The mission of Living Stream Church of the Brethren is to use new media and technology to provide a congregational home online for people who are unable to connect to a Church of the Brethren as often as they’d like. We are a welcoming community, and while we identify as Church of the Brethren through the Pacific Northwest District, we are open to people from all faith backgrounds and all corners of the world. Through regular worship services, Bible study, conversation, prayer, and social networking, we hope to build a community that shares the Peace of Christ in ways that meet people in their daily lives.
Take a quick trip to Living Stream with our introduction videos!
Doing a new thing.
Thank you for joining us on our online community journey.
This is indeed a new thing: building community and worshiping over the Internet, instead of gathering in one place every week. But this is also a very old thing: allowing correspondence to connect us heart to heart, and bind us as a voluntary family, just as the letters among early church members connected them across borders and oceans. This is also a very unknown thing: what we are, and who we may become, are works in progress. Think of this as a kind of laboratory for exploring worship with new media, where we learn together what draws us to each other, what soothes our spirits, what uplifts us from our alienation, and what challenges us to grow.
Who are we?
Our members come from many backgrounds and histories. What unites us is our passion for community and loving relationship, and our commitment to living the Way of peace. Most of us are Christians, many are Anabaptists, some of us are Brethren, and all of us know that coming together to share our stories makes us so much stronger than we can be on our own.
As a congregation we are rooted in the Church of the Brethren, a historic peace church out of the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation and the German Pietist movement. (Learn more about the Church of the Brethren.) Our sponsoring body is the Pacific Northwest District of the Church of the Brethren, knowing – and praying – that our community reaches far beyond our borders of geography or sect.
Living Stream Church of the Brethren grows from these roots into new places and potentials for our current day:
Our earliest spiritual ancestors in the church met in living rooms, where they sang, prayed together, shared the good news of our Prince of Peace, and generally became intimately involved in each others’ lives, as close as sisters and brothers. While the earliest Christians met in each others’ homes, and early Brethren gathered in houses and in barns to feast and celebrate, today we meet through electronic media.
Our community’s online format can complement with existing (“traditional”) forms of community gathering:
The Living Stream is an exploration in community-building through new visual and social media. We believe that active participation in this emerging sector of our lives will allow us to be bound closer together in spaces where alienation and distance often emerge. As virtual realities become more familiar to us, how can we build real relationships and real family even within this new space?
Why a Living Stream?
In one of his teachings, Jesus told a woman from Samaria about offering a source of true and living water: “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” (John 4: 14) Those of us who follow after this man, even to this day, believe that there is some nourishing spirit that raises life up to more than our everyday routines. We in this Living Stream community believe that we can tap into this abundant, life-giving spring best when we join together.
Today’s technology offers new kinds of ‘streams,’ and our worship services are in fact streamed live, as we join together from our various locations around the world. We seek to use these new electronic streams to connect us and focus us on the Living Water of a spirit that binds us with each other as well as with our spiritual ancestors and descendants.
We invite you to join us in the stream of life that moves us through our joys and our challenges, and calls us to lives of meaning and beauty, lives of strength and depth.
How do I join the Stream?
Please join us in our worship online on Sunday evenings (5:00 Pacific time zone).
Sign up for our weekly e-newsletter and connect through our website or other social media.
We are glad to hear your voice!
Can I become a member of Living Stream?
If you are interested in membership with Living Stream CoB, email us or fill out this form to let us know about your gifts and talents!