So, in that spirit, a person who left an anonymous comment about the recent changes at what was formerly Mars Hill Portland and then Redeemer that provides an update that can be vetted by a publicly available source, the Door of Hope church that has agreed with an interim board at Redeemer to assimilate Redeemer.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/03/redeemer-church-in-portland-has-filed.html?showComment=1533393264375#c9203292765554535516
Anonymous said...
Redeemer church Portland OR voted unanimously to join Door of Hope Effective July 19, 2018 see the following for more information - http://redeemerpdx.com/ Thought you might like to know about this – Additional Info & the transition timeline is on Redeemer’s Facebook Page.
Facebook Announcement of Transition Schedule dated July 24, 2018 at 3:37pm
Hey Redeemer! As was announced on Sunday, our Board voted to join Door Of Hope. Here are some dates to remember over the next few weeks until we join them at Revolution Hall:
-Sunday, July 29 - Josh White will be preaching on their core values and lots of other information on how to serve in and connect to DOH - you won't want to miss it
-Sunday, Aug 5 - Tim will be back preaching in Psalms
-Sunday, Aug 12 - Tim will preach our last service as Redeemer Church. We'll have a family style celebration of what God has done in and through our church
-Sunday, Aug. 19 - join DOH for Sunday services at Revolution Hall
**Please like and share this post so word gets around!**
Door of Hope's FAQ Regarding Merger can be found on Door of Hope's website - http://www.doorofhopepdx.org/redeemer-faq/
7:34 am
and here is the Door of Hope FAQ about the merger. It's fairly extensive and provides background for the recent decision.
In Brief
Door of Hope is currently in talks with Redeemer Church regarding the prospect of their congregation becoming part of DoH. [emphasis added] If we go forward, the Redeemer congregation would begin attending DoH services, and DoH would take ownership of Redeemer’s building, a beautiful historic church in the Sunnyside neighborhood of SE Portland. After some helpful repair and upgrade work, DoH would move Sunday services from Revolution Hall to the Redeemer building.
How did the discussion with Redeemer begin?
Josh White and Redeemer pastor Tim Smith were put in touch with one another through a mutual mentor at Western Seminary. In recent months, it became clear that this was an opportunity that could benefit both church bodies and help further our shared mission of serving the city of Portland. [emphasis added]
How does this opportunity fit into Door of Hope’s vision for its future?
We desire to plant churches in Portland that hold to Christian orthodoxy and express Door of Hope’s four pillars. Having Redeemer Church join DoH would enable us to hold Sunday services in a building that aligns with our philosophy of being present in the local community, while joining with the people of Redeemer to make Jesus known in our city. Additionally, this move would open up potential space for a future church plant in our Fremont building.
How many people are part of Redeemer? Do we have the pastoral and volunteer capacity to care for all of them?
At the moment, we’re expecting around 100 people from Redeemer to join Door of Hope. This would translate to an increase of around 10% in our Sunday attendance, which fits comfortably within our current capacity. [emphases added] We anticipate that we’ll need to expand our existing Children’s Ministry volunteer team, but are happy to say that the Redeemer building will offer a dedicated Children’s Ministry space that exceeds the capacity of our space at Revolution Hall.
Who is empowered to make decisions on behalf of Redeemer’s congregation?
Redeemer has an interim board that was established to make decisions regarding the future of the church. After prayerful consideration, the board unanimously voted in favor of joining Door of Hope’s community.
Are there significant theological differences between Redeemer and Door of Hope? Will this change the feel of Sunday services?
Door of Hope and Redeemer are aligned theologically, and share a common commitment to Christian orthodoxy and to proclaiming the Gospel in our city. Our approach to ministry will not be changing, and the new church building will still retain the distinctive feel and values of DoH. In fact, this building aligns even more closely with our desire to be a visible, welcoming presence within the local community.
Will the staff or leadership structure of Door of Hope change?
There will be no change to the leadership structure at Door of Hope. We would be hiring Redeemer’s current lead pastor, Tim Smith, as an associate pastor on DoH’s pastoral team, but Tim would be the only Redeemer staff member joining DoH. [emphasis added]
What would Tim Smith’s role at Door of Hope be? Would he be an elder?
Tim would serve as an associate pastor, working alongside our other pastors in shepherding the church. Additionally, he’d play a key role in helping the Redeemer congregation integrate into DoH. He would not be coming on as an elder. [emphasis added]
What will happen to leaders currently serving at Redeemer?
Ministry leaders at Redeemer would not automatically become leaders at Door of Hope. However, we’re excited to welcome in all members of the Redeemer congregation and help them discover opportunities to serve with their unique gifts.
What is the proposed timeline for Redeemer’s integration into Door of Hope?
We’d love to see Redeemer join Door of Hope before the sign-up process for the Fall community group season begins. The DoH elder board will be voting on August 4, and we’re currently looking at August 19 as a potential integration date. [emphasis added]
What still needs to happen before Door of Hope’s leadership makes a definitive decision?
While the DoH leaders are excited about the prospect of having Redeemer join our family, we want to take time to effectively communicate with our body, carefully evaluate the needs of the Redeemer building, and prayerfully plan the transition.
What work will be done on the Redeemer building?
A thorough building inspection has been completed, with no significant findings outside of general maintenance needs. The building is functional and safe as it is, but we want to do a number of improvements, including installing an HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system and upgrading the existing Children’s Ministry space.
Would Door of Hope be assuming the mortgage on the new building?
DoH would either assume the mortgage with Redeemer’s current bank or refinance it with our own bank. The value of the building currently exceeds the deficit on the mortgage, meaning that the assets would exceed the liabilities. The repayments would be significantly less than what we currently pay for the use of Revolution Hall, which means this would not only be a financially sound move, but a financially beneficial one. [emphases added]
How would this decision impact Grace City Portland?
We’re excited about the work that Grace City is doing and are happy to see the way that the Fremont building has served their needs as a church plant. Having Door of Hope move into the Redeemer building would mean that Grace City could continue to use the Fremont building for the foreseeable future.
What is the plan for the long-term future of the Fremont building?
Our long-term goal would be to plant a church into the Fremont building that would reflect our pillars and form part of a Door of Hope family of churches.
Who the mutual mentor may have been would have to be a guess here but someone at Western seminary is established. Smith will be an associate pastor at Door of Hope. Door of Hope would be assuming the mortgage on the Redeemer building, it seems, and the value of the building currently exceeds the deficit on the mortgage meaning the assets would exceed the liabilities. So ... it would appear the merger makes sense in terms of a real estate pivot.
The number of people who would be anticipated to join Door of Hope from the Redeemer side is stated as 100 people.
100 people?
Let's look at a snapshot of the Mars Hill FY2012 report
and from FY2013
since Mars Hill collapsed in 2014 there wasn't a big incentive to list the number of people in attendance in the annual report. But ... there was a circa April 2014 financial slide in a document passed along to Wenatchee The Hatchet we can consult.
Giving households obviously can't be construed as attenders since peoplecan give to a cause even if they aren't members. Still, the numbers do suggest that there was some kind of numeric decline that could be measured going on.
For the former Mars Hill Portland to reach a point where its operational liabilities make a church merger seem like a good idea and 100 people are anticipated by Door of Hope to join them if the merger goes through, that could seem to tell a story of Redeemer on the rocks. As Justin Dean has been telling things in podcast interviews promoting PR Matters he's been saying all the churches are doing well, thanks.
The Redeemer Portland merger that looks like it gets voted on today reminds me of something Mark Driscoll once wrote the following that we'll quote a large chunk of. Keep your eyes peeled for references to Leadership Network people or the Vanderbloemen group while you're reading this 2011 chestnut that you may not be able to dig up at Driscoll's newer web presence.
...
Missional Mergers
The mergers we’ve been a part of at Mars Hill, and some of the mergers other churches in the Acts 29 network have been a part of, have by God’s grace been missionally focused mergers. By this I mean that they’ve been the result of two churches coming together to ask how they can work together to accomplish a shared mission, to see many people come to Jesus (Matthew 28:19-20). Underlying this is the belief that if Jesus' name is made much of in the building, then it does not much matter whose name is on the sign of the building.Each of these mergers has had different details surrounding them. Sometimes there are financial struggles, such as with Sammamish. Other times, there is a devastating loss to the leadership, as with the case of Pastor Bill and his wife at Doxa. These mergers were akin to an adoption, where a hurting church in need was adopted by a healthy church to work together as brothers and sisters in Christ to the glory of God to accomplish his mission.
Sometimes there is simply a desire to be more effective and to have greater reach as a church, which leads healthy churches to join together to see greater impact for the gospel. Such was the case when we merged with City on a Hill in Albuquerque and with The Vine. These types of mergers are like marriages, in which two churches come together with strengths that complement each other to accomplish the mission of God. As within marriage, there is a leader in the merger, but unlike an adoption type merger, there is health on both sides.
Here’s the painful truth—the calls we are getting lately from churches we have not yet merged with are often cases where the senior leadership was disqualified because of sin, often sexual. Once the leadership leaves, often the best people remain and try to save their church, and a merger is a way to help such people save their church from death.
Other calls we are getting are from churches where the leadership has gotten off-track theologically and moved into false teaching and error. These churches are seeking help to right their ship.
And, sometimes the pastors of smaller churches are so burdened by the administration of running their organization that they want to merge with a bigger church like ours so that we can take those burdens off them and allow them to focus on serving people and making disciples, which is why they went into ministry in the first place.
Often times the whole story behind a merger is not told because of the painful circumstances that need not be made public. As a pastor who loves churches and God’s people, some of what I see and hear is heartbreaking, and if a merger can save a church from death and support godly people giving their all to keep yet another church from the grave, then I am certain it makes Jesus happy no matter what the critics may say.
In each case, the situation is never one of a larger church coming in to pick up the remains of a smaller church but rather of two churches wanting to be as faithful to God’s calling as possible.
These types of mergers are not unique to Mars Hill and are, in fact, growing around the country. Leadership Network research has indicated that 2 percent (6,000 churches) of US Protestant churches merge annually, and another 5 percent of churches (15,000) say they have already talked about merging in the future.
The good news is that a vast majority of churches that have merged with a shared mission in mind have experienced new vitality and growth, seeing their influence and ability to minister in the community grow exponentially. This is something we can attest to at Mars Hill and something I’ve personally seen in many churches across the country.
Granted, these mergers are never without their hardships and struggles, but by God’s grace they’re resulting in a great harvest.
Facing the Facts
The reality is that church mergers will only continue to grow. As the baby boomers begin retirement, there will be a growing decline in Protestant churches in attendance and a very real need for leadership at declining churches. Unfortunately, the upcoming generation is not only smaller in numbers demographically, but also less likely to be involved in church, and especially less likely to be involved in church leadership and the ministry as a vocation, according to some sources. This is creating and will continue to create a great crisis in which many long-standing, God-fearing, and Bible-loving churches who have a great heritage and a history of gospel work in their city, face the prospect of closing their doors for good—often selling their property to commercial interests or even other religious expressions. And once those churches close, the zoning changes and a church may never be able to reside in that community again.The following are some sobering statistics from the upcoming book by Warren Bird and Jim Tomberlin of the Leadership Network, entitled Better Together: Making Church Mergers Work. I thank them for sending me an advance copy of the manuscript and encourage you to read the book when it comes out in April.
- Roughly 80 percent of the three hundred thousand Protestant churches in the United States have plateaued or are declining, and many of them are in desperate need of a vibrant ministry.
- Roughly three thousand of these declining churches (1 percent of all churches in America) will close their doors permanently nationwide in the next twelve months.
- Among the 20 percent of growing congregations across the United States, many are in desperate need of space. These conditions present a potential win-win for forward-thinking church leaders who believe that “we can do better together than separate,” and it is revitalizing church topography.
- Church foreclosures, virtually unheard of in the United States before the Great Recession of 2008, have recently increased in number. According to a Wall Street Journal report, nearly two hundred churches have had their properties foreclosed on by banks in 2008, 2009, and 2010, up from only eight foreclosures in the two years prior to that and none in the previous decade.
- One recent study found that the percentage of congregations reporting some or serious financial difficulty more than doubled to nearly 20 percent since about 2000. From 2000 to 2008—before the recession’s toll was felt—congregations reporting “excellent financial health” had dropped from 31 percent to 19 percent. They dropped further to 14 percent in 2010. The recession only exacerbated their economic situations, according to survey compiler David Roozen, director of The Hartford Institute for Religion Research.
- The biggest elephant in church boardrooms in the United States is the topic of senior pastor succession. It is a difficult conversation for most aging senior pastors to have with their boards and staff, so usually it is ignored until too late. Many are predicting a tsunami of church turnovers during the next decade as the aging baby boomers turn over the reins of U.S. churches to the next generation. According to William Vanderbloemen, founder and president of the Vanderbloemen Search Group, senior pastor succession “might be the biggest unspoken crisis the church in the US will face over the next twenty years.”
- About 30 percent of churches going into a merger do so without pastors in both of the churches, according to the Leadership Network 2011 survey of church mergers.
So the irony of Mars Hill Portland becoming Redeemer in the wake of the implosion of Mars Hill Church without a clear line of succession within Mars Hill, and then Redeemer Portland getting to the point where it agreed to merge with Door of Hope and having the prospect of ... 100 people joining Door of Hope if the vote goes through ... that irony is hard to overstate. Mars Hill Portland may have become in the mere four years after the demise of Mars Hill a church that's dwindling away and that has found it advantageous to agree to a church merger.
POSTSCRIPT
08-06-2018
06.17PM
There's a confirmation on the Redeemer side of things, too, and, per a recent comment, the hand-off/transfer has become official.
On July 19, 2018 the Board of Directors of Redeemer church voted unanimously to join Door of Hope in order to further the Gospel in the city of Portland. As of August 19th we will start meeting with them at Revolution Hall for worship for several months. During this time The Castle will undergo some much needed renovations and after they are finished, Door of Hope will move into the building. We are excited for this opportunity and thankful to the Father for His provision during our time of transition as a church.
