Adventist Review associate editor Bill Knott recently talked with Pastor Greg Nelson, senior pastor of AnchorPointe, a new church plant in downtown Seattle, about the personal and professional challenges of launching a new ministry in a major urban area.

reg, many Adventists in North America seem to be of two minds about big city ministry. On the one hand, we’re troubled by the noise, the crowding, the hectic pace of cities: some say there’s even an Adventist bias in favor of rural life. On the other, we’re coming to realize that fulfilling the Great Commission means going where the people are—and increasingly, the people we want to reach are moving to cities. Is that a fair summary of our situation?

Oh, there’s no doubt that Adventists in North America have historically been very ambivalent about city ministry. We’re worried—sometimes even scared—by big cities, and yet we realize that someone ought to share the gospel there. But the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy make it very clear that God is anything but ambivalent about reaching the cities. Jesus’ whole redemptive model emphasized going where the people were. And if He were here today, I don’t have any doubt that He’d be spending the vast majority of His time in cities—because that’s where the people are.

You’ve just left a very successful and comfortable ministry at an Adventist college to move to one of the fast-est-growing metro regions in the United States. There’s a world of difference between suburban Lincoln, Nebraska, and downtown Seattle. What made you do it?

I began to realize that God had planted a passion for city ministry in me since my earliest days. I was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan; I went to school in Singapore. Probably 80 percent of my life until I went to college was in an urban environment. And over the past 15 years I’ve felt this amazing emotional attachment to Seattle. Before moving to Lincoln, I pastored the Auburn Adventist Academy church on the south side of the city. I’d often drive up here into Seattle, park the car, walk around, look at all the people, and say, “Man, I wonder how in the world you could reach people like this!” As I look back now, the Lord was preparing me to make a move like this.

Was there a specific moment when you became certain that God was calling you to minister here in Seattle?

Actually, there was. Last fall I was preaching a sermon series at the College View church on evangelism, and I was preaching on Jesus’ five metaphors about how His followers should relate to the world: We are salt; we are light; we are fishers of people; we are rescuers; we are the hospital. And as I was finishing that second sermon about light, suddenly this analogy came to me that wasn’t even in my notes: If you have a flashlight and you want to make a difference with this flashlight, you don’t take the flashlight into a big sports stadium at night. You take it out of the stadium into the darkness where there’s no light, and you shine the flashlight. That’s how you make a difference! And that week the Lord said to me, “Did you hear what you said?”

We preachers preach to ourselves as well, don’t we?

That’s exactly what happened to me. I said, “Yes, Lord, I did hear.” It was as though the Lord said to me, “Greg, for 25 years I’ve had you in the stadium, serving as a cheerleader for the people. Now I want you to go out of the stadium and be that point of light in a place of darkness.” It was so clear, Bill, and so staggering that I didn’t know what to do with it. And that week Dave Weigley [Washington Conference president] called me with an invitation to consider a new ministry in downtown Seattle. It was about as clear a calling as I’ve ever experienced.

You’re well aware of the counsel in the Spirit of Prophecy about the dangers for families who live and work in urban areas. How did your family react to your conviction that God was calling you to Seattle?

Well, it certainly was a struggle. We had to wrestle with the tension between launching a mission and the implications for family, for living, for cost, for safety. But it was interesting to me, right off the bat, that when I shared my conviction with the family, everyone in the family—all three of our children and my wife—said, “God is in this call. We must go.” I couldn’t believe it. That was a big hurdle cleared.

Did you also wrestle with that Adventist ambivalence about cities we talked about a few moments ago?

I really felt I had to explore the theological and practical issues before I could make a final commitment. I had to do some serious praying and studying about what was involved in moving a family to a downtown location. And I learned some interesting things. First of all, Ellen White never speaks as passionately about anything as she does about ministry to the large cities. Two large sections in the book Evangelism are devoted to her counsel about city ministry. I immediately read both sections carefully. I was struck most of all by her statement that “we all need to be wide awake, that, as the way opens, we may advance the work in the large cities. We are far behind in following the instruction to enter these cities and erect memorials for God.”¹

Let’s push that a bit, Greg. Ellen White also wrote in The Adventist Home that “the cities are filled with temptation. We should plan our work in such a way as to keep our young people as far as possible from this contamination.” Here’s the key line: “It is not God’s will that His people shall settle in the cities, where there is constant turmoil and confusion.”² How does that counsel fit with her statements about the urgency of city ministry?

Well, that’s certainly a tough one to resolve, at least at first. But here’s what I discovered from wrestling with this. A recent study of Ellen White’s counsels about city ministry and rural life illustrated that her statements about the country have a definite local context that shouldn’t be ignored.

They seem to be written mostly to specific families, or to specific situations, then? Would Ellen White support the idea of at least some families choosing to invest in city ministry?

She’s absolutely right about the dangers of urban living, and my wife and I have prayed long and hard about our decision to bring our family to Seattle. But here’s the other side of that coin when it comes to families. As parents, Cindy and I take seriously our obligation to raise our children (Vaughn, Natalie, and Julian) with a passion for reaching lost people. One of the classic examples of this is John Dawson, who’s executive director of Youth With a Mission (YWAM). He’s taken his family to some of the major cities of the world, living in the inner city, doing ministry. Those kids have grown up with a powerful perspective on mission and evangelism.

It sounds as though a family needs to be very mission-focused to make it in city ministry.

It’s very easy for Adventist families to kind of float along with raising their kids, hoping that the church or the school will do it for them. It’s easy for Adventist parents, if they’re living in the country, to wash their hands and say, “Hey, it’s safe out here; we don’t need to worry about anything.” So the family floats along, living in that safe environment, and the kids aren’t trained to live in the world but not be of the world. When you go into a city ministry, the family has to be extra intentional in building boundaries and safeguards, and particularly, a vision for the kids of what it’s all about.

So let’s be specific. I understand that your home for the past few years has been in suburban Lincoln. Where are you going to live in Seattle?

We’ve moved to downtown Seattle. We’re living in a two-bedroom apartment on the twenty-third floor, right in the heart of the city.

That sounds like a dramatic change. What made you choose that location?

We just felt absolutely convicted that if we were going to reach the people in this downtown area, we needed to live among them. And everybody in the downtown area of Seattle is living in either apartment high-rises or condominium high-rises. So we’re right in the middle of everything. And I’ve got to tell you, Shasta Burr, who’s my associate pastor, and her husband, Jerry, and my family and I have more than 60 people already on our interest list, people that we’re building relationships with, 98 percent of whom are unchurched. The reason we’re reaching them is because we are all living here! We wouldn’t have built relationships with these people if we hadn’t been living here. These people are from apartment buildings, condominiums, people we ride the elevators with every day, people we see in the shops on the corner. That’s the whole reason we have a relationship with them—because we’re here.

What do you hope to do with these new relationships?

Our plan is to raise up a Seventh-day Adventist congregation in downtown Seattle for the 20- to 40-year-old professionals who live and work in downtown. The Washington Conference has developed this vision because there are thousands of these young professionals who have moved into the downtown district in the past few years to live and work here.

So you’re following the population trend?

Exactly. The latest census report shows that in the past five years the demographic shift has come back to the inner city. We’re following the latest research on what’s happening with the trends in our region in order to plant a church downtown. Seattle’s inner city has become very chic and professional and artsy in recent years, and lots of people want to live here. The cultural heart of the city is in the downtown section.

What impact can you have on the downtown culture?

If you capture the heart, you have a chance at capturing the whole body. In cities across America, the downtown areas are once again becoming the heart of the whole metroplex—the political heart, the social heart, the cultural heart, the heart of power and authority. Our plan is to begin meeting people in four major areas—media, politics, business, and the arts—and to share the good news of Jesus with them right where they live and work.

It sounds like you’ve found a mission field—and the only salt water you have to cross is Puget Sound!

I can tell you, Bill, I didn’t know what mission service was until I moved into downtown Seattle and began this project, even though I grew up in what we think of as “the mission field.” Cities are the heartbeat of twenty-first-century mission service. We don’t have to go overseas. John Dawson has a wonderful line about this. He says, “The cities are the mind and heart of the nation, the place where the national myth is largely enshrined. The nation is the sum of its cities.” His point is, if we attack the devil at his strongest point, which is in the cities, then we can make a major impact on the rest of the nation. If we’re living in the suburbs, trying to shape the thinking of the nation, we’re not likely to get it done.

Up to this point, a lot of people following this might say, “Absolutely, Greg, you’re right on. We need to work in the cities; we need to have a ministry there for all the reasons you suggested. But we should do it from outposts.” Tell me about that.

I love the way Eugene Peterson paraphrases John 1:14. He says, “The Word . . . moved into the neighborhood” (Message). That’s “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (NKJV). Jesus went to where the people were. He went to homes, and the homes He went to were primarily in the cities, because that’s where the people were. If we’re going to be effective in reaching the people, we have to live in their neighborhood. We’re finding this out as we rub shoulders with people downtown. They’re pretty skeptical about people who come in from the outside and want to change them. There’s nothing that turns people off more than to say, “I’m here to help you. Now I’m living in the safety of the suburbs somewhere, but I think I have something that’ll help you here.” Plus, by living here, we’re learning to identify with their joys, their pain, their frustrations, their issues, their needs.

Are you saying that the day for outpost ministry is gone, that the church doesn’t need that model anymore?

No, actually, we need both kinds of ministry. As Shasta Burr and I do interviews with people here in downtown, we hear from the unchurched that any church they would consider attending needs to offer a place that’s an oasis, a safety zone, where they can pull away from the craziness of life and encounter the divine. We plan to structure our church, called Anchor-Pointe, to be that place where they can drop anchor in a safe harbor. And it might also mean we need to have places and events that take people into green, quiet places for retreats and Bible conferences where they can be restored. But I can’t imagine inviting those people to go there with me if I wasn’t living right with them.

Ellen White has a lot to say about the kind of people needed to work in city ministries. What do you think you and your team can bring to this new ministry in Seattle that will make a lasting impact for the kingdom?

Our faithfulness to our sense of calling is really all we have to offer, Bill. Shasta and I, along with our families, have discovered that people here in the downtown crave a sense of community. We invite people we meet to come and sit at our table—even if they’ve just barely met us. We’ve been amazed at how powerfully they’ve responded to this sense of community and fellowship and belonging that we’re starting to create here. You can’t create that sense of belonging around your table from a distance. Our gifts of hospitality and community building and relational ministry are making an impact on the lives of the people that we’re rubbing shoulders with night and day because we live here. Whether it’s Todd whom we met on the bus, our neighbors who have introduced us to their friends, the symphony bass player who regularly asks about the family, or the quadriplegic accountant who lives down the hall, we’ve discovered there is a common craving for real relationships.

This is your version of taking over the loaf of home-baked bread?

Absolutely. This would be Ellen White’s twenty-first-century version of taking the loaf of bread to the neighbors. There’s no question in my mind about the kind of passion Ellen White would have for community-building in our cities today. She was so passionate about it at the turn of the century that she once refused an interview with the General Conference president because he wasn’t emphasizing ministry to the cities. The burden for the cities that God laid on her a century ago would be multiplied many times if she were writing today. I think she’d also have a lot to say about being people of integrity, people who are grounded in the values of the kingdom. We must be so close to the Lord that we won’t allow Satan a foothold in our lives. We’ve had to ask ourselves regularly since coming to Seattle, “Are we right with God? Are we dealing with the issues in our lives that we need to deal with? Are we growing deeper in the Lord? Do we have an active prayer ministry?” It’s really forced me, Bill, to reevaluate my whole faith journey, to take it to a deeper dimension.

How can persons who haven’t felt the call of urban ministry themselves get involved in a ministry like this?

What urban missionaries need most from suburban missionaries is radical prayer support. One of our prayer strategies is to recruit 100 prayer warriors from around the country who will commit to praying for us every single day for at least one year. We’re in the process of trying to mobilize and recruit 100 prayer warriors. But—

Sign me up, Greg. Now you need only 99.

Praise the Lord! If there are others interested, they can volunteer at our Web site (www.TheSeattleProject.com/). That kind of prayer support will be absolutely vital, because we aren’t wrestling against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers of unseen forces. The only way to deal with the devil’s attacks is through united, supportive prayer. Ministry in an urban setting is also extremely costly. We’ll need people who will be willing to support major ministry objectives in the inner city financially, such as renting a place for worship services or helping subsidize the rent of our team by buying condos and renting them to missionary families. That’s the second thing people can do from a distance.

We’re also trying to mobilize the Adventist churches across the Washington Conference to help us downtown for a Sabbath afternoon or some week evening doing servant evangelism. We’re praying that congregations would sign up, for example, to come down and help us for about three to four hours with very practical gift ministries to the people in downtown, like passing our free lemonade to people on a hot day, no strings attached.

What will your new congregation look like?

We’re really excited about building an Adventist congregation that includes many creative evangelism opportunities for our neighbors, as well as a very intentional discipling strategy to build people up in Christ. We have a one-year discipling track in which we’ll train everybody who comes into our church in three major areas: (1) the spiritual disciplines and what it means to build an active relationship with Jesus; (2) what it means to be a Seventh-day Adventist; (3) how they can most effectively minister and serve the kingdom of God through the gifts that God has given them.

Sounds like real discipleship, Greg—“teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you” [Matt. 28:20, NKJV].

This is the ultimate discipleship. As Adventists we’ve frequently focused on discipling other Christians into understanding Adventism. But now our urban settings aren’t a Christian environment. This is a post-Christian culture in which people often feel they don’t need what churches are offering. We’ve got Hindus and Buddhists and New Age people around our table. These people have to be led, one step at a time, to accept Christ and His claims on their lives.

I keep thinking of that phrase from the story of Jesus walking to Emmaus: “He was known to them in the breaking of the bread” [Luke 24:35, NKJV]. It sounds like a metaphor for what you’re doing, Greg. It sounds as though people are finding the Jesus who becomes known in the sharing of a meal, in the sharing of hospitality.

I have that Emmaus experience every time we have a fellowship meal with those we meet. My heart is strangely warmed, because we’re building relationships with people. We’re entering into their world. We have the best conversations with unchurched people right around our dinner table. I think it really is a “Jesus strategy.” And remember, Emmaus wasn’t the end of those disciples’ journey. No, because of Emmaus, because they discovered who Jesus really was at the table, they took off on their own missionary journey to tell others. If we follow that model, the men and women who are won to Christ will have a deep passion for sharing the gospel with others here in the downtown. They will leave our safe harbor at AnchorPointe refreshed and prepared to sail the high seas for God. That’s how the kingdom grows—from simple things, from simple conversations—to have a dramatic impact on a whole city.

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¹ Ellen G. White, Evangelism, p. 379.
² White, The Adventist Home, p. 136.