Pastoring Portlandia: John Mark Comer

It’s challenging, but also exciting. There are a huge number of people who actually do want to follow Jesus. In the last 10 years, we’ve lost the nominal believers. There’s no cultural pressure to be at church—very much the opposite, in fact. Sunday Christians are long gone. The people that are left? They’re in. It has been a hard thing to go through emotionally, watching people walk away from church, not because of a crisis of faith, but because there’s a great brunch with killer mimosas down the street, and they’re off to Instagram their food, then go to the beach. That growing dynamic was hard for me, emotionally. I’m just old enough to have been around when church was still a thing people in Portland wanted to go to. That boat has sailed.

But the folks left are committed. What I see emerging from that exile moment in Portland culture is a lot of creativity in the church. We have to innovate. We have to read our context and adapt. If the nominal people are gone, and the disciples are left, then we have to grow so that the disciples can grow. We have to stick together. Our ray of hope is that church does not stay an event on Sundays, but returns to a group of people around a table all week long … who then still come to church on Sundays, too. [Laughs]

It seems like corrosion can be a hidden blessing—eating away at what isn’t real. Exposing what is strong enough to survive.

So true. And that is a blessing. Here in Portland there is a noticeable cultural difference around church, even from only 10 years ago. When I was leading a suburban megachurch in the early 2000s, people wanted to come to church. They were excited to be there! All you had to do was a good job on Sunday, and people came. That world, at least here, is gone.

Ten years later, in the city, there are a billion other things to do, and just getting “the church” to come to church feels nearly impossible, much less getting people who don’t follow Jesus to come. This isn’t just an urban problem—ask anyone pastoring millennials. That’s the corrosion eating very visibly at us. Nominal believers? Long gone. Some of our own pretenses? Gone too. In response, Bridgetown is having to go back to the basics.

Tell me more. In a culture of corrosion, what are those basics?

Well, we’re learning. The task of the church in an exilelike setting is to rediscover the teachings of Jesus and the practices of the early church, then apply them to the corrosive soil of a Western secularized city—like Portland or San Francisco or New York or L.A. And soon to be Atlanta and Dallas and Louisville, and on and on. It’s only a number of years. That’s the question I’m really asking myself here. How do we not go the way of France or England, where church is largely seen as completely irrelevant to life or culture? We have such a heritage of faith here in the United States. What would it look like for the church to still thrive?

One of the hard pastoral realities that I’ve had to face the past couple years is that most people 35 and under in my church have no grasp of even the most basic spiritual disciplines. Things like reading the Bible, practicing listening prayer, silence and solitude, Sabbath, occasional fasting—the basics of Christian practice. They are almost nonexistent, even among some really good people. So to build in the kind of resilience that makes a Christian strong enough for the corrosion, we’re having to go back to the practices and habits that made Jesus who he was and that made the early church who they were.

One thing is certain here in the Rose City—the days where people just wanted to come to church and hang out are over. So our faith has to return to its core. Friendship with Jesus.

That has a ripple effect on every aspect of church. And it required me to shift my expectations. At the end of the day, I think we pastors are all searching for a silver bullet. Maybe it’s “intentional community” or “Alpha” or The Purpose Driven Life years ago, or whatever the big trend will be tomorrow.