A Place of Healing: The Missional Vision Beyond a Community Brewery
The following article features a story about a brewery with images of people serving and consuming beer.
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This is the third installment of Reawakening Stories: Our Family of Heroes on Mission in New England. In the ADNE we believe that God is equipping men, women, and families across New England to be the "everyday heroes" of his Kingdom. Our aim is to highlight the stories of these heroes in our family of churches – both laypeople and clergy – as they uniquely and creatively answer God's call to mission to their neighborhoods, through their passions, or in their diverse spheres of influence…
“Each time we had sixty people show up to our home. We were welcoming new people, hearing people’s stories, and getting the chance to pray for people outside the church.” explained Trevor Gordon of St. Albans, Maine and leader at Imago Dei Anglican Church.
He wasn’t talking about a Bible study, small group, or Alpha course he ran; he was talking about his beer tastings.
Trevor, vice president of a telecommunications consulting firm, began brewing beer as a hobby in 2006 with friend Gordon Nute. The few batches a year they produced were brewed in 5-gallon buckets in an attached garage, bottled on the kitchen table, slapped with the homemade label “Gordon’s Grog,” and passed out here and there to family members and friends. Over time, Trevor and his wife Heather acquired the equipment needed to increase production. Their sons Jonathan, Ian, and son-in-law Matt helped regularly with the brewing process, and with this increase in output, the tasting nights took off as friends, coworkers, and their connections showed up around once a quarter, filling their home with a diverse collection of businessmen, mechanics, reservemen, engineers, welders, and stay-at-home moms, all rubbing shoulders and enjoying an as-diverse assortment of brews.
In the fall of 2019, the Gordons officially broke ground to construct the Gordon’s Grog Brewery building on property adjacent to their home, and in the spring of 2021, the doors opened. Many might see this is as an all-too-familiar story of skilled homebrewers with an entrepreneurial spirit (the State of Maine has the highest number of breweries per capita in the nation with one brewery for every 8654 people) but for the Gordons, the purpose isn’t to build a thriving business: it’s to develop a healing presence in their rural community.
Trevor is quick to tell anyone who asks, it’s not about the brewery. “People ask me all the time what’s my business plan for developing the brewery. I tell them I don’t have one. I’m not doing this to make money; it’s not about that. I’ll be happy if we cover the materials and the utilities.” He says other brewers ask what his strategy is for distributing, and they’re shocked when he tells them he isn’t; he isn’t bottling, and he even discourages growler (64 oz bottle) sales because the Gordons want people to come, to sit with them, to share their story, and hopefully receive healing and wholeness in community as they come to faith.
The reason why the brewery doesn’t have an impressive strategy in and of itself is because there is a bigger vision here: an Abbey. Trevor, Heather, their adult children, and even their grandchildren all describe a place marked by the presence of God, a place where the surrounding region knows there is a rhythm of work and prayer happening and there is always someone present who can stop what they’re doing and offer prayer. In addition to Trevor and Heather, their daughter Erin and daughter-in-law Lucy live nearby and are also gifted in prophetic and healing ministry. Heather is also a knowledgeable herbalist and provides tinctures and salves to those in need.
(pictured above: members of the Gordon family)
Their vision is inspired by historic models of monasticism - where individuals and families lived in community with rhythms of work (often brewing) and prayer - and contemporary communities such as Ffald y Brenin, a remote Welsh retreat center and “thin place” that draws thousands of visitors to experience the presence and healing of God. For years, members of the Gordon family have received prophetic words that pieced this vision together, and now things seem to be gaining traction.
Every Thursday night they gather for worship in the brewery, offering prayer ministry to whoever shows up, and interceding for the region. When Covid-19 restrictions forced their congregation, Imago Dei, to disperse into 5 regional chapel sites, the just-finished brewery was able to host one of the chapels with an altar set up along one wall and the musicians set up behind the bar. Eventually, this chapel site began drawing worshippers who lived even further west - up to 50 miles from the church in areas with little to no Gospel witness. For this reason, St. Albans worships out of the brewery as an Imago Dei chapel every other week. When patrons point to the keyboard near a “beer blessing prayer” on the wall and ask if there’s live music, they are invited to Sunday morning worship.
“I see them as a kingdom outpost holding watch on the frontier,” says Scott DeLong of Imago Dei. “The Lord led the saints of old to build vibrant communities at the furthest reaches of ‘civilization’ in places like Celtic Britain and the deserts of North Africa. Our state’s population is the most rural, the oldest, the 2nd-least churched, and so on. It makes sense for the Lord to build His Church here, and to use the brewery culture inherent to this region to call people out of their loneliness, need, brokenness, and the increasing suspicion of the Church as an establishment.”
While there aren’t yet dramatic stories of patrons coming to a saving faith over their glass of ale, the seeds of reawakening are being planted each time someone shares their struggles and hopes to the family between sips. The ADNE values the kind of risk-taking, creativity, and employment of interests and skills to Kingdom mission exhibited by the Gordons.
For many in a region so burdened by sin and death, a trip to this brewery might just end up being “good for what ale’s ya.”
(non-chapel photos of the brewery are from Darcy Michaud Photography)