A Parish Story from Green Lake | Seattle
In 2008, a group of friends and neighbors came together and formed Awake Church as an intentional faith community along the historic Aurora Highway in the Green Lake neighborhood of Seattle. These neighbors, one being Hayden Wartes, invited their unhoused and housed neighbors to share life, friendship and a good meal and eventually birthed a dream called Aurora Commons.
10 years later, Aurora Commons was thriving as a neighborhood living room and resource center for their neighbors who find home on the streets. The Awake Church community, however, was exhausted and struggled to identify how their original mission to love God and create spaces of belonging for neighbors fit with who they were now. They felt God calling them into a season of rest and letting the ground lie fallow and also desired to share their learnings from their years of being rooted in place. They longed to collaborate with other faith communities in their neighborhood, particularly for the good of their unhoused neighbors.
Bethany Community Church, in contrast, is one of the largest churches in Seattle with over one hundred years of history and six locations throughout the city. Bethany Green Lake has been in the neighborhood for over 50 years. Bethany had financially supported Aurora Commons for years, yet the relationship had become largely transactional and wasn’t engaging their congregation to foster neighborly love.
“On a foundation of unity, different denominations and church sizes can begin to discern ways that, together, each church can address community development issues.”
– Nathan Nelson
Nathan Nelson, Pastor of Missions and Outreach at Bethany Church, worked with World Relief in Rwanda to help bring local churches together to address community development issues. A local Rwandan partner came to visit Seattle and remarked on the state of the unhoused population in the city. This sparked an idea in Nathan and others to bring the model of church empowerment to his own neighborhood and city. He began to reach out to other local church leaders to create a coalition to support the work of Aurora Commons.
The partnership, which is now known as the Sacred Streets Coalition, kicked off on the first day of lockdown with a Zoom call, and together they went into disaster relief mode. This diverse group of churches purchased thousands of supplies, with Bethany Green Lake serving as a hub to gather supplies and prepare hot meals for Aurora Commons to distribute to unhoused neighbors. As life has opened back up, Sacred Streets is shifting toward workshops and advocacy to spread the learnings and stories of Awake and Aurora Commons to the broader community.
“Sacred Streets Coalition honors the gift of longstanding neighborhood relationships and connections. It’s our responsibility to pass on the wisdom we’ve been entrusted with from our good teachers, our neighbors on the street.”
- Hayden Wartes
This story exemplifies the ways that God weaves connections for us in our common ground as we link across difference to collaborate for renewal with God. In the post-pandemic time of declining attendance and decreased church giving, the Sacred Streets Coalition raised one million dollars to help Aurora Commons buy the building they had been renting for years. They have not only leveraged the resources of the church for the good of their neighbors but also continue to foster relationships and build trust within the community.
Click to learn more and connect with Aurora Commons, Awake Church and Bethany Community Church.
