Our story officially began around 1906 – but was birthed long before amidst tent meetings and revival prayer. It was a day of adventure, exploits and new beginnings.The headlines told stories of Teddy Roosevelt, San Francisco fires and earthquakes, refugees flooding Portland, the Panama Canal, the first flight of the Wright Brothers and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. World travelers and leaders were coming to Portland.
Portland First Church of the Nazarene was launched as the fruit of revival tent meetings sponsored by the Oregon Holiness Association. There was a desire to gather and freely embrace the doctrine of holiness and sanctification. Over a century has come and gone.
In the last 3 years, we believe God has invited us that continue in this tradition to take a unique direction as a result of asking this important and radical question: “How do we serve our community better?” We are precisely are putting our focus back on our community at-large in contrast to only considering our needs, our membership, our programs or our campus. Our collective answer yielded a rare community response of unity, calling and walking out the Great Commission. Last year, four congregations, PDX First, Eden Community, Lighthouse Church and Casa Del Luz, came togther and launched Serve Week, which intentionally united our congregations to serve together. Something exciting happened: we sensed and observed a special unity in Christ among our communities and our leadership. We know God was up to something that had to do with our congregations being together.
In the end of 2019, we set aside a weekend to articulate and capture exactly what we were coming to understand of God’s plans for us. We prayerfully pursued aligning and uniting the 4 unique congregations in order to meet the diverse demographics in the area with their unique needs while representing who we are and our calling to discipleship. The results were unifying as we all saw a way to walk out the commission from Jesus to make disciples together.
In years past, we have been the congregations of PDX First, Eden Community, Lighthouse Church and Casa Del Luz. Now, we are united under a new name, Nexus Church, and our vision as a community of faith is to become a hub of disciple making, missional engagement and service to our community.
