The Evergreen Story: Beginnings

April 14, 2011

            Last week I was at General Executive Council (GEC) meetings followed by a special Design Team meeting for the launch of a new missional initiative by American Baptist Churches—watch for the launch at the Biennial. My intention is to add to this blog about weekly, but it has been much longer than that, since my last post. Thanks to those who are reading this, I hope you find it helpful to learn more about Evergreen Association.

            There is on the Evergreen web site a history of Evergreen, but I think it important to tell some of the poignant stories of Evergreen, which is what I hope to do in these next few blogs. Evergreen is blessed as an organization, especially blessed as an American Baptist Region because of our beginnings. We were born out of the controversy surrounding acceptance of gay/lesbian/transgendered/bisexual peoples in American Baptist life. The American Baptist Churches of the Northwest in an effort to keep people at the American Baptist table made a decision at their 2000 Biennial Convention to restructure the region. The subsequent meeting held in December of 2000 was to ask Seattle Baptist Union (SBU) (an already existing organization of American Baptist Churches in Seattle) to form a new region. There was a caveat that any church in SBU could opt out of the new region and any church in the greater ABC Northwest could opt into the new region. That started the Evergreen journey. It was blessed at the beginning to be given this gift of invitation to churches, very few of which were actively engaged in the controversy, to form a new region. This was a gift of a clean slate, an empty place, in which to build something new. This gift allowed us to begin with renewing relationships and work slowly toward organization. The gift of time and a blank slate on which to create something new is a rare thing and one that helped Evergreen become what it is today. The task force asked to begin the new Region worked slowly. Although they began meeting in January of 2001, it was not until May of 2002 that the name Evergreen was proposed as a name—all that came before then just did not fit or were too close to names already in use. Although the name is geographically based because Washington is the Evergreen State, it calls forth a wealth of other possibilities for us.

            In the next blog I’ll reflect on how we came to our mission statement and caucus structure.

Marcia