Being the only Black person in the room is nothing new to Annette Nettles, pastor of Love at the Cross, a small congregation in Washougal.
Nettles’ own relatives are often the only Black faces she sees as she looks out across her tiny flock of 21 members.
It’s not that Nettles is unaware of the differences between herself and her white, mostly older congregants. It’s that she feels called to overcome those differences and help others see how to overcome them, too.
“Other Black people visit and they are shocked that it’s not an all-Black church. It will be nice when people don’t have those boundaries,” Nettles said.
The Vancouver resident’s personal, professional and spiritual experiences have singularly qualified her to bridge boundaries.
Nettles calls her life “the story of an African American girl who grew up in Clark County.” Her family moved to Vancouver from Hooks, Texas, in 1953, when she was 7 months old. They came not only to join her aunts and uncle, who worked in the shipyards, but also for the region’s relative freedoms.
“They moved to the Northwest to try and give their children a sense of not being persecuted,” she said. “They saw a lot. They saw lynchings and Jimmy Crow laws and they wanted us to have a different life.”
In Texas, Nettles’ mother had been following the religious teachings of Herbert Armstrong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God (renamed Grace Communion International in 2009 after a complete doctrinal overhaul). When the family settled in Vancouver, they joined a local congregation of Armstrong followers.
“There was a lot of racism in the church culture. There were a lot of rules — you can do this but you can’t do that because you’re Black,” Nettles said. “My parents worked hard to give us a sense of ‘Jesus is all religions.’ I took away that Jesus is not just one body, one church. He is all churches. My friends came from all churches and many different denominations.”
Because she and her siblings couldn’t always socialize freely with white children, Nettles said, her parents hosted large parties, filling their home with friends from their predominantly Black neighborhood in the McLoughlin Heights area of Vancouver. The outgoing Nettles loved talking with and listening to other people and felt compelled to share the message of inclusivity that she’d learned from her parents. The high school-age Nettles started a prayer group with friends from different religious backgrounds but wasn’t able to pray with others in her own church in the same way.
“I would sit on the edge of my chair at church and I wanted to know who Jesus was,” Nettles said. “I wanted so badly to be able to teach and to lead. That seemed to be what I was being led to at a very young age.”
She married a Baptist man at 17, after graduating from high school. They divorced in a matter of years and Nettles became a single mother to two young children. With only a high school diploma, her employment options were limited, so she went to Clark College and then transferred to Central Washington University to study chemistry, the single Black face in a sea of white. She was the first of her siblings to graduate from college.
She wasted no time blazing a trail in the professional world, where once again, she was not just the only Black person in the room but also the only woman. She was hired as a semiconductor engineer with Tektronix and then became an engineering manager at Burr-Brown Corp. in Tucson, Ariz. She worked her way up the management ladder and took her skills to NEC Corp. of America, where she served as worldwide quality control manager, traveling to division headquarters in Germany, France and elsewhere. She was laid off in 2009 but looked at the pause in her career as a chance to reassess her goals.
“I realized that I had reached an age where I really wanted to follow my passion, and my passion was people and Christ,” Nettles said. “I wanted to inspire and motivate people and not do any additional harm.”
Nettles is especially empathetic toward those who’ve been wounded by past experiences with church groups.
“I wanted to come from a place of love and inclusion and so anybody who walked in felt that message, so we’re coming from a place of love and not of sin,” Nettles said.
This message inspired the name Love at the Cross, which meets from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. Sunday mornings on the campus of Riverside Christian School, 463 N. Shepherd Road in Washougal. Some gatherings are online but a few members attend in-person masked and socially distant worship services, in accordance with Washington’s pandemic guidelines.
It’s a small but tight-knit congregation that literally began with a dream, although the path to achieving that dream had many switchbacks and hairpin turns.
In 2010, Nettles was ordained as an associate pastor in the church where her family had worshipped for nearly 60 years. Soon after, Nettles said she experienced what she believes were racially motivated conflicts with congregational leaders and later discovered that the paperwork confirming her ordination had never been filed.
Deeply hurt, Nettles stepped away from her pastoral duties and moved to Seattle, but missed the spiritual work she felt she’d been called to do. After about three years, she reconsidered.
“I had been really praying and talking to God and trying to figure out where to go next,” Nettles said. “It came back to me that I should come back to Vancouver, mainly because of my mom, but I didn’t want to give up the passion of my heart.”
Meanwhile, the Vancouver worshippers had joined another congregation in Tigard, Ore., but that was too far for Nettles’ aging mother to travel. Nettles hoped to start her own congregation in Vancouver and began searching for possible locations.
“People were saying, ‘Why don’t you do it at home or at a hotel?’ but I really, really, really wanted a church,” Nettles said. “I was praying about it when I fell asleep and I saw this church nestled in a hillside with water running beside it. I thought, ‘Wow.'”
She mentioned the dream to her neighbors, who said that what Nettles described sounded like Riverside Seventh-day Adventist Church in Washougal.
“I Googled it and I got in my car and drove past it,” Nettles said, “and it was the church I had seen in my dream.”
Nettles contacted Riverside officials, who agreed to lease their meeting hall to Nettles’ fledgling congregation. Love at the Cross was granted a charter under Grace Communion International and held its first worship service at Riverside in October 2016.
Today, the Nettles are still the only Black members, though Nettles is determined to broaden the congregation’s inclusive mission by hosting events like its annual Black History Month Celebration in February (see box on Page D1).
The church partners with a sewing group to make “comfort quilts” for those who are sick or suffering; many quilts have been donated to PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center and some have been sent as far as Texas and Alabama. The group made baby blankets for Washougal’s Pathways Pregancy Clinic and sewed 150 book bags for a January 2019 mission to Kenya, where they were given to Kenyan children along with stuffed animals from the Portland Winterhawks ice hockey team. Last year, the sewing circle turned to mask-making to help slow the spread of COVID-19.
In June, partially in response to the pandemic’s disastrous economic impact on struggling families, Nettles formed Family Compass, www.familycompassnw.org, a nonprofit organization that helps people with education, employment, housing, health care and food. Nettles is working with the city of Washougal to secure land for a housing community using repurposed shipping containers.
Nettles serves on the Washougal School District’s advisory board on diversity, equity and inclusion. Grace Communion International — the denomination that, in its early years, prevented Nettles from fulfilling her calling to teach and lead — now seeks to learn from her perspective as a Black woman. She serves on its national advisory council for diversity, equity and inclusion.
“We have to move from anger to ‘how do we change the culture?’ Changing the culture is paramount,” Nettles said. “We don’t have to go back 200 years to slavery. It’s hard to be an African American standing in front of you today.”
Nettles is not naive about racism’s painful wounds or our profound political and religious divides, even in her own flock.
When white friends or congregants tell her that she’s not like other Black people, Nettles explains that she’s not different, that she’s “had the same challenges my Black brothers and sisters have had,” but believes those challenges can be a source of power rather than divisiveness. That’s what inspires her, she said, to keep working as a pastor and community leader.
“Our love for each other has to trump our pain,” Nettles said. “We’re not that different. There are more things that unite us than separate us … You know, we are neither Democrat or Republican. We are children of the Most High.”
