ATLANTA – Nanette Sawyer’s congregation doesn’t meet in a church.
“This ministry was the dream of the presbytery of Chicago,” she said recently. The vision was to minister to people outside the church in an art-filled neighborhood in west Chicago, “people who would not come to church in any traditional kind of setting.”
The presbytery expressed it as being in relationship with Gen Xers — “Generation Y wasn’t even on their radar screen,” Sawyer said. “It was a parachute drop kind of thing. I went there to do a ministry that hadn’t even been imagined.”
At first, Sawyer, then a recent graduate of McCormick Theological Seminary, sat alone with an empty day planner.
But she began to meet people in teashops and coffee houses, to make friends and to talk with them about spirituality and faith.
Out of that was born some trust and Wicker Park Grace, a new congregation that worships in an art gallery. Worship is held Sunday night.
And during the week Wicker Park Grace shares space with the community in the art gallery — building relationships through jazz concerts, actors’ improvisational nights, the local food pantry.
Some in that neighborhood think, “Church is the place to go where they want your money and your mind,” Sawyer said at a recent conference at Columbia Theological Seminary on Emergent church and mainline denominations.
But Wicker Park Grace invites them into friendship, into relationship, not promising all the answers.
