St Ansgar Lutheran Church

11/08/2025

Last week, a group of over 20 members of the former St. Ansgar Lutheran Church met at the O'Malley's for food, fellowship and fun. It was so wonderful to get together again. Our ministerial chronology was saved and is displayed when we get together. In typical St. Ansgar style we collected food for Project Feed and money for Hope Acts.

12/16/2024

Members of the former St Ansgar Lutheran Church met last night at Mayo Street Arts in Portland to listen to the St Lucia Procession with Northbound. We followed the performance with dinner at Kon Aisian Bistro. Mayo St. Arts is housed in the original St. Ansgar before the congregation moved Woodford St. One member in attendance was baptized there!

12/14/2023

Members of the former St. Ansgar Lutheran Church were blessed to part of HopeGateWay’s opening celebration on December 10. Their reimagining of our former worship space was inspirational to see! Congratulations!!

11/09/2023

Last weekend St. Ansgar’s painting of Jesus the Good Shepherd was delivered to Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in Montpelier, VT.

08/03/2023

Monday I had the pleasure of delivering 13 boxes of documents and photographs to the Lutheran Archives in Philadelphia. Archivist Shelia Joy accepted our collection.

07/01/2023

We are so excited to pass along the stewardship of 515 to HopeGateWay! We are filled with gratitude for their spirit-filled energy!

Today HopeGateWay became owners of the building the former St Ansgar Lutheran Church built and occupied for the last 62 years. This process has been Spirit led and inspired by our shared values of inclusion and progressive Christianity.
We are overwhelmed with the possibilities to which this leads our community.
We will spend the summer putting in new bathrooms and spiffing up the place that has been well maintained throughout its life.
Our business condo on High Street is now under contract and our lease for the space we currently rent is coming to an end. All of these circumstances have led us to trust that the movement of the Spirit is at work amongst us.
We are so immensely grateful!

Thanks to the The Dunham Group for being great realtors for this process. And being our realtors for our condo.

Image description: HopeGateWay Leadership Team Chair Margaret Menger, Rev. Sara Ewing-Merrill, Lead Pastor, and Nancy Deane-Loranger, President of Saint Ansgar stand with their arms around one another beaming with joy after signing ALL the papers at Old Port Title for the closing.

06/04/2023

05/17/2023

It has been quite a while since we posted to our page. The community at St. Ansgar has been in deep discernment, wondering how God is working in this place and how we might be called in the next season of our life together.

After consideration, conversation, and prayer, the community made the difficult and Spirit-filled decision to recognize that God’s ministry at 515 Woodford Street has come to a conclusion, and the next most faithful step would be to close.

We are thankful and grateful for your support - faithful followers on Facebook (and those who knew us before the advent of social media). The community is hopeful that the seeds of our 62 years in this place will now take to the wind to germinate the radical, justice-centered and love-filled truth that is God’s unswerving grace.

If you have a memory or a picture of something that happened at St. Ansgar, we’d love for you to post it to the page. We’ll be sure to share these images and comments at our final public worship service on Sunday, June 4th.

10/16/2022

Thanks to all our co-sponsors, our community volunteers, and everyone who turned out yesterday for Beyond the Rainbow Flag with Brandan Robertson and Marpheen Chann. It's not too late to head over to St. Luke's Cathedral to hear Brandan preach at the 10 AM service! After service, head over to Equality Community Center - ECC for their Block party starting at 4 PM!

10/14/2022

Our special guest tomorrow, Brandan Robertson, was just interviewed about his new book: https://religionnews.com/2022/10/12/brandon-robertson-heresy-isnt-the-enemy-in-tiktok-pastors-new-book. Join him and Marpheen Chann at St Ansgar Lutheran Church for Beyond the Rainbow Flag - Sat., Oct. 16 @ 4:00 PM.

(RNS) — ‘I’m not interested in playing the orthodoxy game,’ Brandan Robertson told RNS.