St. James Catholic Church http://saintjames-parish.com
St. Joseph Catholic Church http://stjoevan.org
New Heights Church http://newheights.org
Guru Ram Dass Sikh Community http://portlandsikhs.com
Congregation Kol Ami http://jewishvancouverusa.org
People are always debating whether the swooping roof of the hilltop church in Hazel Dell is an ark or a dove.
Sailing or flying? It’s a puzzle Pastor Brooks Berndt of the First Congregational United Church of Christ enjoys pondering.
Sometimes the dove, the traditional symbol of God’s love, seems to be descending from above, he noted in a newsletter once; and sometimes the ark gives a his parishioners a place to pull together and navigate stormy seas.
Berndt savors the “identity complex,” he wrote, because of its rich possibilities.
“Be not confused by our many identities,” Brendt concluded. “Choose as the moment demands. Fly or sail as your heart desires.”
St. James Catholic Church <a href="http://saintjames-parish.com">http://saintjames-parish.com</a>
St. Joseph Catholic Church <a href="http://stjoevan.org">http://stjoevan.org</a>
New Heights Church <a href="http://newheights.org">http://newheights.org</a>
Guru Ram Dass Sikh Community <a href="http://portlandsikhs.com">http://portlandsikhs.com</a>
Congregation Kol Ami <a href="http://jewishvancouverusa.org">http://jewishvancouverusa.org</a>
It’s good advice for churchgoers here in Clark County, where nearly every kind of congregation can be found — the traditional and the modern, the expansive and the introspective, the tiny and the plain huge.
There’s Living Hope, a megachurch with 5,000 members and a flamboyant pastor who’s used devices such as a live Bengal tiger on the altar and a marquee sign that says “SEX” to generate publicity and attendance. And New Heights Church, which has a 13-acre campus off 78th Street and several satellite facilities — including a historic downtown building that started out as a First Presbyterian Church in 1912, then became a Baptist church, and later the Columbia Arts Center, a public performance space.
New Heights Church purchased the building for $1.4 million in 2007, and made extensive renovations.
A couple of blocks over from there is the stately St. James Catholic Church, the first masonry cathedral in the state of Washington, which has also seen major renovations. Capping off the million-dollar upgrade of the 1885 structure — which has roots in the earliest white trading-post settlers here — was a visit from the archbishop of Seattle, who rededicated the building.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church built its $8.1 million regional headquarters on 30 acres alongside Interstate-5 in Ridgefield in 2006. And the hub of the Meadow Glade neighborhood, near Battle Ground, is Columbia Adventist Academy.
Clark County has its share of still-functioning pioneer churches, too — in rural neighborhoods that some city slickers who hang out in Vancouver may never have heard of, such as Fern Prairie, Highland, View and Venersborg. These churches bore witness to the diversity of early Clark County, with immigrants from all over Europe — and elsewhere — bringing their own styles of worship to churches they built with their own hands and timber or stones from their own fields.
Modern diversity is present in the Guru Ram Dass Sikh Community of Vancouver and Portland, a growing community that draws adherents to this outgrowth of Hinduism from all over the metro area. The group is planning to move this year from an old church building in the Rose Village neighborhood to a roomier former athletic club in east Vancouver.
There are two Buddhist monasteries in east Vancouver — a Vietnamese one near Harmony Elementary School and a Chinese one near Burton Elementary School.
Jews in Vancouver can ponder the riddle that Berdt enjoys: the Congregation Kol Ami borrows space in at the First Congregational church for its services.
Still waiting for the answer? OK: The church was designed to look like a dove. The ark ambiguity appears to be a happy accident.
