Burien’s good news

We decided to bag church reports after each visit. 1.There’s not always a lot of interesting stuff to say and 2.”Thank you” is best said personally. But we’re making an exception for our church of yesterday, formerly Burien Bible Baptist and now Seattle Church of the Open DoorSeattle Open Door Church. And, boy, have they opened their doors.

Our relationship with the church goes back 7+ years when we visited raising support. At the time Lee Scholes was pastor and the church was, to put it truthfully, kind of a white island in a rainbow neighborhood. They had a Spanish-speaking church meeting in the afternoons, but they were struggling with how to adapt and reach the new population of Burien. They wanted to, but they didn’t know how. I can sympathize. In fact we began to pray along with them for God to help them reach out. Well while we were in Mexico Pastor Scholes retired and Brian Cho, a Korean-American pastor, came. We don’t know all the details or the story, but we saw the results yesterday. There is a contingent of Bhutanese refugees that has integrated into the church. There are Koreans and Japanese and Samoans and indy-rockers and, yes, how-do-you-say-it-Europeans. There was an energy and vibrancy to the church that you could feel. They are working hard to form one church composed of many “nations” and not several different churches. And the preaching was…well, Tim preached, so it was maybe passable. But surely on other Sundays it is good! Sometimes first impressions are wrong, but we really felt that God is doing something special at Seattle Open Door church. It seems that the church leaders are really behind Pastor Cho and working at making this happen. Just a hunch, but we suspect that bringing in a non-white leader of the whole church may have been a major step in this direction.

Now we know that there are struggles and ups and downs and we’re sure this isn’t coming easily. And being there for a few hours on one Sunday doesn’t begin to tell the whole story. Nonetheless, it was as mixed a group in a church as we’ve seen and definitely a shot in the arm for us on our first weekend back on the road. We’d encourage others to pay them a visit and check it out–Seattle Open Door Church in Burien.

One Response to “Burien’s good news”

  1. 1
    Jana

    This is a church I would like to attend!! Love you guys! Hope the prayer retreat went well, Tim…


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