Match-making for Sunday Mornings
You can't miss the crowd. Students hover around tables in Martin Square during the first week of Autumn Quarter.
Have they come for free energy bars? Well … yes. But more importantly, they've come to find a match — a local church that will become their new Sunday morning destination.
This year, students shook hands with representatives from 17 local churches — only a sampling of their options. It would take you almost six years of Sundays to visit all 300 Seattle-area churches in the church database provided by Seattle Pacific University Ministries and Center for Worship. Looking for Catholic mass, or gatherings of Arabic Baptists, Quakers, Lutherans, or Presbyterians? Search for congregations by denomination, keywords, and even distance from campus. And if you have questions, a student ministry coordinator on every residence hall floor is ready to help you out.
No wheels? No problem. Several churches are within walking distance. Others are just a bus ride away. Many local churches bring vans to campus and fill them with students. But some students get there on their own. "I took the shuttle a lot last year," says Anna Barton, who attends Bethany Community Church. "But normally I get to church by carpooling with bunches of my friends."
Church membership is an important part of the SPU experience, even though Seattle Pacific offers a variety of worship opportunities every week. "We absolutely want people to come to our on-campus worship services," says Bob Zurinsky, assistant director of the Center for Worship. "But we feel that students should be involved in a church outside of SPU as well, in order to establish connections outside of this community."
Zurinsky also hopes that worship experiences at SPU will equip students to enrich the worship gatherings in their own churches.
For juniors Joshua Dolim and Leslie Byerly, the church fair launched an interesting search for just the right church home. "We visited 15 churches before we found our church," says Leslie. "It was a long journey."
Joshua adds that the church is called, "Epic Life." "We went because the name was so ridiculous," he says. "We didn't expect to like it. But we felt so welcomed and at home from the moment we walked inside that we never left."
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