Beer, Church, and Charity: Portland’s Nonprofits Find Ways to Thrive Amid Declining Religiosity

Thomas Patterson/The New York Times/Redux

Ryan Saari runs a church and a bar. The two share a century-old two-story building, with worship upstairs and happy hour downstairs.

Mr. Saari, pastor of the Oregon Community church since 2010, is new to dispensing booze. Nearly three years ago, he and others from his church opened the Oregon Public House in partnership with neighborhood residents. The city kicked in a grant to help renovate the building. The result is a cozy spot with exposed brick walls and high-backed wooden booths. The beer list includes such rogues as the Evil Twin Molotov Cocktail, but there’s not a religious icon in the joint.

The bar and its partner church have an agenda, though not one you might expect. Declaring itself the world’s first nonprofit pub, Oregon Public House donates after-cost proceeds to a rotating set of local charities, including both secular and faith-based groups. Framed names of beneficiaries hang on the wall, and patrons pick the charity they want their dollars to back.

If this mix of church, state, and philanthropy seems odd, consider other Portland alliances. Hundreds of churches have forged partnerships with public officials to work in the city’s schools, its foster-care system, and more — this after evangelical leaders publicly embraced the mayor, then an openly gay man. A suburban megachurch has an office in a troubled city high school to coordinate its many volunteer efforts. A Lutheran church, meanwhile, houses six nonprofits rent free.

A church social-action movement in hipster-filled, tattoo-loving Portland might seem irrelevant to mainstream America. But secularism advancing nationwide makes what’s happening here an intriguing case study of how philanthropy can adapt when religion’s influence fades. In speeches across the country, Portland evangelical leader Kevin Palau tells audiences, “Hey folks, take a good look, because this may be where you are headed.”

Empty Pews

Recent surveys reveal a sharp decline in the number of Americans who identify as Christian. A recent Pew Research Center study shows that nearly 23 percent of Americans do not belong to any organized religion, up from 16 percent in 2007.

While spiritual fervor ebbs and flows — three major religious awakenings have swept the United States since the American Revolution — organized religion’s current trajectory could signal decades of struggle ahead for many nonprofits. Research routinely shows that churchgoers are the most generous in their charitable giving. Churches and faith-based organizations also build a large-scale social-service infrastructure.

“What will happen to U.S. civil society as the pews empty out?” wrote Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith Youth Core, in Sojourner last year. “Who will support all those schools, hospitals, and social-service agencies?”

Portland started facing those questions years ago. Churches in the Northwest, while never the force they are in the Bible Belt or Catholic urban strongholds, began to weaken in the 1960s. Today, 42 percent of Portland residents are unaffiliated with any religion — the highest proportion for any metro area, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.

Researchers refer to unaffiliated Americans as the “nones” because they check “none” when asked in surveys to identify their religion. Yet many are actually very spiritual, often borrowing from various religions to create their own set of beliefs, says Steven Moore, executive director of the Northwest-based MJ Murdock Charitable Trust. “I call it designer spirituality.”

Millennials are fueling the rise of the “nones,” according to Pew. About 35 percent of that generation isn’t affiliated with a religion; many simply don’t value institutions, religious or not.

Organized religion in Portland is neither absent nor passive. Catholic Charities and other traditional faith-based nonprofits are social-service anchors. Following the 2010 fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American man by police, clergy led by pastors of black churches mounted protests for change, then became key players in law-enforcement reforms.

Still, the community of faith-based organizations looks different from what’s typical in cities with a robust religious life. Few houses of worship are big enough to do significant social service on their own. To fill that void, churches and faith-based organizations have put aside theological differences to create interfaith alliances.

Sister Mollie Reavis, a prominent Catholic educator in Portland, sits on the board of the Muslim Educational Trust and helped the organization design its school’s curriculum. Forty or so small Protestant churches and faith-based groups in North Portland created the nonprofit AllOne Community Services to coordinate their work. It’s a coalition of Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and more — something revolutionary for many established, older congregations, says David Brewer, the group’s first executive director. “But the nones would say, ‘That’s obvious; that’s the way it should be.’ "

‘Radical Generosity’

The biggest alliance of churches was midwifed by the Oregon-based ministry of Luis Palau, an Argentinian-born international evangelist. Founded in 1978, the ministry organized Billy Graham-style revival campaigns for decades until flagging attendance forced a change. In the 1990s, it began to host outdoor music festivals that blended preaching with Christian bands, food, and family fun zones. The new format drew huge crowds. Still, Kevin Palau, one of Mr. Palau’s four sons and the organization’s president, worried that the unchurched would never attend anything billed as a Christian event.

For a new model, Kevin Palau looked to the days of the early Christian church, when Jesus’s followers were a small band facing a hostile world. Their response: Show the love of Jesus by helping orphans and widows, the needy, and the poor. “The church,” Mr. Palau writes in his book Unlikely, “was radical in generosity, tireless in service.”

Inspired, Mr. Palau persuaded his father to add new work to his ministry. The goal: to find common ground with the unchurched through pursuit of the common good. In 2008, the Luis Palau Association launched a Season of Service, four months in which 26,000 churchgoers logged more than 100,000 volunteer hours cleaning up schools, helping the homeless, stocking food banks, and more. This burst of “radical generosity” evolved into year-round work loosely coordinated through CityServe, a Palau Association auxiliary embraced by Portland’s top official at the time, Sam Adams, the country’s first openly gay big-city mayor.

The signature CityServe story comes from Roosevelt High in northeast Portland. In the first Season of Service, more than 1,000 volunteers from SouthLake, a suburban megachurch, joined a cleanup at Roosevelt, whose low-income neighborhood was caught in the middle of gang turf wars. SouthLake parishioners left that day thinking they could do more. They came back at Thanksgiving with meals for families, then started providing toys, diapers, and volunteers at the school’s day-care center for children of students.

“In a matter of a few months, I went from not knowing anybody’s name to having kids give me a hug in the hallway,” says Linda Siegel, a SouthLake volunteer. Her kids’ school in the suburbs had an abundance of volunteers. “But I honestly didn’t feel needed out there. When you come here, it’s just so different. It’s hard not to do something.”

Today, Ms. Siegel coordinates SouthLake’s volunteer efforts through an office the school provided to the church. SouthLake has started a free food pantry, clothes closet, and tutoring program. It raised money to create a writing lab with computers and cutting-edge software. A Nike executive spearheaded a joint drive by the company, church, and school for a new football field at SouthLake.

Jeff Martin, one of SouthLake’s leaders, helped engineer a campaign to complete funding for a state-of-the-art track. Since church members can’t preach Christianity at the school, Mr. Martin says, it preaches excellence. “We want to serve in a way that makes the church famous for doing good in the community.”

Pointing to Roosevelt as a model, the superintendent of Portland’s schools asked CityServe to find church partners for all of its schools. Today, more than 300 schools in the metro area have church partners, with barely a ripple of concern about church-state entanglement. There are also church-led medical and dental clinics for the poor and efforts to combat homelessness and gang violence.

Dennis Morrow, head of the secular Janus Youth Programs, worked with the CityServe faith-based community when he led planning for a multiagency effort to combat child sex-trafficking. Its leaders came without an agenda, he remembers, asking only, “How can we help?”

“They could have tried to do it on their own or set up something that’s competitive,” he says. “None of us had a clue what to do; this was a new issue and a new population to deal with. But they stayed in the boat with us as we figured it out.”

Called to Serve

Mainline denominations have entered Portland’s public square through both service and advocacy, with much of their work organized through the 41-year-old nonprofit Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon. The organization’s founders believed Oregon’s secularism requires churches to be “more than just a building, a dogma, and a doctrine,” says executive director Jan Elfers.

The Rev. Mark Knutson embraces that credo. When he became senior pastor of Augustana Lutheran Church in 1995, membership stood at about 200; there was no janitor and only a part-time secretary.

Rebuilding, he focused on what he believes is the Lutheran church’s DNA: advocacy and service. “For me, if you know Jesus, it means you’re called to serve and make a difference,” he says.

Shortly after his arrival, when arson destroyed a nearby African-American church, Pastor Knutson led his congregation on a two-mile march to worship with its neighbor on a football field. Augustana also joined the sanctuary movement, offering refugees protection from deportation. Pastor Knutson recruited nonprofits to operate from within the church. The first: a group supporting Latino victims of domestic abuse.

Today, Augustana’s congregation has nearly 900 members. Eighty-year-olds mix with twenty-somethings. Offices for six small nonprofits are shoehorned into the basement, with bookshelves and filing cabinets serving as walls for a few. Pastor Knutson hopes to eventually create an umbrella organization that will give each more heft in the eyes of supporters.

The best-known Augustan nonprofit is the Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice, a coalition of churches, synagogues, mosques, and others advocating for immigrant rights. Faith of all kinds compels people to act, says coordinator Rae Anne Lafrenz. “We kind of pull people from the pew and show them, “This is how you can do it.’ "

Leah Nash/The New York Times/Redux

A New Brand for the Church?

While Portland’s religious-civic ventures are rooted in scripture and Christian teaching, the work is also an exercise in branding. “In the ‘none zone’ in particular,” says Pastor Knutson, “a lot of people don’t understand what the church is about.”

Nationwide, the rise of the nones is forcing leaders of churches and faith-based organizations to invest in relationships with their neighborhoods and cities, says Maria Dixon, a nonprofit consultant and member of the clergy at the United Methodist Church of North Texas. “The church is going to have to figure out a nuanced way to say, ‘Look, we’re here to serve the community.’ "

That message may get lost when religious identity collides with popular opinion. A case in point: This fall a Portland Catholic girls school rescinded a job offer to a lesbian, a decision that sparked protests from supporters — including big-name donors Tim Boyle, chief executive of Portland-based Columbia Sportswear, and his wife, Mary. The school quickly amended its hiring policies to include a provision banning discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Such flashpoints were hard to imagine on a recent night at the Oregon Public House, where a church served its community amid laughter and the sound of clinking beer glasses. Ryan Saari talked politics and nibbled on nachos at a table by the window. The wait staff, volunteers from one of the evening’s nonprofit beneficiaries, hustled to and fro.

On the back wall hung a sign with old-fashioned print that read, “Have a Pint. Change the World.” That, at least in beer-loving Portland, seems to be something on which everyone can agree.