Our Vision

An inclusive, progressive church with a healthy sense of humor and humility

We all need help we can’t give ourselves. And, increasingly, people experience the “more, faster, bigger, better” solutions of modern life to be too flat, too empty, too unjust to provide that help (including many of those offered in religious settings).

We started this church in 2013 for people who feel more at home culturally in progressive or secular settings than in religious settings, but who nonetheless long for communal experiences of spirituality. Since then, BLC has grown from a local community on the Northside of Chicago to both a local and online community, including many people beyond Chicago.

With a healthy sense of humor and humility (something not usually experienced in churches), we host Sunday gatherings for prayer & meditation, build small group community, and empower individuals to contribute to justice and healing in the world — all with the goal to help people foster mature spirituality (based not in obligation to a distant God, but in relationship to a trustworthy God).

Our guide in all this is Jesus. Many religious settings present “faith in Jesus” as an exclusive thing, over and against other religious or non-religious approaches to life, but our experience of Jesus is entirely different. For us, connection with Jesus and spiritual growth grounded in the Biblical Tradition have never made us more closed-off; they have made us more open!

We embrace diversity in perspectives and religious/cultural backgrounds, we are committed to equity, justice, and anti-racism work, and we are LGBTQ-inclusive.

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Learn about our Five Year Vision →

Our Values

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

The spirituality we encourage is relationship with God (NOT obligation to God) — healthy relationship with God leads to joy, humility, emotional maturity, resilience, self-sacrificial love, lifelong transformation, and never feels like a step backward

Experiential Spirituality

All people can hear and connect with God, and your subjective experience of feeling cared for, loved, guided by a Living God matters! — commitment to a set of ethics or beliefs (even really mature ones) can only take us so far

Equity, Justice, Inclusion

Challenging the powerful and lifting up the marginalized, in the model of Jesus, even when we are the powerful and self-sacrifice is required — for a community founded by white, straight men, this means intentionally de-centering whiteness, straightness, and maleness

Relationships

That are built on honesty, vulnerability, and showing up for each other — that free us from our instincts to perform, pretend, and manipulate — that show the kind of care and support to each other that usually people only provide to family

Presence in Suffering

Learning to be present to our suffering — never avoiding or explaining it away, but seeking to be transformed by it — and, like Jesus, learning then to be present to the suffering of others and of the world

Centering the outsider experience

Increasingly, Americans identify as non-religious, and yet most still long for meaningful, communal spiritual experience — church settings tend to reward religious privilege and “insider” knowledge, but what if a church centered the outsider experience?

Shifting the narrative about God & the Bible

Away from exclusive toward inclusive — away from “allowing suffering” toward “with us in suffering” — away from violent toward self-sacrificial — away from retributive toward redemptive

Humor & Humility

We want to help facilitate conversation and engagement of the deepest matters of life, but we know we don’t have all the answers, and we try not to take ourselves too seriously — being able to laugh at oneself is spiritually healthy!

Our Philosophy

Centered-set, not bounded-set

Imagine a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it. The thing about circles is that you’re either inside of them or you’re outside of them. So we (Kyle & Vince, the two founding pastors here) grew up in Chicagoland. If you’re from another part of the world, sorry. We are Bulls fans. If you support a different basketball team (or don’t care about basketball), sorry! You’re outside of our circle. Let’s call the circle a “bounded set.”

Now imagine a second piece of paper with a big dot right in the middle of it. This shows a different kind of set. The dot in the middle represents what holds the set together, and, let’s say, on this piece of paper there are a million other smaller dots which represent everyone on earth. For each of those dots (us) it’s not about whether we’re inside of something or outside of something. It’s all about relationship — about our orientation to the center — about movement toward the center. We’ll call this a “centered set.”

We wonder if this helps us think about how churches might serve (or not serve) people. For our purposes, let’s say we want to be a centered set with God or Jesus at the center of our set. If so, then this would suggest we put our focus less on whether someone is inside or outside of “faith in Jesus”, and more on someone’s relationship to the center (Jesus) — less on cultural markers of acceptance in a group, and more on practical questions like, “what does it look like to point myself toward Jesus right now, in my current circumstance, or in this or that relationship, or given a specific injustice in the world around me?”

It’s worth noting: a lot of churches seem to operate from a bounded-set mentality. Usually, churches don’t realize how much culture beyond just Jesus their bounded sets entail (or how much culture forms their view of who Jesus is and what Jesus is about in the first place). And it can come as a shock to them that their good intentions to share their gospel might be received by some as insensitive or harmful.

On the other hand, approaching faith in Jesus as a centered-set, in our experience, opens us up to the prospect of connection with just about anyone, regardless of how much or what kind of religious background someone has.

Visit Sunday →

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Our Teams

(See our open paid internship opportunities here →)

Staff

Vince (Lead Pastor) helped found the church in 2013 with his friend Kyle (who served as Co-Lead Pastor for the first 9 years). Vince’s background is in education (DePaul University). He is a voice for open and relational theology, and is published in the collection of essays Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God. His personal interests include technology, guitar, and sports (Chicago Bulls & Liverpool FC), and he lives with his wife, their four kids, and one housemate in the West Ridge neighborhood.

Hayley (Connections Pastor) joined staff in 2021. Hayley’s background is in theology (North Park University), she is a coffeeshop enthusiast, and she lives with her husband and their two kids in Evanston.

Vince Brackett

Hayley Larson

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Financial & Advisory Board

The people responsible for the financial and business side of operating our church.

Vince Brackett

Jen Colburn

Christina Culver

Lara Johnson

Leicester Mitchell

Joey Rodil

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Music & Worship Leaders

The staff and volunteers who lead our community in prayer and song when we gather on Sundays.

Elizabeth Bertrand

Vince Brackett

Keziah Brackett

Jen Colburn

Hayley Larson

Angela Rak

Teel Short

Music Team Audition →

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Our Beliefs

Like most people, we are after deep, full life — beyond self-centeredness, and beyond the American status quo that privileges the wealthiest 1% of our society, and exploits the poor. Here, we wonder if a big part of that pursuit has to be spiritual: learning to continually look outside ourselves for the help we can’t give ourselves. The good life isn’t automatic, and living courageously on behalf of others isn’t automatic. Living in accordance with our highest values, pushing beyond the consumeristic rat race, staying engaged in equity and justice and anti-racism work are not things we can just pull off relying on ourselves and our will power.

The help and guide we look to at Brown Line Church is Jesus.

Historically of course, it’s been mostly Christians looking to Jesus. We absolutely want to be in the same stream as many of the Christian heroes who have done that so winningly - people like Francis of Assisi or Julian of Norwich from eras past, or contemporary figures like Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dr. King, Cesar Chavez. However, if you've been around any modern day Christian conversations, perhaps you (like us) have recognized they often seem to represent a reactive American sub-culture more than a mature thousands-of-years-old faith tradition (and, of course, there’s a real ugly side to Christian history that runs parallel to that mature faith tradition). Many Christian conversations today are politically-entangled, blind to their white supremacist roots, anti-LGBTQ, misogynistic and give off a negative vibe of being over and against the rest of the wider culture, especially in the way they read the Bible.

Our connection at Brown Line Church is to the mature thousands-of-years-old faith tradition, not the American sub-culture, or the ugly history of Christendom.

This, we believe, puts us in line with the heart behind the ancient Christian creeds, like the Nicene Creed (our statement of faith) - what followers of Jesus have all held as their core for centuries. If “Christian” just means alignment with the ancient creeds, we are unapologetically Christian! However, when it comes to that particular culture and perspective the word “Christian” often refers to today in America, maybe we’re not so Christian.

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Banner images from Andrew Seaman & Anthony Doubt