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The Vision

About

No one is coming for us—but God is with us, and the gospel compels us. So we build.

The Ministry Statement

The Pattern

Built on four load-bearing texts: Micah 5:2. Romans 15:20. Jeremiah 29:7. Zechariah 4:10.

God has a pattern. He picks the town no one is watching. He sends workers where no foundation exists. He tells exiles to build in the city they did not choose. He asks who dares despise the day of small things—and then answers the question himself.

Of All Places exists inside that pattern.

The West Coast is the least churched corridor in America. No denomination has cracked it. No conference is flying out here. No one is writing strategy papers about Portland or Seattle or the Bay. The harvest is real and the workers are few and the few who come tend not to stay.

We stay.

Not because we are sufficient for the work. We are not. Not because reinforcements are coming. They are not. We stay because Jeremiah 29 was written to people who did not choose their city and did not want it, and God's word to them was: dig in. Plant gardens. Seek the peace of this place. Pray for it. Because if it prospers, you prosper.

We stay because Acts 18 records the moment Paul most wanted to leave Corinth, and God said to him in the night: do not be afraid. I have many people in this city. The city that looks empty of the gospel is not empty of the gospel. There are seven thousand who have not bowed. We may not be able to count them yet. We stay until we can.

We stay because the asterisk is not a decoration. It is a footnote. It means see below. It means this is not finished. It means the fine print is the whole story.

Of all places—here. That is the wonder of it. That is the wound of it. Both are true. We hold them both.

Portland downtown at dusk
Clarifications

What We're Not

Failed Evangelical Survival Strategies

  • Fundamentalism
    Withdrawal as faithfulness. Purity as distance. Culture as contamination. This strategy mistakes the absence of engagement for the presence of integrity.
  • Isolationism
    Building walls and calling them walls. Protecting what we have instead of stearding what we've been given. The fortress that becomes a tomb.
  • Moral Majority Politics
    Borrowing the world's categories for power. The confusion of cultural dominance with the kingdom of God. We've been here before. It did not end well.
  • Pragmatic Relevance
    Changing everything to reach everyone. The gospel repackaged as self-help. The church that became indistinguishable from what it was trying to reach.
  • Experience-Only Pentecostalism
    Feeling as the measure of truth. The interior life substituted for the whole body of faith. Important but insufficient.

What We Believe Instead

  • Presence as strategy
    We don't withdraw. We don't perform. We show up. Faithfully, consistently, without adjusting the message for the room.
  • The inheritance is real
    Two thousand years of the church thinking, suffering, and prevailing. We don't need to start over. We need to remember what we forgot.
  • The kingdom does not need our management
    Political capture is not faithfulness. The church does not need the protection of the state. It needs to be the church.
  • Distinctiveness is the witness
    We don't become like the world to reach the world. We become more fully what we are. The contrast itself is the proclamation.
  • Formation through ancient practice
    Prayer, Scripture, community, table. The rhythms the church has always known. Not exotic. Forgotten.
How We Stand

The Posture

"Weary & Wholehearted"

We don't pretend the work isn't hard. We don't perform strength we don't have. The exhaustion is real. So is the commitment. The weariness and the wholeheartedness are not opposites. They are the same life, held together.

"We Are Bombs"

Not as aggression. As presence. A bomb doesn't do anything until it's in the right place. You have been placed. Your city, your church, your neighborhood. You are not there by accident. You are there on purpose. The question is whether you know it.

"Let the Old Era Be Reborn"

We are not nostalgic. Nostalgia is grief dressed up as hope. What we mean by "the old era" is not a decade or a culture or a demography. We mean the church in its original impulse: strange, alive, and fully convinced of what it carried. That does not need to be reinvented. It needs to be recovered.

Structure

The Gatherings

Of All Places is organized around cities, not denominations. Portland is the hub because that is where this started. From there, we go to the cities no one else is going to: Seattle, Vancouver, the Bay Area, Sacramento, Bozeman.

Each city gathering is led by pastors who live and serve there. We do not fly in experts. We do not export a program. The people in the room are the resource. They always were.

No one is coming for your city—but God is already there, and the gospel compels us forward. So we come to each other. That is the model. West Coast pastors building up West Coast churches. City by city.

Portland
Hub City
Seattle
2026
Vancouver
2026
Bay Area
2026
Sacramento
2026
Bozeman
2026
The People

The Team

Portland wet road at night

"There Will Be No Legacy"

Of all places—here. That is the wonder of it. That is the wound of it. Both are true. We hold them both.

West Coast pastors building up West Coast churches. Hard work in hard places. No one is coming for us—but God is with us, and the gospel compels us. So we build.

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