Vancouver church aims

to fill Portland's Rose Garden

on Easter

   PORTLAND — Easter, or Resurrection Day, is a big day for Christians around the world, and a Vancouver, Wash.-based church is celebrating it in a very, very big way.
    Living Hope Church is holding the first-ever Easter church service to be held in Portland’s Rose Garden arena.
    The service begins at 11 a.m. in the arena, best known as home of the Portland Trail Blazers professional basketball team. The service is open to all and parking at the Rose Quarter facility will be free, paid by the church.
    Living Hope is the one of the nation’s fastest-growing churches, ranking 43rd in growth in a recent church survey. It began in 1996 in Battle Ground, Wash., and in 2003 merged with Prairie Community Church in Brush Prairie, Wash. A 2005 merger with Vancouver Community Church started the establishment of satellite locations.
    Last year, the church opened five satellite campuses for Easter — the first church in the nation to ever open that many sites in one day — to help accommodate the nearly 8,000 people who attended services during the weekend. The numbers expected for this year forced Living Hope to think in broader terms.
   “At Easter, we became one church with multiple locations and each Sunday we have more than 1,000 attending services at our satellite campuses, as well as the 4,000-plus who attend the seven weekend services at our main building,” said Senior Pastor John Bishop. “When we started planning for Easter for this year, it was clear that we needed to find a new way to accommodate the thousands who want to celebrate God’s miracle and the Easter story. So we started thinking about the concept of multiple campuses in one location.”
    Bishop said church leaders looked at a number of venues that could hold the 8,000 to 9,000 people expected to attend Easter services. With no site in Clark County either large enough or suitable enough for the expected crowd, the church started searching in Portland.
    During a tour of the Memorial Coliseum, a 12,000-seat arena that was the former home to the Trail Blazers and other professional teams for 25 years, facility officials mentioned the nearby 20,000-seat Rose Garden was also available for Easter.
   “We all looked at each other and thought, ‘Wow, that’s really big,’ ” Bishop recalled as the church looked at the Rose Garden. “Then we remembered the theme that has guided our church over the past year: Only God! And we knew that no building is too big for Him.”
    In February, Living Hope signed the contract for the Rose Garden event and began planning the logistics for holding Easter services in the 785,000 square-foot building.
    It is the first time in the 12-year history of the facility that it has hosted an Easter service and is expected to be the largest baptism event ever held in Oregon.
    The congregation helped set the Easter plan into motion. During a February service, Bishop shared his vision of the church reaching out to the community for Easter. Parishioners responded by giving more than $100,000 in a special offering, which made it possible to cover the cost of renting the Rose Garden.
    The Easter service will feature four baptism pools for those ready to dedicate their lives to Christ. In the past two years, more than 2,000 have been baptized at Living Hope — many of them spontaneous baptisms, with people entering the water in the clothes they wore to church.
    Bishop said the Rose Garden services will be another sign that God is at work in the local church.
   “A few years ago, our church was trying to figure out how to fill 20,000 plastic eggs with candy for an Easter event to bring people to church. Now, we are looking at how to fill 20,000 seats at the Rose Garden, Bishop remarked.
   “This is not about Living Hope. We just want to see people cared for, to see them come to a relationship with Christ. When the day is over, the most important thing is that lost people are found.”
    For more information on Living Hope, go to the church web site at www.livinghopechurch.com.
    Living Hope currently meets at the main campus in Brush Prairie and in Hockinson, Orchards and Longview, Wash. and the Fisher’s Landing area of Vancouver.
    After Easter, it plans to open a location in Camas, Wash. and two or three locations in Portland, including northeast Portland and the Burlingame neighborhood.
    It also is launching an “Internet campus” and, in what may be the first of its kind, an “Internet deaf campus.”