Memories from the Shadow of a Mountain

Reflecting on 23 years worshipping with the McKinleys and Imago Dei Community.

1991

Our church, Mt. Tabor Presbyterian, needs a new youth pastor, and they hire a young Multnomah College student named Rick McKinley. His hair is curly and cut in a mullet, he has a goatee, and wears wraparound shades.

We’re out front of the church on 55th and Rick is admiring Dad’s car, an original Mini, painstakingly restored. Dad teaches Sunday school and he gets along with Rick, as fellow Richards often do. Rick wonders if he can pick up the Mini and then he grips it by the bumper in a deadlift and pulls the back tires a foot or so off the ground, then sets the little car gently back down.

Now this is a guy I can see following, I think.

Rick’s from California, has that stoner/surfer drawl, a wry wit, and a comedian’s timing. He’s effortlessly cool. He teaches us about the Bible. I don't recall the lessons, but I know how the old stone building feels new, like there’s another generation ready to hear the Word clearly even as the blue-haired faithful pass away.

Rick talks about how he woke up one morning, fist bloody from a bender he couldn’t remember, and how it was a Sunday so he went to church. He talks about how Jesus changed him, about the epic story of the Bible. He tells us Jesus will change us when we let Him.

Mt. Tabor Pres. Youth Group circa 1992

Rick teaches senior high and I’m a sixth grader, but we connect because we’re a similar sort of person and we both love to read. He’s a Civil War buff, and recommends Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels, and we go see Gettysburg at Lloyd Center along with Rick’s wife, Jeanne, and my parents. The movie is epic and I mow through a giant box of SweetTarts. Jeff Daniels is riveting as Colonel Chamberlain. The film ends well after midnight and it’s the latest I’ve ever stayed up.

1994

The youth group thrives for years. Rick’s teaching is sharp and authentic. He’s asked to preach on Sundays. He feels destined to lead a church.

Then Rick graduates from Multnomah. He’s hired at First Baptist in La Grande, so he and Jeanne and Josh and Kaylee move east, and he builds First Baptist’s youth group the way he did ours.

Our Presbyterian church carries on through a litany of youth pastors. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare, but none lead or teach us as passionately and truly as Rick.

2000

I am 20 years old and I learn the McKinleys are back in Portland. They’re starting a church, which meets in a small chapel on campus at Warner Pacific. I invite my friend John along. We arrive and the chapel door is wide open and we find folks our age spilling cross-legged into the aisles. We are all hungry.

The worship sounds like alt-country. The sermons are smart and warm. A painter splashes color on canvas as the service whiles by. Did I mention there are pretty women? There are. We make friends. Any night of the week, you can open up the Horse Brass and find a table of Imagoans in some corner, hunched over ploughmans’ platters, smoke billowing in haloes. We are acolytes of the Inklings. We are learning the Gospel, and we want to understand and swim against the current which drags fellow followers into political riptides. Polls of the congregants find Imago attendees are half Republican, half Democrat. From the front, Rick warns us anything can be crafted into an idol. The antidote, he tells us, is Jesus.

Imago Dei outgrows the chapel and for a while, we are nomads. We move from Warner to Da Vinci, then Old Laurelhurst, then Franklin High. Later, we trade our offices at Evangel for a magnificently worn building in the heart of the Rose City.

The community faces trials and scandals not uncommon to any church. There are addicts and adulterers, hotheads and hypocrites, egos and controversy, tragedy and grief. There are sometimes folks who leave angry.

There are similar churches all over: Ecclesia in Houston, two distinct versions of Mars Hill in Grand Rapids and Seattle, The Simple Way in Philadelphia, Vintage Faith in Santa Cruz. We are part of a flourishing movement and within that movement, Imago Dei has outsized influence.

Some of that is because of the space the McKinleys carve out, and some is because of Blue Like Jazz, the best-selling memoir by Donald Miller, one of Imago’s earliest members. The book paints a unique portrait of Christianity in Portland, casts a mood, asks questions many of us want answered, sells wildly. The book draws folks to our city and Imago Dei like pigeons to bread.

2003

I meet Mindy through friends at church. She lives in Temecula, but we start dating anyway and she moves up here for med school and we attend Imago together. She loves the authenticity, loves Rick’s sermons. She serves in the children’s ministry, and we host, with many of our dear friends, a home community at her house near Lewis & Clark. Groups like ours bloom across the city, and we meet throughout the week for pints at pubs, and we gather in one place on Sundays to worship and hear Rick preach.

Rick McKinley: Leader of Men

You could call us a hipster church, not least because we hold a kickball tournament. The trophy is a bright orange bike helmet pronged with buck antlers, a white elephant gift unearthed at a Christmas party. We call it the McKinley Cup, and our home community wins it the first three years.

Rick isn’t interested in setting up franchises, in being a face on a screen across Portland. Imago is a sending church, involved in church plants and spin-offs. Imago has congregants of all types, but mostly we are transient and young, arriving from California and Montana and Ohio and Texas. For all of us, this building and these people are one step on a greater journey.

Mindy invites the McKinleys for dinner because she adores Bryce and admires Jeanne. Rick suggests I let Zach punch my hand and my palm feels like it’s been struck by a small freight train. The twins are the age I was when I met their dad. Later, Rick and Jeanne counsel us as we plan a wedding. Rick stands with us at the altar.

Then it’s Mindy and I who have to leave. We’re sent by God and Mindy's job to Arizona. We make new friends in the desert, look for churches where we feel at home. Phoenix is not the same. We miss the green Northwest. We find new brothers and sisters, but we also learn how unique our church home and family really is.

We have a new daughter and Mindy is working 80 hours a week in residency. The desert becomes both literal and spiritual. I deconstruct, dig out the bottom. I miss home immensely.

2012

Mindy has cancer, but she’s resilient. She stiff arms the disease through a mastectomy and chemo, and we move home victorious, ready to start again. We return with gratitude to Sunday mornings at Imago Dei, to our dear friends, to Rick’s sermons. We live on a creek and celebrate life for a year and a half.

Then the cancer returns and we learn the truth of death and collapse into Jesus’ arms. The Body is always changing. Wounding into healing. Shedding cells and growing them anew. Branches drop fruit and seeds. They are pruned away and grafted back in.

Our Imago family is there for us, to keep vigil, to bring food, to pray. Rick is there, counseling, talking through what’s ahead. He and the elders weep with us. Mindy knows, with all the full fire of her heart, her soul will dwell on with God.

Mindy’s body fades away. To the end, she points to Jesus, and her passing, one Sunday morning, is a flash of peace. Rick breaks the news to the church, and Lana and I are covered by prayer. We commemorate her in the sanctuary, lit by a stained-glass Jesus with arms outstretched.

I’m baptized there a few months later. I leave Lana with the Railtons, and Ben Thomas finds me a t-shirt and brings Rick into the back hall to rejoice with this decision. Jeff Marsh dunks me under.

As a widower there is solitude beyond the desert. For many years, Mindy’s loss rings, every day, hollow in my core. I lean on Jesus, because I know He’s the only cornerstone worth leaning on. This is what Rick teaches. I listen to him speak from the back of the balcony with the Matsuokas and Washingtons, with Joanna Montesino and Mary Dixon.

Even washed in the Holy Spirit, I’m still wrecked for a long while. I hide away. There are days sobbing in the waiting room for 45 minutes of therapy, starved for someone to talk to. I'm a tortoise in a shell. Ben Thomas reaches out and invites me to Refuge, and I join that community with lots of other messy folks trying to heal, to find help and respite through the Holy Spirit and each other.

2016

The world fluctuates. There are fires of division stoked through elections. There are massacres in churches, mosques, and synagogues. There is a global pandemic. Our city becomes an epicenter of unrest. In each case, Imago seeks to act: to serve our neighbor; to live in truth; to reflect the endless diversity of who Jesus calls. Sunday services are shut down for quarantine, but not really. Our worship service and home groups go online. Our meetings are outside. We volunteer, we risk ourselves when the moment calls. When, during protests, our building is tagged, we respond, collaborating through love and art.

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I’m in Michigan at a writing festival and get to talking to an old reverend with a memoir to pitch.

“Through most of my life, being in pastoral care was one of the best jobs anyone could have,” he tells me. “We were honored and respected in our community. It was one of the longest-lived professions! Today it’s completely flipped. Everyone thinks they know better, and that’s at least one reason why so many pastors burn out or fall away.”

I think of Rick lifting the Mini. I think of this mountain of a man. I think of the burden he carries as our leader. I think of the time his Achilles tore en route to the pulpit. How Rick still preached that morning. I remember a story from his days as a high school lineman, how Rick learned a scout was in the crowd, so every snap he drove the nose guard 15 yards upfield. Only afterward did he learn the scout was there to watch the nose guard.

I think of his contemporaries, locally and all over the world. I think of how many moved on to other jobs. I think of how some are cautionary tales. I think of how a few persevere.

2023

Imago Dei looks different today. We are older and grayer. There are less of us than in our heyday. We remain a motley crew.

Like many other American churches, we are whittled down by isolation and strife, by doubt and distrust. Not since the days of Jason Lee has it been less popular to believe and walk the Way of Jesus in the Willamette Valley. And still, our congregation remains—the Imago Dei—a fabric of Christian brothers and sisters. Friends woven together in eternity through the Holy Spirit.

When I imagine Imago, I see our church’s timeline in one long string. I see everyone who opened that door and worshipped with us over the last 23 years. I think of the Alvarados and Asays; the Browns and the Butlers; the Czuks and the Kearns; the Knoxes and the Wallaces. There are too many more to name. We are thousands, made in His image, scattered across continents, rooted together in Christ.

Imago is a sending church, and this Sunday we send off our founders for a while. That service will be a celebration because witnessing the McKinleys’ leadership was a grand honor. Sometimes I can’t believe it all happened, that I got to watch this unfold. If you were or are a part of the Imago Dei community, I hope to see you so we can simultaneously cheer on and mourn this end of an era together.

For 23 years, we’ve learned and served Jesus under Rick and Jeanne’s guidance. They stood faithful while so many absconded or crumbled. Still, they keep teaching us who Jesus is, keep pointing to His endless love and grace. Through fires and storms, change and loss, the McKinleys stay steadfast, because they are anchored on the Rock of Ages.

So are we. And our congregation will carry on, trusting the Holy Spirit to guide us wherever this new era leads.