The Tents Outside Grace Community Church

For three years, Grace Community Church in northeast Portland held monthly all-night prayer vigils. They fasted. They wept over the state of their city. They filled journals with intercession. And every Sunday morning, they stepped past a growing encampment of seventeen tents pitched along the fence line of their parking lot. It was a sixty-three-year-old deacon named Russ Takahashi who finally said it out loud at a board meeting.…