Dennis Tuuri

I think we need him back to Oregon City specifically very soon. Correct. I am serious about that. It would be wonderful, and it has to do with my talk. Actually, I’m going to talk on the church in Oregon City and kind of give an update on what’s been going on there for several years and some of the theological underpinnings of it and the men that are involved in it and the work. And I think I was trying to think of a snappy title, and I never came up with one, but kind of maybe “From Brigadoon to Oregon City: A Rude Awakening.”

I’ll explain that in a little bit. But I’m going to ask someone to read a couple of verses. I have my home Bible and I don’t really—it’s difficult. You don’t want to see me reading like this, but it is interesting. This is a James B. Jordan Bible. It starts with Leviticus. Yeah, so if you could read Jeremiah 29:7. A very familiar verse. “And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captives. And pray unto the Lord for it, for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.” And then 1 Timothy 2:1-4. “I exhort therefore that first of all supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings, and for all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who will have all men to be saved and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.”

Thank you. You’re welcome.

Okay, let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for your Spirit who instructs us in this word. We pray that you would bless us as we think about what’s happened in Oregon City over the last 10, 12 years. And give us, Father, your renewed strength, courage, and a desire to see our cities truly transformed the way that these connected verses instruct us to do. Thank you, Father, for this time. Bless us, Lord God. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

So Brigadoon was this stage play and then became a movie. How many people have seen the Brigadoon movie? A number of you. So RCC used to be this Brigadoon church. Brigadoon was this little village in Scotland, I think, and they made a pact with God or somebody, I don’t remember who. And every so many years, they would rise back and have a day together again in their beautiful little village and they’d have a great time, and then they’d go back to their graves and they’d come out again a few years later.

So they kind of arose out of the mist, you know, for a day and went back. And when RCC started, we kind of arose out of the mist in a rented facility on the Lord’s day, and then we just sort of disappeared back into our communities. So we were sort of a Brigadoon church. And what’s interesting about the movie is a couple of men get transported back to this place just when the happening is happening where they’re coming back out of the mist, the Brigadoon.

So as someone was talking about last night in his talk on utopia, God doesn’t like stasis—static passivity, just a nice day together is not what it’s about. And so in the movie, two angels, we could say, visit this village and disrupt things. And so for RCC to move from Brigadoon to planting a church or buying a building in Oregon City was this sort of waking up. And you know, it’s a metaphor. I mean, it’s certainly we did a lot of work when we were renting facilities, but I think that’s kind of the idea of what’s happened, and it’s a bit of a rude awakening, right? We’re in a rude awakening right now.

So part of this controversy about our growth initiative is, what should we do? Do we want a church that really is pretty much, you know, kind of a port of safety in the midst of a world that’s going to hell? Or do we want something a little different than that? And so I think that’s kind of involved with what we’re doing with our growth initiative, which we’ll talk about Friday morning as well.

And I don’t think, you know—I think it’s good that we have these ports of safety on the Lord’s day in the church. But the church is an outpost, right? It’s forward movement. And I want to talk about the ways God has blessed us in Oregon City with forward movement.

Tomorrow I’m going to leave camp after breakfast. There’s an important meeting—a follow-up meeting to the Compassion Connect clinic that we just had in Oregon City. I think this is only the second time I’ve left camp. And I thought about this in terms of this illustration with Brigadoon. The last time was many years ago when we were up at Salmon Falls campground and we had to leave camp to go down for a rally because the head of education was attacking homeschoolers through new regulations. And so the last time something was important enough to leave camp, it was a defensive movement to protect our Brigadoon, to protect our families and the ability to educate our kids.

And of course, that’s part of what we do, and it was a great success that day and led to good things. This is more of an offensive movement though. Compassion Connect is an attempt to seek the peace of the city where God has placed us. And by peace, God doesn’t mean, you know, common good. I don’t think I mean some kind of secular nice city. This is not—I don’t think that’s what’s being talked about here.

And when we see the echoes of this text in 1 Timothy, what do we see being prayed for? Well, we see similar things. The most important job of the church, Paul tells pastor Timothy, is to pray for these leaders and really for the peace of the city, because in their peace you’ll be blessed—he says in that kind of quiet life. But the text says importantly that God is seeking all kinds of people to bring to a knowledge of Christ. Peace is bringing that city to a knowledge of Christ. Peace is God’s shalom, God’s order. It’s not the absence of conflict or a nice middle-class living in Portland where everybody gets along, even though there’s idolaters on every corner. That’s not peace.

It may look like peace. It’s what pagans see as peace, but it’s not peace. So when I leave tomorrow, it’s to do Compassion Connect. It’s an interesting story.

You know, Joseph, it’s your tithe dollars at work. We commissioned him to write this song. David Herb and Toby Sumpter—these are your tithe dollars that are supporting the speakers at camp. Your camp fee, your registration, pays for everything else, but the speakers are paid for by your tithe dollars. It’s your work that’s going on here.

And a year and a half ago or so, your tithe dollars paid for me to go to a Q gathering—a two or three day conference in Portland. $750, right? Expensive and a big investment of time. I spent a couple three days down there. But at the Q gathering—and why did I go? Because they’re seeking transformation of the city. Now, their model is this common good that’s based upon Aquinas, and I’m not sure—well, I am sure that our vision is a little different. But I’m going to a lot of these city transformation events, and they’re quite instructive for where we’re at.

We’re in a nice small city. Portland is big and complicated, but Oregon City, Moscow—these are very manageable places where we can lay out a strategy and a plan to affect city transformation. So at the Q gathering, I meet Kevin Palao because I was sort of controversial—and can you imagine that I brought up a controversial question in one of their breakout sessions? But as a result of that, Kevin immediately came up to me and started talking to me, and we got to know each other. I invited him out to Oregon City pastors meeting.

Well, Kevin then also had this dinner—the Palao organization—and I went to the dinner. I was invited, Christine and I, and met Milan Hamala there. And Milan is the guy who has Compassion Connect. It’s a 501c3, a nonprofit organization. And this is what he does. He helps churches put on free medical dental clinics in the Pacific Northwest. And he does other things too. He’s got an apartment ministry now—a different deal.

So your tithe dollars sending me to a city transformation meeting got me in relationship with Milan. And I thought, man, that’s the next thing for the church in Oregon City—to put on a free medical dental clinic and to serve our city that way and use that for evangelism. I mean, it’s a perfect evangelistic opportunity. You’re ministering health and you’re doing it in the name of Christ and you get all this data from people, right? I mean, you fill out forms and stuff, and so you can follow up with mailings, Bible studies, whatever it is. We’ve already got several families who have come to the Nazarene church that hosted it, and we’ve won at least one profession of faith so far.

Well, in any event, Milan shared this thing, and I thought, that’s got to be for us. But we did it a little different. What they normally do with Compassion Connect is they host it in a public school or a convention center, a public building, and the church—a particular church in the region or a set of churches—will assist, but along with a whole bunch of social service agencies. And so it’s this kind of common good sort of secular peace thing going on. And of course they’re using it to follow up evangelistically, so I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s good what they’re doing. But in Oregon City, our view of seeking the peace of the city looks a little different.

And so what we think is the church in Oregon City—which we are using to describe all Trinitarian churches that would affirm the Apostles Creed—the church in Oregon City hosted this event, not this or that church and a multiple number of social service agencies. That was one difference. We want the church in Oregon City, and we want this event to be cited in a church, not a school. I understand that schools are now the centers of community. I understand they’re neutral places. But what we’re trying to do is we think the peace of the city will be accomplished when the church in Oregon City and the various churches that comprise it are seen as the community centers for the neighborhoods.

So we have that vision, and we’re moving incrementally. And one important step that we thought was, let’s make sure we get this thing cited in a church. Well, you know, that is a good idea, but you need a particular kind of facility to do that. You’re going to have a couple three, four, or five hundred people. They’re going to be waiting in line. You’re going to want to feed them. You’re going to want to talk to them about Christ. You’re going to want to just get to know them. So you’ve got a big place you need. You’re going to want to have little rooms around—examination rooms for the actual work that’s going to go on. You need a parking lot, handicapped accessibility. I mean, there’s all kinds of things you need.

And we wanted central location. In the providence of God, in this particular story, the best location seemed to us to be the Nazarene church in Oregon City. But the Nazarene church pastor had dropped out of our monthly pastor meetings that really have formed the basis of the church in Oregon City, which I’ll talk about in a couple of minutes. And he was a little, you know, kind of distant from us—kind of doing their own self-sufficient ministry. He said they have a big clothing ministry, big food pantry ministry, right? And they’re doing evangelistic stuff in their neighborhood.

So it was really tough just getting him to return my calls, and then to get a meeting. And then Flynn A. and I went and met with him personally, and—oh well, okay—so maybe. And so they ended up—he went to his elders and they got very excited. Now, I didn’t find out until last Wednesday—okay, well, after the planning for this thing happened. Why last Wednesday? Significantly, this pastor attended for the first time in a long time the pastor meeting, the monthly pastor meeting. He’s hooked back into relationship, you know, as part of this group of men who come together to represent the church in Oregon City. We’ve re-established relationship with him, and he is happy as a clam because, unbeknownst to me, when I talked to Milan or when we talked about a service project or when we needed his building, him and his elders had been praying for a medical piece to come along with the food and clothing piece of helping the poor.

So they were praying, “How can we do this? How can we get a clinic established?” And along come guys who are talking about the church in Oregon City to him, and we bring this wonderful opportunity. And he is so happy. Fifty people from his church volunteered as part of Compassion Connect or Compassion Oregon City. As I say, he’s got three families coming to his church out of it, and they’re just pleased as punch the way God answered prayer.

But what’s the prayer God is answering? Well, I think it’s because we have this vision of what these verses mean, and we have a vision of implementing it in the city where God has planted Reformation Covenant and the rest of the body of Christ. And we’re in the middle of cities now that are secular and that are not Christian. And we’re seeking the peace, and we’re trying to do that self-consciously. And I believe that the Lord God is blessing these efforts by these kind of strange things that happen—strange to us, but this is the way God works. He brings together people and he creates new opportunities.

And those opportunities don’t just minister health to people. They do it representing the love of Jesus Christ. We did it in the context of a local church, representing the church in Oregon City. And as a result of it, you know, God also knits the bonds of the churches in Oregon City tighter together, and a pretty enthusiastically charismatic prayer time becomes quite different—and it becomes a little different than you’re used to or maybe comfortable with.

And we’ve got three churches right now in Oregon City that are Trinitarian. They believe in the Apostles Creed. They participate in our meetings less than, you know, some of the other more conservative churches. What they do—in these three churches, one is an ELCA church, a Lutheran church; another is a Methodist church. And so these churches, they think homosexuality is just okay, just fine.

So what do you do about that? Well, that’s a tough question. It’s kind of a rude awakening to actually take on your city and say, “These verses are a very important part of the instruction of what we’re supposed to do in America right now, where God has placed us—is to seek the peace of our cities.” That’s tough. I mean, just within the church it’s hard, let alone considering the civic leaders, et cetera.

So it is difficult. Underlying what happened eventually to produce this Compassion Connect event that we just did, and the wonderful fruit that’s coming out of it, is all this hard work. And underlying the hard work are several important things that happened in our story—at least in what God has done at RCC.

And the first one is theological, and I’ve already talked about it a little bit. We had to struggle with what is institutional catholicity? What’s the basis for how we’re supposed to work wherever God places us, right? And we had some ideas. I had read years ago John Frame’s book *Evangelical Reunion*, and you know, he said, “You know, we read these verses about the body of Christ has all the necessary parts. It’s got ears and eyes, et cetera. And we always apply that to our local church. But is that true? Probably not, particularly because a lot of our churches in the cities are quite small.

Why do we think that? Because we’re always thinking in terms of the local church or the universal church. And we’re not thinking about the church in Oregon City. But I believe that this is true much more clearly. And I think this is what John Frame argues for: if you comprise all the churches in our particular city, and what happens typically right now in the divided body of Christ is ears get together with ears and eyes get together with eyes. And you know, we’re sort of—we need to share to get the body to experience the full body of Christ functioning in Oregon City. It’s not good to have our own little Brigadoon outposts. Okay, we have to think of ourselves together.

So we had that book. We had James B. Jordan. You know, another very important thing that has happened in terms of this vision that I’ve seen is something that nobody ever really thinks about Jim doing. But this is—we got this from James B. Jordan years ago. He said, “Hey, it’s good to be in a denomination, right? That’s good. We like that. But just as importantly,” he said—and he said, “Maybe more importantly—is your relationship to the churches in your city.” He told us this years ago, and it fit with, you know, the theological stuff of the church and how that’s used in the New Testament. And it fit with Frame’s vision.

And so we had this idea, right? These theological things at the base. And one more area by the way—very important work for the church in the United States and actually across the world. And although it’s not something he’s known for, this is where we got this originally: this vision for Oregon City.

But particularly then it was bricks and mortar, and this was a big shift for us as a church to go from Brigadoon to Oregon City. It means we are planted now in a particular location. Brigadoon can move around. We could rent a facility here, rent a facility over here. We knew where we were, and if we wanted to start to get together a little closer in terms of where we live, there was no way to do it because we were moving around, which is okay, right? That’s what the tabernacle did. But the tabernacle became the temple, and there became bricks and mortar.

We early on with Reconstruction had thought in terms of ideas and you know, this kind of thing. And we were sort of—we didn’t like bricks and mortar anymore. “Oh, we don’t want that. We don’t want to waste money that way. We want to put it into people.” But when we bought our church in Oregon City, that created the mechanism that kind of put all this other stuff into practice. And what God was doing with us—just buying a building and planting in a particular city—now we know these are the people, this is the city, these are the pastors, these are the different sorts of churches that we’re going to have to learn to get along with.

You know, like Toby again, right? We got lions and tigers and bears. Oh my. All meeting together and praying, and you’re sort of like, “What am I doing here?” But you’re there because God has planted us there. So that was a very important thing for us—buying a building, getting planted.

Now, a lot of our people still come from outside Oregon City, and we try to help them do stuff in their communities. But you know, our focal work is where God now has placed us physically. So that was a big deal—the theological stuff, but then it became bricks and mortar. And we get bricks and mortar stuff, and we get planted in a particular city. And now I start going to these monthly pastor meetings, and I know now, “Okay, these are the guys.” And a lot of these guys, I’m going to be working with for the next 20, 30 years. And I need to build relationship. I need to respect, right, the sort of structure that’s already there.

And of course, there’s very little formal structure in these pastor meetings, but there is a structure. And you can’t just come in and say, “I’m going to take over and do this and that and the other thing.” You’ve got to have respect. You’ve got to look for what you can learn from them as well as teach them. And that all begins when we get that building and start attending the pastor’s meetings.

And we start doing a few things. We established a Love Inc. branch—Love In the Name of Christ. And so they needed six churches, six stakeholder churches. This vision of ours for unity in Oregon City and Clackamas County was part of that. So we did that, and we learned from that too.

Love Inc., you know, one of the things they say is, “We don’t help anybody.” The person that talked to us about getting a Love Inc. branch together—all they do is they connect up people with needs with people in the local churches in Oregon City or Clackamas County who fill the needs. They’re not meeting any needs. They’re like that old, you know, gal at the old telephone exchange, plugging in all the lines, you know, connecting the calls. That’s who they are. I love that model.

But what they do is they find out which people in which of the different churches can meet the needs. And now we’re talking ears, eyes, parts of the body. And we’re recognizing we don’t have it all. No one church can take care of the benevolence requirements in a local city. And so you’ve got to work together. So it was part of this vision of seeking the peace by working with the body of Christ in Ephesus or in our case, Oregon City.

And they also, by the way, provide great pre-screening stuff. Most local churches, you get a call—I got a call, I got scammed. I mean, this guy came with a great story. He was from Japan or someplace, I don’t remember. And we got scammed. We lost money. And this is what happens. But if you’ve got the churches cooperating and they bring in trained people to train intake counselors who get these calls from people, and if the churches are not handling it all right away themselves, they’re turning it over to these people. And these people are trained, and they’ve got the list of who the scam artists are working in our area, right? So now when they connect somebody up to you, you have a lot more confidence. “This is a person with need.” Okay.

So we did that, and that’s an example, though again, of the church in Oregon City. We didn’t call it that yet. It needed a man. Another man came along.

So I had the theological basis. We were bricks and mortar, and we began to do some work based on the bricks and mortar—our location. And then God brought this man into the pastor’s fellowship. He may visit camp this week. He might stop by. But this guy is a Wesleyan and Arminian background pastor. I had worked with him years before. He was the guy, and this is interesting again about the church in a region—he was the guy who began the constitutional amendment process in Oregon to stop gay marriage. Was it Measure 36? I think so. I don’t remember. And because he was in Portland then and he saw himself as a pastor to pastors—connecting up pastors in Portland, right? Church in Portland—you know, not many pastors saw him that way, but that’s how he saw himself.

And he worked on that vision, right? And so because of that, when he gets this idea to change the constitution, he goes and starts talking to different pastors, and he ends up talking to the pastor of City Bible Church. And City Bible Church—I work with these guys in political action. Oregon Family Council. I have for years. He tells those guys, and they say, “Well, okay, we need to work with this guy and make this thing actually happen, so the constitutional change happens.” And we did it.

But to do that, you need—you can have two chief petitioners, right? Somebody and somebody else who are the guys that the state sees as circulating the petition to put it on the ballot. And I was asked, you know—I’m always kind of like Forest Gump in these things. I’m never sure why, but I was asked by the people at Oregon Family Council to be the second chief petitioner. So now this pastor and me—his name is Kent—Kent and I work together politically, and it’s all—and the state of Oregon’s constitution changes, right? And we protect, we defend marriage, we were supposed to according to the book of Hebrews.

And I have this relationship with this fellow. And it’s because he saw himself as part of the church in Portland and communicating to the church in Portland his vision for what he wanted to do with the Constitution. Well, in the providence of God, years later—couple years after we’ve been in Oregon City, three or four years later—here comes Kent to pastor a church in Oregon City, and we’ve got a relationship already because of our previous political work.

And Kent, you know, I’m just, you know, kind of a reformed guy. I’ve got some ideas, and maybe if things come up, we’ll try to do something about the ideas if we have to. But Kent is charismatic, right? And he’s Wesleyan Arminian, and he has an idea about the church in Oregon City. But he wants to actually do it, and he wants to go to the meeting. And you know, he’s not hung up with gradualism. He starts telling people there is a church in Oregon City. The church in Oregon City is who we are.

And it resonates with the theological underpinnings that God has given us at RCC. And all of a sudden, through this man—this incarnational thing, right, with people—now the church in Oregon City really starts to happen. And he’s kind of forcing and pushing. And you know, I need to work with him to make this happen, and it has. And those are vital steps to what eventually becomes Compassion Connect—the latest work of the church in Oregon City.

And under Kent’s pressure and me with him, then we start to vision ourselves as the church in Oregon City. And by now, you know, four or five or six years later, we have a national day of prayer breakfast in Oregon City—we always do. And the churches kind of organize it. But now instead of praying for the churches in Oregon City, now I was asked to pray for the church in Oregon City by the pastor of the largest church in town. You know, Jim says the bishop. Whether you call him the bishop or not, the guy with the biggest evangelical church—he’s the guy. And he asked me to pray for—now, every year—we’re not praying for different individual churches in Oregon City when we are. But in the prayer breakfast, the community event with the mayor and all those people and business people, it’s the church in Oregon City.

It’s come that far, that fast really. Now, you know, we have events sponsored by the church in Oregon City. Now we have Compassion Connect, and it’s put on not by a church or a few churches listed, but by the church in Oregon City. Now, every year in the Chamber of Commerce directory, we don’t have a bunch of individual church listings. But now, and we have those—but we also have an ad for the church in Oregon City. And we put in there the Apostles Creed as the basis for the doctrinal understanding of what that means. And we list all the churches unless they don’t want to be listed. But there’s 27, 28 churches in Oregon City. And most of them are part of, now, completely willing to be identified with the church in Oregon City.

Now we have a Christian schooling fair. One of our great concerns is education and the amount of Christian children raised in public schools. If you’re going to seek the peace of the city, it’s going to be real tough long term if 90% of the kids are going to the public school. I mean, it just is. And if a whole bunch of Christian kids are going to the public school, which they do, and I think it’s worse in Oregon—but it’s not good anywhere in the country. Homeschooling and private school is a very small percentage. And it’s worse now because we’re in a long, slow economic difficulty, right? And now the two-income thing becomes more and more a requirement for families.

And now the ability to send kids—you know, to have four or five thousand bucks for private tuition per kid to a private school—becomes less and less available to people, more and more out of reach. So now even more, all the pressure is for children to go to the public school system.

Now, I went to the public school system. It’s not as if it’s horrible. You know, I used to tell my kids that they crucified people there and burned them. No, I didn’t really say that, but that was the vision they had. The school bus would go by, and we’d go, “Oh, public school.” You know? Of course, it’s not like that. I mean, there’s a lot of good Christian people involved in the public school system. And so, but what are we supposed to do? We’re supposed to raise our children in the culture of Jesus. And, you know, we’re never doing that perfectly, but we do that better if their education—where they’re spending so much of their time—is Christian. Obviously, I’m coals to Newcastle here. But what do you do about it?

If you’re part of the church in Oregon City, what do you do? Well, so we’ve done a couple of things as the church in Oregon City. The first thing we did was a Christian schooling fair. Let’s take all the Christian options—homeschool, private school, tutorial approaches, blends, classical conversations, whatever we’ve got going on in the greater Oregon City area. Every year, let’s bring them together—one-stop shopping for parents to say, “Oh, there’s all these options as I look at what I should do with my kids.” And we’ve done that.

It was horrible. We had, you know, we did it a couple of times at RCC. The last two years it was still hosted. It was sponsored by the church in Oregon City, but we hosted, you know, four or five people show up. This year we moved it to Oregon City Evangelical Church. You know? I mean, how many of our people are going to go there? They know what they’re doing already. So we moved the location to a church where maybe the need is greater—even though it’s for all the churches—but the host church will probably have more of their people show up. And we had much better attendance.

And then in the providence of God, you know, Georgin Rice, who’s the big talk show radio host on KPDQ in Portland, she comes and live broadcasts for two hours from the Christian schooling fair. And the first half hour she talks to Pastor Tom and myself about the church in Oregon City because she’s jazzed about that. And we’re talking about it to kind of jazz other people throughout the Pacific Northwest that listen to her in terms of what they can do in their communities. And then we’re talking about it in relationship to Christian education and putting on the Christian schooling fair.

And then—you know, patient and discipleship are not equivalent. I believe that. Hands raised. So I made 15 to teach people how to learn for themselves, and homeschooling definitely was beneficial in that way. Christian parents fill out wells which you did not dig. And Liz, you went to community college and then NSA. Is that correct? After that? Okay. And Bethany, you went to community college. And now, you know, there are other, you know, large private schools. It’s notable that Alex’s father—the work that Alex’s dad did, Dick—was very similar to what Dennis Tuuri did here in Oregon City.

Now this is producing change downstream into Portland with significant results. So you know, we’re seeking the peace, I think, the way God wants us to seek the peace, and he’s blessing. Results are happening.

Another thing we’re doing, you know, an idea—and I don’t know if it’ll happen or not—but a free Christian school. Why couldn’t we, you know, if one church is going to do it, forget it. It’s too difficult. But if the church in Oregon City gets jazzed up about getting more and more of our members—of our churches—Christian education for their kids at virtually no charge—if you don’t have any money, right? Why couldn’t we do this? I mean, it seems pretty doable.

I know people with money who think that, you know, long-term, Oregon has to fund Christian education or we’re just dead in terms of governmental structures and our economy and all that stuff. But they’re not just going to give it to somebody who has some idea. What we’re doing now is we’re working with different pastors of these 27 pastors, and we’re trying to get buy-in from a dozen of them. That’s kind of our goal. And by buy-in, we’re going to try to get 12 churches to put it in their annual budget for next year.

And if we can do that, I don’t care how much money there is committed—but then we have the base to be able to go to some Christian philanthropist and make it happen. And we’ve got all these church buildings sitting empty. One of the biggest costs for schools is the facility. We’ve got free ones. We’ve got pastors who can teach Bible. And we might even have some people who are willing to volunteer some time for other subjects.

So where our idea is, is to start a free classical Christian school in Oregon City. And if we can do it, it’s going to be because the church in Oregon City is doing it—not because RCC is doing it. I have no interest in doing it that way. But if we do it, it’s scalable. You can take this to big cities. You could do great things. We could really affect significant change in the percentage of Christian parents who are sending their kids to public school.

This is not an outreach school, by the way. This is not evangelistic. This will be free only to members—whatever that means—at these churches, to members of Oregon City churches. It’s for the body of Christ, and it’s for education helping them to raise their children in the culture of Jesus Christ in a more consistent way than they can right now with the public school system.

So, you know, it’s another thing that we’re able to dream about and to think about and make plans for, because the Lord has done this work in helping us to see each other.

A couple of last things I’ll mention: parakaleo. So, nobody in Oregon City—these other pastors probably never heard the word—but Pastor Kent, the guy that I worked politically with, who began to push and push me to get this thing actually going in Oregon City and has been a big spark plug to get this happening successfully. Pastor Kent, I don’t think he’s ever heard of that particular term, but he knows about gifts to one another.

And what Pastor Kent says is, “There are gifts. You know, this church has this gift.” One of the first gifts he thought the church in Oregon City needed from RCC was the CRC worship memorial. Now, how unexpected is that? Totally. And he taught this worship memorial in his sermons to his people. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but this is really interesting to me, right?

But he says to us at some point, “Well, one of the gifts you need to receive is the charismatic renewal, right?” Okay. A year and a half ago, we’re going to a seminar on human trafficking. Flynn, myself, and Pastor Kent. And Pastor Kent said, “We’re sitting around afterwards, having a meal and discussing the seminar. And Pastor Kent says, ‘Hey, have you guys ever heard of R.C. Sproul?’”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, we’ve heard of R.C. Sproul. Noah’s son, you know, I’m friends with, you know, Junior and stuff.” And which I am. “And yeah, we do. And I think this is interesting. Where’s this going to go?”

Well, he says, “I’m listening to his tapes every day. And I’ve decided that you guys—this reformed salvation, this is the strong biblical salvation that the church in Oregon City needs.” Now, this is a guy who, you know, raised, trained, dedicated Wesleyan Arminian. And now he’s reformed. Last weekend he was up there listening to John MacArthur and R.C. Sproul up in Seattle at the Ligonier conference.

Now, we’ve got to do some other work with him to make sure he doesn’t, but anyway, you know, so but this is pretty remarkable, right? And it’s—I didn’t—it was not like I was working him, but the Spirit of God was moving here with this guy that I’ve done political work, ecclesiastical work with. And now his basic theology has changed.

A year and a half ago, four or five months ago—maybe four months ago—he gets together with Flynn and I, and he wants to talk again. And he says, “You know, I’ve always said you guys needed this charismatic renewal, and I know that you don’t think that’s true. And he says, ‘I’m wondering what you think about the cessation of the gifts.’”

And we sort of do a Jordanian thing—special cases set up the regular, right? Tongues, sets up translation, et cetera. And he says, “Yeah, you know, I’m just becoming convinced that tongues and some of these things have ceased in the way that they existed originally.”

Now, this is a charismatic, and he’s got a charismatic church. And two weeks ago, he begins a series of sermons on the work of the Holy Spirit to let his congregation know, “I was wrong. And I think this tongue stuff isn’t what we’re doing anymore.”

So, you know, it’s just been a lot of fun. It has been a lot of fun—a lot of hard work. It is a rude awakening when you move from Brigadoon to Oregon City. A lot of difficult work.

The pro-homosexual pastors, we’ve begun meetings with them to go over our basic doctrinal statement that we drafted for the church in Oregon City, to see to make sure we’ve got the right tools that we can even have the conversation about homosexuality with them on. We’re not giving up on them, and they’re not giving up on us. So it’s hard work. It is a rude awakening. It’s difficult. But you know, there are wonderful brooks and gardens along the way. God does these cool things with his Spirit, and he refreshes you on the way.

And great work, I think, is happening. And I think, maybe, that what we’re doing in terms of city transformation in Oregon City based on the church in Oregon City will be significant—will be significant not just in Oregon City as a model for other places as well. So that’s the church in Oregon City.