and try to make sense of all of it,” said Carlson.

“But I don’t feel alone in this work because it is so collaborative. There is a life in the Spirit here, and there others who are part of it and feel the same way that I do.”

To watch A Brave Lament, a short film about the death of Brave Bauman and how it affected the family, click here:
https://www.andrewjbauman.com/a-brave-lament/