as some of you know, my family and i love going to vancouver and other locales of BC. we love it because it’s cheap vacation (even with increasing gas prices) and i can still brag that i take my family to a foreign country for vacation. we’ve always breezed by bellingham.
for those that dont’ know bellingham is the ‘city’ between seattle and vancouver - only 80+ miles from seattle. although still considered a small city, it is quickly changing. there are about 70K+ in belligham and 170+ in the larger whatcom county. western washington now has nearly 14K students and 2,013 are students of color with asians being the largest minority group. over 20% of this year incoming class are students of color.
so, today, i had the chance to preach at bellingham covenant church. after i preached, they were gracious and took an offering for quest church. along with being in the same denomination, i met their senior pastor, paul peterson, at the kansas city airport at 1am and took the same taxi in for a conference.
after that, i had a meeting with some asian students at wwu and couple local missionaries. we met to pray about the possibility of planting a ‘quest bellingham’ in seattle. their burden has been that after multiple years, students and folks of color have no where to go to call ‘home’ for their place of worship. there are couple local mega churches and bellingham cov are great churches but just not the same. in addition to 2000+ students of color, there are, according to the most recent demograhics survey, 655 african americans, 997 native indians, 2853 asians, 3111 latinos, 116 other pacific islanders, and 1450 other races. in the larger whatcom county, there are 4637 asian-americans. yes, there is a local slavic church, a local native indian church, and three korean speaking korean churches, a chinese baptist church, but not a single MULTIE-ETHNIC (english speaking) church in bellingham. it is for this reason that i was invited to meet with some local bellingham folks to see if quest would consider planting a church in bellingham.
as most know, my deep passion is to help quest plan churches – through quest, through a possible network we start, and/or through our denomination. it’s not that we want to take over the world but as broken as churches are (including quest), there is something beautiful and powerful about churches. so, as quest seattle struggles, i pray for bellingham, bellevue, federal way, portland, vancouver, phuket, shanghai, naryn, goma…
Filed under: church, churchplanting, quest church
