In the control room of Qwest Field overlooking the endzone, Randy Rowland sits behind a microphone, waiting for the Seattle Seahawks to take on the San Diego Chargers, alternating sips of Diet Coke and decaf coffee. He's trying to keep his vocal chords both wet and warm. "That just makes your voice more loose," he says. Which is important because the tall 53-year-old with the scruffy gray beard is the official Seahawks announcer, the voice that reverberates throughout the stadium—introducing players, guiding fans through plays, and saying things like: "Gentlemen, will you all remove your hats?"Minutes before the Christmas Eve game, Rowland jokes about his days as a wild Tacoma high-school student, driving around in a green ex–Forest Service truck and answering to the nickname "Smoky."
Photo By Harley Soltes
Sanctuary parishioners who knew Rowland from his Church at the Center days say the pastor has changed considerably.
Related Content
More About
"I believe it has something to do with cannabis," Rowland explains, as one of his two spotters, Darren Kochansky, squeezes into the tight space behind him and begins to rub his shoulders. "Ohhh, homeboy Darren," Rowland laughs. "Smear me with that oil."
And then, he's on: The teasing, conversational voice becomes the booming,omnipresent voice of authority around the stadium—what God would sound like if he called football games.
Perhaps it's not entirely incongruous, then, that Rowland has a very different kind of job in his non-Seahawks life: He's a pastor.
Three hours earlier, Rowland, who turned to ministry after a career as a radio sports broadcaster and music DJ, sat on a wooden chair behind a small round coffee table on the stage of Greenwood's Taproot Theatre. The locale is the Sunday morning home of Sanctuary, a congregation founded by Rowland that is affiliated with the Christian Reform Church. Wearing a thick gray cardigan and whimsical tie, he read a Longfellow poem called "Christmas Bells," an ode to God's presence in the midst of war, which Rowland chose as an allusion to the current Iraq entanglement. Rowland shared the stage with a young painter named Scott Erickson, whose job was to react to the sermon by use of his own medium, which he did by coveringa canvas with a cross overlaid with the word "Arrival" and a lamb radiatingyellow light.
"I've never seen anybody painting in church before," a parishioner whispered during the service.
Rowland's acquaintances recognize that he specializes in the unconventional and innovative. The author of several books, including one entitled The Sins We Love, he teaches courses on bringing pop culture into church at Fuller Theological Seminary, a California-based school with a Seattle branch. One time, Rowland took a bunch of pictures of the solar system off the Internet and made them into a slide show that he projected in church—to the soundtrack of Bruce Cockburn's "Lord of the Starfields." He also has a favorite Simpsons episode that he sometimes plays during sermons. The punch line—"You are so banished"—is a send-up of the Garden of Eden story.
Those who are familiar with Rowland know that his current pastoral persona is a much mellower incarnation of himself. Five or 10 years ago, anybody who had visited Rowland at his former Presbyterian church would have seen a rock and roll pastor with a ponytail and an air of rebellion grounded in the belief that the church, up until that point, had gotten it wrong. Looking to bring religion into the secular heart of Seattle culture, Rowland started his church near the Seattle Center, taking note of its relatively close proximity to Sub Pop Records, which was then presiding over the grunge frenzy. The Church at the Center, named for its location, met at Uptown Cinemas and attracted national media attention. The church's motto: "real, relevant, and a little bit radical."
"It was the new groovy church," says Pastor James Kearny, who succeeded Rowland as pastor of the church, which later merged with another to become Capitol Hill Presbyterian. "But there was a lot of youthful pride and arrogance."A series of power plays and conflicts involving Rowland caused the church, in essence, to implode.
Presbyterians have a way of dealing with alleged sins within the church through a court system that looks very much like a secular one. In September 2003, on the second day of a two-day church trial, Rowland pleaded guilty to 21 counts of abuse of power and breach of confidentiality. Such trials are rare, numbering less than one a year in the Seattle region over the last 11 years, according to Dennis Hughes, clerk of the Seattle Presbytery, which oversees all Presbyterian churches in the area. Rarer still is the magnitude of this case. "Twenty-one allegations is a lot," Hughes says. "I've never had anything close to it." (Hughes refuses to disclose details of the charges.)
Yet what happened at Church at the Center is a matter of debate fraught with feelings of bitterness and betrayal, one that reveals the stakes at play in church life and the level of dysfunction into which it can sink. Friends and foes alike describe the Rowland of Church at the Center as a puzzle of contradictory traits: a dominant personality who could also be very humble, a man who asked a lot of questions but didn't always listen to the answers, and someone who could be both punishing and forgiving. Rowland's trajectory, encompassing both Church at the Center and Sanctuary, also sheds light on the promise and perils of what is often labeled the "emerging church"—those postmodern ministries with hardcore bands, hipster followings, and outwardly casual pastors with charisma to burn.
