At Bethany Lutheran, there is no clear line of demarcation between church and community.

Service is important to Bethany’s members, who include the city administrator, some of the pillars of Helpline House and three of the last five Kiwanis Citizens of the Year.

“This church has always had a very high proportion of people involved in the community,” said Senior Pastor Martin Dasler, citing that dedication as one factor that brought him to the church.

The involvement extends to the seven-acre church campus on the triangle formed by High School, Sportsman Club and Finch roads, where the congregation moved in the 1960s from its original location in Pleasant Beach.

“The site was donated to the church, and we believed it should be for the benefit of the entire community,” Dasler said. “So we have entered into a number of partnerships that involve the land.”

The southern portion of the grounds, called Bethany Park, has a picnic area and a baseball diamond that are administered by the park district. The parking lot is a Kitsap Transit Park ‘n’ Ride lot. The Boys and Girls club uses a portion of the church’s education building, as does the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The community has responded. The church has enjoyed steady growth over the last five years – a distinction shared by fewer than 5 percent of the congregations in Bethany’s branch of Lutheranism.

“I think the church projects a certain amount of joy about faith,” Dasler said.

The church’s historically strong youth program has also been a factor, says Associate Pastor Paula Lund Burchill.

“People say we really feel like we welcome children,” she said.

At one point, Bethany nearly became a victim of its own success with young families – Sunday School became so cramped that kids and their families were turning away.

To remedy that problem, classroom space has been expanded twice in the last three years – once with a new building east of the sanctuary, and again with a Mongolian yurt, a distinctive, round structure with a peaked roof on the east side of the grounds.

Noting the surprisingly delicate lattice-work that supports the yurt’s heavy canvas covering, Dasler said, “This is a pretty good metaphor for the church. Individually, the supports are not very strong. But with everything tied together, it works wonderfully.”

A second change was bringing on Burchill, who came fresh out of seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her special charge is to work with youth and families, and with music.

“We work well as a team,” Dasler said. “She has a great public presence, a natural inclination for leadership. And she has an organizational mind that can put things together and see in specifics.”

It wasn’t just the Sunday School that was crowded – the two Sunday services were, in Dasler’s words, “uncomfortably full.”

The solution was to take a contemporary service that had been held in the evening and move it to Sunday morning, between the two traditional services – a move that spreads the 260 attendees on an average Sunday over three time intervals.

At the contemporary service, guitars, drums and a piano play more modern tunes than the traditional organ fare. And that change hasn’t been easy for everyone.

“We are the church of Bach,” Dasler said. “Music is such an important part of our worship that changing it was harder than it might be for those from other church traditions.”

The service

Martin Luther’s disputes with the Roman Catholic Church did not extend to the form of worship, so the services at Bethany follow the order of traditional Catholic masses, with Bible readings, a sermon and communion.

An animated preacher, Dasler dealt with themes of prayer and repentance in services in the wake of September’s terrorist attacks.

“This was not a tragedy,” Dasler said of the attacks. “A tragedy is something that happens through the force of nature.

“This was an atrocity, caused by people.”

It was an appropriate time for repentance, he said, not in the sense that America “deserved” the attacks, but in the sense that horrible events are an occasion to focus on what is important in life.

Dasler urged parishioners to consider whether they were focusing too much on material things at the expense of faith.

Major changes are coming up for both Burchill and Dasler.

Burchill and her husband are expecting their first child in late November.

After she returns from maternity leave, Dasler is leaving for a three-month sabbatical in Africa. He will spend some time at a Masai girls’ school in Tanzania, then go to Ethiopia, more to learn than to teach.

“Ethiopia is the fastest growing area for Lutherans in the world,” he said. “We added 750,000 new members there last year. I want to see what’s going on there we can learn from.”