High tech quest

Christian Century, August 1, 2001 by Richard Scheinin

"It does get old after a while," Pierce remarked. "Many women experience a shocking hollowness. Living with such abundance, we are spiritually deprived.... Part of the safety net we provide is to bridge modern evangelical thinking and our more contemplative roots."

This is what she told the 30 women at the retreat: "Just let out the air and breathe deeply. And as you inhale, invite God into this time, this place, into you."

Pierce has 3,000 women on her mailing list, and can be mighty hard to reach on her cell phone as she scurries about, setting up and running retreats. She is an entrepreneur of Christian spirituality. Once again, the penchant for innovation that defines the valley's business culture overflows into its religious life.

IT HAS BECOME almost a cliche to refer to new churches as "start-ups." More and more, valley churches are drawing on the marketing and hightech backgrounds of members to reach out to a new generation.

I sat down a year ago with several founders of the Highway Community, a new nondenominational spinoff of a Baptist church, then meeting in a Palo Alto high school gymnasium. Pastor John Riemenschnitter wore a baseball cap pointed backwards as he showed me the slick direct mailings that he and his team had designed and sent to 37,000 homes in the cities of Palo Alto and Mountain View: "What if the hottest start-up in the Valley was a church?" one card said. "Let's do launch," said another.

He also showed off what looked to be a rock CD booklet; the cover photograph zoomed in on the pleading eyes of a young Everyman. In fact, it was a trim, paperback version of John's Gospel, made to catch the attention of young people. Highway volunteers hung the booklet on hundreds of doorknobs in surrounding neighborhoods.

Travis Reed, who runs a Christian multimedia production company, explained that the group was trying to "reposition" church in popular culture--tweaking the style of religious practice and outreach, but preserving the essential lesson about "the hope and truth of Christ's message." The point was to build the Highway Community "outside the Christian bubble or fortress," he said. The church's organizers were using a "Silicon Valley team" organizational structure--flat, nonhierarchical--as a business model. "That's what a church should be," Reed concluded--"where everyone is helping out with one big cause and your mission is to help everyone in the community."

Because just about everyone works hard in the valley, and because relatively few people belong to religious communities, the church must prove itself relevant to the business world if it wants to grow. That's one reason why the Episcopal Church established a full-time missioner to CEOs and business "strivers" here two years ago. Richard L. Shimpfky, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real, reasoned that valley businesspeople have unique spiritual needs that arise from too much work and too much success achieved too quickly (and in recent months perhaps quickly lost).