Newberg’s Hillside Fellowship evolves into Church of the Vine

We are grateful to the Newberg Graphic, and the author of the article, Seth Gordon, who gave us the rights to publish this article here.

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Formerly non-denominational, congregation finds fitting balance of spirit and structure in a unique arm of the Anglican Church

Seth Gordon
Newberg Graphic reporter

Because Hillside Fellowship worships out of the former St. Peter Catholic Church building on one side and on the other operates the Hillside Inn, a residence for young adults in transition or in need of respite, Pastor Sean Flannery likes to say that the church straddles Main Street.

In addition to being an apt description figuratively, Flannery and the congregation have long considered it a fitting metaphor as the church building is where members retreat from the world to worship, while the inn is where the congregation lives out its Christian mission to serve the community.

But coming out of the 2016 election cycle, Flannery and other church leaders became increasingly concerned about the disorienting effects of the divide along Main Street of America as a whole. They saw how much members were being pulled in different directions by modern culture and politics, and how that was affecting their faith.

“They’re trying to figure out how to engage a landscape that is so divided, where there’s so little room for character and compassion in the midst of really hard either/or options,” Flannery said. “I saw the need to connect people with what it means to be the church, getting to the deep roots of the church.”

As they pondered deep pastoral questions about how to best nourish and shepherd members in such a climate, a new door opened in the form of Churches for the Sake of Others (C4SO).

Led by Bishop Todd Hunter, C4SO is a unique church-planting diocese of the Anglican Church in North America that combines a missional focus with an orthodox and liturgical worship style.

“That wedding of these two things, when we looked at it, is kind of like our story,” Flannery said. “It felt like an answer to a question that’s still forming. I felt like we found our tribe with Bishop Todd.”

Hillside became Church of the Vine in February and took a big step in its transition when Flannery and assistant pastor Mike DiMarcangelo were ordained as priests Saturday in a ceremony led by Hunter.

“As a guy who spent 15 years as a non-denominational pastor, that’s a whole new world,” Flannery said.

As a pretty informal evangelical church, joining any denomination would have been a big change for the congregation, but it wasn’t entered into lightly or quickly.

As Flannery was grappling with the challenge of pastoring in the current climate, he connected with George Fox University professor Joseph Clair, who was helping to establish the honors program there and now serves as dean of the College of Christian Studies, Liberal Arts and Honors. The pair had previously collaborated on a lecture series about habit and liturgy informing spiritual formation and the movement to re-introduce orthodox ceremonies and practices to evangelicals.

Clair had worshiped at an Anglican church while at Wheaton College in Illinois and when he came across C4SO in May 2017, he encouraged Flannery to check it out.

As Flannery was considering the pastoral challenges he faced, he asked church leaders to discern along with him. When he connected with Hunter and hit it off immediately, they gave him the go ahead to learn more about C4SO to see if it might be worth pursuing.

In August 2017, another piece of the puzzle fell into place for Flannery when his wife, Melody, received a text from a woman she had mentored about 15 years earlier. Mandy DiMarcangelo and her husband Mike had traveled to Oregon from California to view the eclipse and hoped they might be able to connect.

The DiMarcangelos happened to be in Newberg, but at that point didn’t realize that’s where Melody and Sean had settled. The two couples met and the DiMarcangelos explained how they had been mentoring at-risk youth in a way reminiscent of the Hillside Inn.

The couple went on to explain how they also had been feeling stirred to make a change in their life and revealed that Mike had just been ordained as a deacon in the Anglican Church.

“We were standing there looking at each other like what just happened?” Flannery said. “It just got crazier from there. God moved, one thing led to another and about 30 days after they were in our living room, Mandy was offered a job at Intel.”

Mike DiMarcanegelo has since joined Church of the Vine as associate pastor and Clair has also come aboard as a preaching associate.

“It was this confluence of stories, so we have just felt the joy of that momentum and the clarity around it,” Flannery said. “I don’t know when I’ll feel like we’re not in transition. It feels like that could be a while, but we had that season where we felt like God’s spirit was merging and knitting together these stories, including our own congregational discernment.”

During that process, the allegory of Jesus and the vine resonated and became the inspiration for the new name.

“Our hope is to really be a community rooted in Christ, rooted in the deep story of the church, and flowing out of that rootedness to really bear fruit for Newberg,” Flannery said. “We feel like the inn is a great example of how we want to continue being driven by worship of Christ into bearing fruit for the common good.”