Soul Cafe - Hood River, OR - coffee shop, spiritual, community

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Welcome to the Soul Café Intentional Community!
There is a small but growing number of people who are forming an intentional community through their experiences with those they’ve met at Soul Café. They gather regularly as an open and affirming community, inviting people of every age, race, marital status, sexual orientation, means, ability, and spiritual tradition to participate with them in the love of God and neighbor. If you’re looking for a community where you

Nervous about getting involved with something that mentions the word, church? Click here....

can practice being the church instead of going to church, contact Jill for more information!

A Message from Jill
I’m an ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) pastor, and the vision for the Soul Café community bubbled up in 2002 when I served as pastor of Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Hood River, Oregon. I met lots of people in the Gorge who didn’t attend my congregation, who said, “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious.” I’ve learned that this statement represents many people’s distrust of the church as an institution. I’ve also learned that people who are “spiritual but not religious” long for a place to explore and talk about the joys and struggles of their faith journey. They long for a community. It’s what the church is supposed to be about anyway—how we live and work and play and struggle together as the people of God!

We’re many years into this journey of Soul Cafe, and we’re still trying to figure out what we’re doing. The good thing: God knows what God is doing! We continually work on being open to what God is doing…. looking for what God is up to in the world and taking the risk to join in that work. Our prayer is that through our questions and our struggles and our joys and our not-really-knowing-what-we’re-doing, we can live into the people that God has created us to be….that we can be the church as we partner with God in loving and bringing healing and wholeness to the world!

Jill Rowland
Lead Mission Explorer and Pastor
Soul Cafe