ABOUT

Hi, my name is Ben! I’m husband to Cherie, and I’m a dad to Evie, Jackson, and Zara. My family lives in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood along Aurora Avenue where we share life with some really inspiring and resilient friends. I am part of the Thresholds Community, a fabulous team of people that helps form leaders and communities. I love karaoke, Pearl Jam, and the Green Bay Packers. I like my salsa spicy, coffee strong, and beer hoppy.

My core passion is to awaken people to the abundant, loving, energizing presence of God in the places they live, work, and play!

I believe this happens to be the true purpose of the church, too, which is why replacing the church matters so much to me! It seems that God might be putting the church back in place by calling people to participate in place-based church expressions in order to remind the world that we don’t need steeples and stages or brokers and budgets to connect with Christ and join in God’s mission of renewing all things.

So if you are imagining what it might look like to be the church in your particular place or creating a neighborhood church expression (aka “church planting” or “starting a missional community”) or leading an existing church or spiritual community in your context, then RePLACING CHURCH exist to help and support you!

I write an article or two a week, share a weekly podcast, and connect you to other learning opportunities in order to empower you for your journey of responding to God’s movement and practicing the way of Jesus in your neighborhood, your workplace, and your third places. I encourage you to subscribe to the RePLACING CHURCH email so that you can get the latest content, and please share this site with other friends on this journey!

HOW I GOT HERE

The short version: 

For the past decade I’ve been cultivating community as a neighbor, church planter, pastor, and nonprofit executive director, and I’ve been coaching, training, and connecting other community creators. I’ve made some great decisions and I’ve failed, casted clear vision and confused the people I was leading, thrived and burned out, empowered people to use their gifts and sometimes forgot about mine. I’ve learned so much. Now I feel compelled to share it with others who are bravely cultivating church expressions in their neighborhoods, workplaces, and third places.

The long version:

A decade ago I arrived in Seattle for a church internship. I had passed through seminary and denominational processes, church planter assessments, and church planting bootcamp. According to the tests, I was a visionary, a communicator, a Type A leader. And so the the stage was set for me to launch a conventional, Sunday event-centered church plant!

… But the Spirit had been replacing that idea for some time. Experiences with kids in an inner city elementary school, with migrant workers on a Michigan fruit farm, in a rural Mexican village, in a weekly (charismatic!) prayer gathering in college, an intentional living community, a community coffeehouse, and so many more were preparing me for another expression of church.

And then a neighborhood summoned my soul: I fell in love with Aurora Avenue on the east edge of Greenwood in Seattle, an old stretch of state highway lined with fast food joints, used car lots, and run down motels; a place where many neighbors are unhoused, exploited through prostitution, enslaved by substance addiction, and abandoned to mental illness.

In 2007, Cherie and I began the work of cultivating Awake Church, a neighborhood church expression along Aurora Avenue in Seattle, one of the least churched cities in the country. While we gathered on Sundays from day one (when there were 10 of us in the back of a sketchy coffee shop), our focus has always been to follow Jesus in the neighborhood as we live in proximity to one another. As a result, in 2011, Awake launched the Aurora Commons, a neighborhood living room and resource center where I served as the founding Executive Director through 2014.

Over the years, the Awake community has rented and bought homes, planted gardens, gathered, grieved, shared countless meals, ran a transitional housing initiative, created art, partied, protested exploitation, prayed, ran a neighborhood news site, played at the park, empowered leaders and so much more. It’s just getting started! At the end of 2015, I concluded my time as Lead Pastor of Awake, but my family and I remain an active part of this neighborhood church expression.

As soon as I began place-based “church planting”, I realized how critical it was to connect with other like-hearted practitioners. And so, in 2010, I co-founded the Parish Collective, which has grown into a network of hundreds of neighborhood rooted faith communities in neighborhoods throughout the United States and Canada. I also co-created the Parish Collective’s annual Inhabit Conference. In 2014, I launched Cultivating Parish, a Seattle area network for leaders of neighborhood church expressions in the Seattle area, and before that I led the Seattle area Leadership Development Network with the Christian Reformed Church in North America, the denomination in which I am an ordained minister.

RePLACING CHURCH is a continuation of all of this work of encouraging, empowering, and networking leaders and groups, and I’m thrilled that I get to focus on this initiative as part of my work with Thresholds!