pat loughery

TUESDAY 6/3
I arrived late today. We’re having hard rains, and traffic was really bad – stop and go for much of the way. I missed worship and arrived during the time that the students were sharing reflections on some of what they’d seen the day before.

The morning’s lecture began with a talk by Ron Boyce, who teaches geography at the University of Washington. He oriented us first about Seattle’s geography, how the city was formed by its natural resources, and then began to draw implications about the way the city was shaped as industry began. Seattle, Ron claims, is one of the most changed cities on earth in terms of its physical location – we have removed hills, filled in tidelands, changed rivers, created canals. Ron’s discussion of the character of the city was fascinating and engaging. It made me love Seattle – and more than this, it made me want to go spend time in North Bend, learning more about its history and talking to the business owners. I’d love to take a few weeks and just go sit with them and hear their stories, find out what they think about our area and what engaged citizens should know. I think this is a better approach in my context than the typical church planter approach of going door to door and asking people what a good church would do.

Ray spoke next about the purpose of cities, and today’s climate of the nations coming to the city. He asked us to think long and hard about what God is doing as he is intentionally integrating cities, bringing the nations into our neighborhoods. Ray’s thesis is that God is preparing for another Pentecost type experience as he gives people a powerful sense of who He is, and sends them out to communicate Him. I want to think more deeply about this, but I certainly can see Ray’s perspective, and I agree completely that God is up to something. What strikes me about this experience is how Ray is able to see the forest for the trees – to look at news stories and local situations, and then recognize a systematic underpinning to those events. I can’t say that I can make the same leaps, but I deeply appreciate hearing from Ray and from Ron and others who think this way. It challenges me to look deeper and to step outside my own situations to see what larger forces may be at play.

The class then left on a walking tour of Seattle as a way to exegete the city with Ray’s guidance. This idea is one of Ray’s specialties. Normally we as Christians think of exegeting Biblical texts – meaning, digging deep to understand the text’s meaning in its context. But Ray says, “To love your city you have to know your city.”, and in learning to do this, we have to learn how to read it, understand it, know its history and its present and future. What’s fun about Ray’s approach is that we’re not exegeting the city by reading its history books or analyzing the newspaper, but we’re putting out boots to the pavement to walk it. In doing so, we visit well-known and not as well known places.

In front of Harborview Medical Center, Ray makes a great point that I think is very helpful. A city contains “saving grace institutions”, for example churches. These are provided by God to benefit the city, and they are funded by tithes and offerings. There are also “common grace institutions”, for example schools and hospitals and police. These are funded by taxes and donations. These are very different funding sources, but if we take seriously Psalm 25 for example, all of the funding comes from God for us to steward. Hospitals and police (should) serve people regardless of faith or economic level. Employees of hospitals and policemen are serving in God’s plan for the city whether they’re aware of it or not. And Christians can serve God in a variety of jobs.

We spent time at World Relief’s facility in the International District with Cal Uomoto, a BGU student who runs the World Relief effort in Seattle. World Relief’s mission is to help refugees to be incorporated into the city’s systems and culture. We heard from three World Relief staff, all of whom were refugees who have settled in the US. Cal made a point that I’ve heard echoed elsewhere, but Cal knows it more intimately than most: Christian churches used to spend millions (and still do in many cases) sending missionaries overseas to build relationships with other people groups. Now, those same people groups are relocating into our neighborhoods, or at most a short car drive away. The mission field has come to us, and the church needs to respond to this shift.

On the way from World Relief’s facility, we passed by the Panama Hotel in the International District. In this hotel during World War II, many Japanese left luggage on their way to the internment camps that were set up throughout the west to hold Japanese citizens and immigrants for the duration of the war. Many of those people never returned to reclaim that luggage after the war. This hotel has a display of that luggage that represents and embodies a powerfully emotive time in our history. This hotel and the stories of Tacoma’s citizens killing and evicting Chinese laborers illustrate a dark underbelly in our region. They remind me of an area not far from my home in Montana, where there is a hillside that was used to bury Chinese railroad workers, but the burial ground was discovered during a highway construction and was walled off so that the remains in the hillside above the freeway stayed intact. Ever since I was a small child, that wall has haunted me.

We continued our tour through Pioneer Square and up to Pike Place Market. Ray asked us to listen to the recent history of the Market, which was scheduled for demolition around 30 years ago but was saved by the foresight of a single visionary person. Today, the market is a thriving, multicultural system that is Seattle’s top tourist attraction. Ray asked us to walk through the market and get to know it, seeing how it functions and what makes it work. He then asked us: “What would the church look like if we were as serious as the Market about attracting diversity?” Ray gave us a handout of fifteen principles for reading maverick malls like this one and relating that principle to something the church could learn.

I spent my time at the Market taking pictures and observing the interaction between merchants and tourists and customers. In my previous job, I bused to work and transferred buses downtown, so I often spent time taking pictures in the Pike Place Market area and the downtown core. I found that the practice of street photography made me very observant, watching for patterns and oddities, changes in light, and attentive to the people around me. I miss that part of my commute in my current job. I grew to believe that this type of photography is much like a spiritual practice, so I took the opportunity to look at the people of the Pike Place Market through a camera lens and to try to discover what was happening through that lens.

I took a break to write several pages of notes and questions to myself during this time. I realized that all of the bakeries were located on one row, right next to the sidewalk, whereas the clothing stores were inside the building. The aroma of the baked goods had to be in the faces of potential customers in order to attract them in. I realized that the countenance of a shopkeeper makes a huge impact on whether or not customers will wander by; I saw friendly shopkeepers who had a lot of browsers, and scowling merchants with none. I also saw the way that the employees of the main fish market engaged with people who were standing around by asking about their stories, where they had come from, what brought them to Seattle, and inviting them closer to examine the product or sample something. I was also surprised to see that very little actual commerce happened there, but there was a lot of buzz in the air as people waited to see the guys do their world-renowned fish throws. I’m not sure that I can draw much meaning from this observation, but I did find it odd, and in fact watched that part of the market for 20 minutes waiting for them to make a sale, and didn’t see one.