Hands raised skywards, a mostly young, strikingly multi-racial group of parishioners shouted out their praise inside the Willamette High School auditorium on a recent Sunday morning.
"Give God the glory," said Keith Jenkins, strutting across the stage, raucous gospel music playing in the background. "I feel good!" he declares. "Can you tell?"
Most of the 200-plus in attendance can, which is one of the reasons that Jenkins' World Jubilee Outreach has outgrown its Gilbert Shopping Center storefront along Highway 99 and now meets each Sunday morning in the Willamette High auditorium.
What transpires here is part of a larger phenomenon happening across the country: Membership is surging at nondenominational churches that emphasize personal spirituality and unabashed worship over institutional tradition. Many, in fact, avoid the "C" word — church — preferring to identify themselves as fellowships or ministries.
Because they have no denominational affiliation and often don't track membership, such churches are typically missed by religion demographers.
But 2001 survey data collected by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research suggests that as many as 10 million Americans attend an estimated 35,000 independent and nondenominational churches. That's 13 percent of the total population of congregations.
That a handful of such churches are thriving in and around Eugene — one of the most secular or "unchurched" cities in one of the most unchurched states may be especially surprising.
The Eugene Yellow Pages list 29 nondenominational churches.
Their growth hasn't gone unnoticed by leaders at more mainline churches.
Steve Carlson, pastor at Emmaus Lutheran in Eugene, meets with other area Lutheran pastors every week.
"There are times we'll just sit there and say, ‘Why are people going there instead of going to our churches?' " he said.
The evangelical Lutheran church nationally, he says, is exploring ways to update its worship services.
"You have to be true to who you are," he says. "There are many ways to stretch to be responsive to the culture, but there may also come a point where you say, ‘I won't go any further than this.' "
Gary Clark, senior pastor at Eugene Christian Fellowship, says it didn't take long after arriving in 1980 to figure out that many people here are skeptical of mainline churches.
"They don't like being told what to do," he says. "Churches that are just there to defend the faith and perpetuate the traditional past people are staying away from those churches in droves."
In the front row of the Willamette High's auditorium on a recent Sunday, a white woman with red hair raises her hands in praise while a black man next to her weeps with joy.
They are Randy and Leann Rawlins, husband and wife and parents to a 16-month-old son, Emmanuel.
"There's no Baptist twist or Catholic twist or any twist," Randy Rawlins says of why he loves the church. "You take what's there, you don't add to it, it's just be free with Christ."
Nondenominational churches are growing, says Mark Shibley, a professor of sociology and religion at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, not because they emphasize a "return to values" morality, but because they take a modern-day approach to religion.
It's not entirely surprising, Shibley says, that such churches are making inroads in secular Oregon. The state's entrepreneurial ethic, combined with the fact that most people here aren't wed to any dominant faith tradition, makes the area "ripe for recruitment."
"I try to be as plain and relevant and share as much of my own walk as possible," Jenkins, an ex-Marine with no formal religious training says.
"Our greatest common denominator is our pain," he said.