Message from Pastor Hayden
On this page you can find:
Story
Hear the story of how Awake Church came to be!
People
All are welcome!
Location
Learn about our meeting space on Aurora Avenue!
Faith
What we profess!
Staff
Come say “hi!”
Partners
How we “Love In Public!”
.
Our Story
Awake Church was born in 2008 when a group of Jesus' followers in North Seattle was prompted to wonder about the love of God being tied up with love of neighbors. We gathered weekly in the back room of a local coffee shop to pray and share communion, explore the scriptures, and scheme about our participation with the Holy Spirit's movement in the neighborhood. We visited motels, created a communal garden, hosted backyard BBQs, and grew in affection for one another and for the world of Aurora Avenue. This led in 2011 to the creation of a non-profit community living room called Aurora Commons, which exists as a space for every variety of neighbor to experience hospitality, community, and be shaped by one another.
We gathered in different spaces tracking up and down the Aurora corridor: living rooms, parks and backyards, an old Lutheran church building, a senior center, and a Chinese restaurant. Since 2018 we’ve been able to gather at Aurora Commons, our home, thanks to an addition for our kids we fondly refer to as the corner store. Our lack of a building and migration over the first decade, however, solidified a knowing that we the people are the church.
In this new decade, Aurora Commons and the community that’s formed around it are now our teachers. We gather to expose ourselves to the wisdom of the poor and seek moments of deep communion in order to remember we are a people seeking to be formed by the Way of Jesus.
Our People
We believe all people are created in the image of God, unconditionally loved by God, and gifted with particular ways of revealing God in the world. We embrace people of all ages, races, genders, sexual orientations, differing abilities, ethnic origins, and economic circumstances as needed and essential to God’s work in the world. More so, Scripture shows us those who have been unjustly marginalized by their communities are often closer to the center of God’s heart and work in the world. We look for resurrection to come toward us from the edges.
We have a low-barrier way of gathering together, which means we can be comfortable with people coming and going, causing mild disturbances, dressing out of fashion, and asking difficult questions. We don't have a dress code, smell code, or moral code because we want to stumble into communion as our most honest selves, which is how we believe Jesus is most delighted to meet us.
Our community is made up of families, couples, single people, and we value the children in our midst who point us to honest faith. Pretty much all of us are struggling in one way or another, but we've discovered something powerful about doing that in community in order to share life in a way that forms us unto Jesus. We are ready to grieve deeply, celebrate joyfully, and forgive readily. We lament complacency, strive for justice, and work to live out of our convictions as well as our questions in the context of our daily lives.
.
.
Our Place
Aurora Avenue (99) is a storied highway running north out of downtown Seattle. Before the advent of I-5, it was the primary route in and out of the city and you can still see traces of those glory days - service stations, drive-in restaurants, an elephant sculpture, and the iconic motels. These motels, many of which were built in the 1960s to accommodate booms of business travelers, are now being utilized as short-term "housing" for people who experience barriers to the more stable options (poor credit, lack of rental history, inability to acquire security deposits, refugee situations, etc.). And now Aurora has acquired a reputation as one of the primary "strips" in the Seattle area for the harsh realities of drug dependence, street-based sex work, and more visible forms of homelessness - people sleeping outside, under awnings, or in vehicles.
Aurora is also where to go if you want to buy used cars or appliances.
Our church most closely identifies with a segment of this highway that forms an intersection of socio-economic worlds. To the west is the residential community of Greenwood with its eclectic coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and boutiques. To the east is the upscale Greenlake neighborhood with its large houses and lovely parks. And so it's easy to disregard the highway between these worlds as nothing more than a transportation corridor with a reputation, but for the imagination being shaped in us Aurora has become a kind of world unto herself; a place with her own story, her own people and her own emergences of God's Kingdom. We have grown to love her and seek to be formed by her.
.
Our Faith
Awake is formed and led in conversation with Christian scriptures and a trinitarian understanding of God in the world as Creator, Savior and Spirit. As a community of individuals, we connect (and struggle) with the basic tenants of orthodoxy in a variety of ways, with a variety of theological perspectives, and from a variety of religious backgrounds. We value this diversity and we honor the sacred process of questioning and doubting and wrestling in all matters of faith and spirituality. We are a people who entrust themselves to the human Jesus, believing that he was born, lived, died, and became resurrected in order to take upon himself the full weight of sin and evil in the world, carry it to the other side of death, and thereby enact the victory that reconciles the beauty of heaven with the reality of earth.
As we live our faith we share these guiding principles:
We believe relationship is more important than being right. We recognize our place in the conversational nature of reality.
We believe in the wisdom of the poor. We humbly recognize our exposure to people on the margins as an act of spiritual formation. We look to those on the outskirts of society to show us the Way.
We believe creation is ongoing. We recognize our role as sub-creators mediating faith through imagination, artistic engagement, and connection to the earth and creation.
We believe that God is present within the disturbances around us. We recognize grace in the grotesque.
We believe God’s Spirit inhabits our bodies. We recognize our capacity to mediate God's prophetic word and presence with one another.
.
the Awake Staff
Hayden Wartes
Co-pastor, Life Together
Hayden is a native of Indiana and forever Hoosier at heart. She’s lived for twenty years in North Seattle, involved in various community and capacity building expressions. She is married to Zadok and mother to Jai, Loyalty, and Reza. Hayden has taught yoga for a decade and loves to scheme ways to uncover more of the Spirit through knowing the body. She has her master’s degree from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology.
Jennifer Thomas
Co-pastor, Children and Families
Jennifer grew up in the greater Seattle area and learned to follow Jesus in the Lutheran church where her family was very involved as leaders and musicians. She met her husband at the UW, then spent several years in Illinois for graduate school. She loves being a mom to her three kids, good books, old music, lively debates, time on her yoga mat to refuel, and sunny camping trips. She has her M.Div. from Regent College.
Thomas K. Brown
Nicole Baker
Co-creator of Gatherings
Nicole and her family joined the Awake community early on in its formation when Awake was still migrating around Aurora Ave in senior centers, homes and old church buildings. She is a grounding presence for us, holding the tension of who we’ve been along with listening for new invitations from the Spirit for our continual becoming.
Monet Goode
Ryan Daniel Dobson
Youth Director
Ryan bla bla bla
.
Sacred
Streets
INFO ABOUT WHAT SACRED STREETS IS AND HOW IT’S CONNECTED TO AWAKE.
INCLUDE A LINK TO SACRED STREETS WEBSITE FOR MORE INFO
Situated at the intersection of homelessness, poly substance use and survival street-based prostitution, Sacred Streets provides soul care on the streets and in the places where our unhoused neighbors stay or frequent.
This means sitting with people in their suffering and acknowledging their attempts to make meaning and find relief. This also means greeting their inherent dignity and particularity in every encounter, offering active listening, love, care and accompaniment. The only agenda for these encounters is to call attention, reflect back and be an empathetic witness who holds (with them) their own hopes for flourishing.