By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Contra Costa Times
Article Launched: 06/05/2008

Lyle Birkey of the emerging church movement picks up trash in the Mission district with others…

In an apartment a few steps below street level in San Francisco’s Mission District, several people — most in their 20s — sat in a horseshoe of couches to consider the meaning of service.

In black high-tops, Crocs, hoodies and jeans, they looked much like the hipsters who wait in line Sunday mornings for a table at Boogaloo’s a few blocks away on Valencia Street

This group of Christians gathers each week to grapple with seven intangibles: service, simplicity, creativity, obedience, prayer, community, and love. A young man in a cap reads Colossians I aloud while some look down, others into the distance. Midway into the evening, all take to the streets, battling an icy wind to pick up trash, scrub graffiti and post signs in shop windows exhorting people to honor their neighborhood with cleanliness.

From left, Emerging church movement members Caroline Pappajohn and Sarah Montoya put up a sign that reads “Our Neighborhood, What We Do Matters” at a doughnut shop in the Mission district of San Francisco, Calif. on Tuesday June 3, 2008. People in the movement aim to live like Jesus, but say they have no use for church as an institution. (Photo by Nader Khouri)

The group is part of the decade-old emerging church movement, an eclectic wave of change propelled by the Internet and peopled globally mainly by the young.

Their Jesus is a radical. They have little use for the institutional church, with its buildings, budgets and boards. They meet in homes. Their aim is to live like Jesus, compelled to service among the poor. They eschew congregations for communities. Their faith is not a doctrine but a conversation — fluid and evolving.

“Experiment is a word we use a lot,” said Adam Klein, who helps lead the loosely organized San Francisco community that calls itself reIMAGINE.

“Nobody has lived in 2008 before and lived the way of Jesus, so you have to figure out what it means to you.”

Their expression of faith harkens back to the early days of Christianity, he said.

“Part of Paul’s job was to encourage people to continue on but without the dogma. When Constantine came around and nationalized the church it became a place where power and control were brokered.”