I am delighted to announce that I will be presenting in two sessions at an exciting new conference in Seattle. Organized by Fuller Seminary Northwest, the conference, Christ and Cascadia, aims to start a conversation about how Christianity is practiced in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a conference aimed at both practitioners and academics. The venue is First Church at 180 Denny Way, and the dates are September 26-27, 2014.
Registration details can be found here. The schedule can be found here.
I will be speaking at two sessions, both on September 26. The first session, Solidarity and Empowerment, is from 11 AM – 12 PM in Room 3. The organizers tell me that I have 20 minutes to deliver a talk entitled ‘Faith Communities Committed to Solidarity with the Poor: Religious Freedom, Interfaith Initiative, and Poverty Ministry at Tenth Avenue Alliance Church in Vancouver.‘ Here’s the abstract:
This paper explores how repositioning religious freedom arguments in a Cascadian context may rearticulate their political emphases. From 2007 to 2008, an interfaith coalition of religious congregations and organizations formed Faith Communities Committed to Solidarity with the Poor (FCCSP). Its objective was to lobby the City of Vancouver for Tenth Avenue Alliance Church’s religious freedom to run a homeless food and shelter program without a social services permit. Arguing that a new mandate to obtain a permit dictated to the church what religious practice was and was not, the campaign successfully deployed a religious freedom argument to contend that faith communities of a variety of religious traditions should be able to serve the poor as a core part of their theological practice. Although more conventional religious liberty cases around socially conservative issues have been filed in Cascadia on both the Canadian and American sides, I argue that religious freedom has been rearticulated by FCCSP as a progressive cause that gained wide social acclaim in a liberal Cascadian political climate. This argument is based on key informant interviews with core participants in this activism. This paper thus advances conversations in Christ and Cascadian culture by demonstrating that the oft-celebrated politically progressive politics of the region offers opportunities for faith communities to reframe their public engagements away from a set of narrow ideological issues in order to display the complex totality of their theological commitments.
The second session is on the same day from 4:15 – 5:30 called Mega Churches and Gender: What’s Sex Got to Do With it? in Room 3. Organized by my colleague Elizabeth Chapin, the panel will address gender at a prominent megachurch in Seattle. Because this is a panel session that is meant to be more conversational, I am compiling my thoughts into a paper for publication right now, but tentatively, my talk will focus on Mars Hill Church in Seattle and private property ownership.
If you are interested in Christianity in the Pacific Northwest, we really hope to see you there!
Justin K.H. Tse 
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