Episode Description
One guest, one through-line, a lot of ground to cover. Mike sits down with Pastor Mark Knutson of Augustana Lutheran Church — a Portland native who’s spent his lifetime as an activist and more recently at the center of the city’s fights over gun safety, police accountability, and immigrant sanctuary. They trace Knutson’s path from a Franklin High School track rival of Steve Prefontaine to a hospital chaplain on the AIDS ward in the early 1980s, and connect that history to Augustana’s role today: from the Peace Bell with a melted down 60 lb clapper made from surrendered firearms, to the church’s decade-plus sanctuary relationship with Francisco Aguirre, to the slow rollout of Portland’s police oversight board six years after voters approved it. The conversation closes with a lightning round: Hymnal Ranking, Augustana-style.
In This Episode
Mike and Pastor Knutson start with the man himself: Portland roots, Franklin High School (where he ran track against Steve Prefontaine, captained the football team, and served as student body president), a stint teaching for Job Corps in Astoria, a 1980 run for state representative that he lost at 28, seminary, and a hospital chaplaincy internship on the AIDS ward in the early 1980s — the experience he credits with shaping how he thinks about ministry.
From there they turn to Augustana itself, which has grown from roughly 200 members to nearly 900 representing 23 countries of birth, and to Portland’s famously “strained relationship with formal religion.” For Knutson, that tension dissolves once faith is reframed as practice rather than doctrine:
“Faith is the values from my faith that drive me to work for the common good, to measure our society by how the most vulnerable are doing.”
That framing carries into a conversation about the church as a living building — modeled in part on Bethel Lutheran/Bethel New Life in Chicago — that houses community organizations alongside the state’s longest-running jazz gig, and about the “energy points across the city” Knutson sees in Portland’s current wave of nonviolent organizing.
The conversation then moves into policy, starting with Measure 114. Four years after voters passed it, the law is still awaiting a ruling from the Oregon Supreme Court — expected any day — and Augustana is planning a press conference the moment the decision drops. Knutson walks through the coalition that got it passed, from rural Oregon counties to Portland high schoolers.
From guns to policing: Portland’s Police Accountability Board passed with 82% voter approval in 2020 and, six years later, is only now hiring its first executive director. Knutson and Mike dig into the Albina Ministerial Alliance’s long involvement in the fight and push back on proposals to redirect Portland Street Response or Portland Clean Energy Fund dollars toward sworn-officer benchmarks. Mike puts it plainly:
“A number of police officers is not an outcome. That’s an input. Safety is the outcome.”
Knutson also recounts a real-time encounter he came across — a Black retired parole officer surrounded by police with guns drawn — as an illustration of what accountability work is actually responding to.
The back half of the interview centers on Francisco Aguirre and Augustana’s sanctuary story: the 81 days Aguirre spent living under the church altar in 2014, the extortion and death of his son Moses in El Salvador, a recent action by the Governor that Knutson credits to grassroots pressure, and the community turnout Knutson says kept Aguirre out of ICE custody just this past week. Throughout, Knutson returns to a theme:
“We’re not Jesus. You can’t fix everything. You can’t heal everything, but you can do something.”
He closes out the substantive conversation with a list of ways to plug in — Sanctuary Sunday, Lift Every Voice Oregon, the Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice, the Albina Ministerial Alliance — before Mike brings out the game segment: “Hang the Hymnal,” where Pastor Knutson ranks ten hymns blind, one at a time, with no do-overs.
Organizations Mentioned
Augustana Lutheran Church
Albina Ministerial Alliance
Lift Every Voice Oregon
Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice
Portland Street Response
Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon
Catholic Charities
Latino Network
PCUN
Where to Find Augustana Lutheran Church
Sunday services: 2710 NE 14th Ave, Portland — jazz preludes included.
