Good afternoon. My name is Rob Bryceson and I’m the pastor of the Gathering House Church.  In 2009 I found myself leading a 120-year-old, downtown church in Spokane WA., a city over 200,000 people in a county that had half a million. We were surrounded by homeless shelters, mental health institutions, housing for addicts, correctional release facilities, and 44 registered sex offenders lived within eight blocks of our church. The dying church hired me to revitalize it and have young families come back. But alas I was not a magic Disney Princess.

Instead, we decided to sell the building and close down. But the economy had tanked, and we would need to occupy the place until it sold. In the meantime, we decided to just “Love our neighbor”. We invited them in Sunday afternoons to watch football and eat a free meal. During commercial breaks I gave away hats, coats, gloves, and backpacks by using trivia questions or playing games. Up to 200 people came each week – for the next five years.

I joined the Spokane Homeless Coalition to learn what I could. I made connections that expanded us to two more meals a week. Other non-profit agencies and the city’s health and human services worked with us and used our location to serve the street people. Gonzaga nursing students came to health check the population. I gave their data to Providence Health Care who used the study to put an urgent care clinic across the street. Everyone praised our work, but the church was dying.

Nobody really wants to go to a church where the pre-service announcement is: “Good morning, before we start, we’d like to ask that you not place your beer in the toilet tanks to keep them cold during church services. There is no pan handling in the lobby unless you’re an official church usher. If you like something the pastor says you don’t have to call out for him to, Kick the demons in the Ass - a hearty ‘Amen’ will suffice. Try to refrain from standing at the back and flipping off the pastor during his sermon – he finds it distracting. We’d like to remind you that tipsy is tolerable but sloshed will get tossed. And please - silence your cell phones.

In 2014 the building sold. We didn’t want to build another church auditorium that sat empty all week waiting to fill it for four hours on a Sunday. We wanted to build something more community related that allowed use of the building seven days a week but also let us do church. We decided to create a job training coffee shop that took people coming out of poverty, addiction, or being paroled, and gave them a shot at getting a job and building a resume. We’d close the café on Sundays to hold church. We relocated to a gentrifying business neighborhood. We took the church pews and converted them to café tables and the old pulpit became the barista bar. The back children’s rooms were designed to be business friendly during the week for meeting spaces. We had no idea the impact we would have.

For the last five years our space became a hub for community development and social action. The Spokane Homeless Coalition moved their meetings to our space, so did the Garland Business District. The North Hill Neighborhood council, part of the city’s governmental structure moved their monthly meetings to our church. The mayor booked our space for an educational symposium with top business leaders encouraging them to hire former felons. The city council president held workshops to discuss serious social problems. Several other city council members, and state representatives, used our space to hold informational meetings with their constituency. When the current, newly elected mayor, launched her campaign by gathering 100 of the top women business and community leaders – the event was held in our café. A group of felons known as “I did the time” met weekly in our coffee shop for support they became our friends. When one of them was elected President of the NAACP, they began to hold meetings in our space. The Racial Justice Equity Council moved their monthly meetings to our house. When they met with the county sheriff to discuss the impact of a new jail on the racial minority population of our county – it was at our church.

Because our space is a great small meeting venue, our church which looks nothing like a church, became extremely popular. We have hosted regular meetings for The Spokane Fatherhood Initiative, groups rescuing girls from sex-trafficking, temporary foster care to help struggling mothers, racial reconciliation forums, and meetings between pastors and city employees to discuss ways to positively impact the city. Time will not allow me to tell of everyone but in a single year over 40 different groups, agencies or government entities have used our church site to further their work. In addition to these groups, we became a host venue for fund-raisers, acoustic or jazz concerts, open mic nights, art gallery shows, auctions, hip hop concerts, 1940s swing dance lessons, and break dance competitions.

I would eventually write a book about our adventures called - Lessons From A Church In Zombie Land. America loves big and thinks unless its’ big it can’t be significant. Even the church world has bought into this. We are only 100 people. But we are significant. How would you like to be the church in your town of over 200,000 people that when the city government needs help – they call you? I leave you with this thought, our journey to significance didn’t begin with the powerful or the influential, it began by loving with the lowest rung of American society.