During Stewardship Kaleidoscope, Commissioned Pastor Kevin Riley speaks of the beautiful ways Mount Baker Presbyterian Church is serving Concrete, Washington
by Jody Mask for the Presbyterian Foundation | Special to Presbyterian News Service
Kevin Riley, the commissioned pastor of Mount Baker Presbyterian Church in Concrete, Washington, leads a workshop during Stewardship Kaleidoscope. (Photo by Gregg Brekke)
Kevin Riley’s life has been full of risk — and not all of it good.
Riley, the commissioned pastor of Mount Baker Presbyterian Church in Concrete, Washington, suffered from addiction, homelessness, and incarceration earlier in life. Those life experiences, harrowing as they are, increased his comfort level with risk — an attitude that served the church well when the Covid pandemic arrived.
“At the beginning of 2020 we had maybe five members in our congregation and a surplus of maybe $20,000 in liquid capital,” Riley said. “Our community has the highest poverty, homeless(ness), and addiction rates per capita in Skagit County. When we closed out 2023, we had a total income of $830,000, and in June of 2024 secured a contract for an annual $235,000 per year.”
Riley led a workshop called “Taking Risks to Steward a Community” at the 2024 Stewardship Kaleidoscope Conference. To a room full of church leaders seeking wisdom about stewardship of God’s gifts, his story was a provocative introduction.
But Riley’s low-key manner communicated a deeper reality: most churches do not find themselves in such desperate contexts that free them to consider possibilities deemed unthinkable in the past.
“Covid was actually good for the church as a ministry, because it made them realize what the community needed the church to be for them,” Riley said. He thus engaged his own risk-taking nature in a positive fashion for Mount Baker Presbyterian Church.
Changing ministry
Before the pandemic, Riley’s ministry was split between the local congregation and a jail ministry. When Covid upended life for everyone, “it was time to put my money where my mouth was,” Riley said.
During the Covid shutdown, he wrote a grant proposal for $5,000 that said in part, “I don’t want extra bandwidth. I want ways to meet community needs.” After receiving the grant, Riley enlisted the help of Northwest Coast Presbytery, asking for their financial support over three years in a “step-down” model that allowed him to develop a fundraising plan. Riley’s wife, Danielle, joined him in the effort.
They set up a “rainy day” fund in case things didn’t work out. Then they got to work.
The first “bold and risky move” was to abandon the traditional model of membership acquisition. Counterintuitively, this helped free them for ministry. They then created an advisory committee of community members to guide their approach to community ministry. This “stewardship of our community” began to open more doors — most importantly, the ones that led to the church itself.
“We had to establish the church as a safe place to come for new folks,” Riley said. Previously, the church was hidden in plain sight among buildings in Concrete. “When I asked Mount Baker what their vision was, they didn’t have answers.”
New services for the community
They became a cold weather shelter for four weeks. They hosted pop-up vaccination clinics. They distributed food and diapers on Wednesday nights. And they provided coats and shoes for children in need in the local school district.
This increased visibility as a ministry upon which the community could rely led to more partnerships; one with North Sound Behavioral Health Administrative Services Organization, and another with the Skagit County Department of Health. Those connections eventually led to another with a bigger impact: the North Sound Accountable Communities of Health, which spans five counties in the region. Mount Baker Presbyterian Church was the first faith community invited into that space. “That involved a lot of repair work,” Riley noted. As a faith leader, his presence was triggering for some people who had been mistreated by the church in various ways.
The ministry continued to grow. Church leaders had to rent another building to do what they heard God and the community calling them to do. Riley wrote a proposal to the county to get that done. They used the newly rented building as a homeless shelter and Medication Assisted Treatment clinic, including access to showers and free laundry.
Riley’s formula for expansion thus included collaborative fundraising, personal fundraising, resource sharing, grant writing, and “boldly being what our community needed us to be.”
Worship isn’t the focus
Worship continues at 10 a.m. on Sundays, but “it could be four people or 60 people” that show up, Riley said. For Kevin and Danielle, who both have ADHD, church “as it’s usually done” is hard. “Every time we walk into a church, we put a mask on; I want to create a church where we don’t have to do that.”
For now, given the volatility of worship attendance, “(It) has become a byproduct of our ministry and not a focal point.” From a traditional standpoint, this too is provocative. But this ethos of worship runs through Mount Baker Presbyterian Church’s ministry: “We understand that we can’t do it alone.”
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