Tim Burgess is early.

In fact, he’s the first one here.

It’s a wet, chilly mid-October night in Ballard, and Burgess is at the Sunset Hill Community Association’s City Council candidate forum. Held in a quaint, 80-year-old community center, the forum is filling up with gray-haired, fleece-wearing Ballardites with notepads and stern looks.

Burgess is working the crowd, passing out campaign literature. He’s tall, well over 6 feet, and rail-thin, with a white, close-cropped beard and receding hairline that would benefit a Roman patrician, or Captain Picard, if he wore a dark blue blazer with a nametag.

Burgess’ opponent, incumbent David Della, strides in, and the forum begins. The two men hardly share a glance as they sit down side-by-side, facing the audience.

The back-and-forth line of questioning from the moderator about development and zoning laws belies a feeling of tension between the two men. But between the tried-and-true positions on “responsible development” and “more cops on the streets,” another issue lurks in the background and is made conspicuous by its absence. It’s the thing that sets Burgess apart from his opponent.

Burgess is devoutly religious.

He’s what friends and family call a strong Christian, an elder at his church and a man motivated by a sense of social justice.

He prefers not to talk about his faith, but the fact that he talks about it at all makes him an unusual candidate. It’s also proved a political liability.

In this year’s most expensive city council race, both sides have raised more than $520,000 in a battle over whoever better represents the liberal values of the majority of Seattle voters.

The contrast between the two men is sharp. Della, a former campus and labor activist and community affairs director at the United Way of King County, trumpets the support he’s received from the city’s Democratic establishment, including prominent local labor groups like the Teamsters and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

As the founder of a successful ad agency for nonprofit organizations, Burgess has taken flack from Della for his business dealings with conservative, evangelical groups like Concerned Women for America (CWA), an anti-abortion group, and Food for the Hungry, an abstinence-based, poverty relief agency that unabashedly preaches the Gospel in the Third World.

Most recently, Burgess has come under fire from the Seattle Gay News, and two reproductive rights grous, NARAL and Pro-Choice Washington, an abortion rights group, for his work on behalf of the CWA and for writing conservative editorials in The Seattle Times in 2005 opposing abortion and gay marriage. Burgess has since partially recanted these positions, and has said that he now regrets having the CWA as a client. He’s also said that he is no longer opposed to gay marriage, and decries what he calls “guilt by association.”

His changing positions have brought accusations of hypocrisy.

“There’s a concern that he’s very two-faced, that he’ll say something to one crowd of folks, go to a candidates’ forum, and then turn around and say something the exact opposite at another forum,” said John Fox, a Della supporter and member of the Seattle Displacement Coalition, a low-income housing and neighborhood advocacy group.

David Domke, a UW professor of communication and a Burgess supporter, thinks that the Della campaign’s efforts to link his candidate to the far right side of the spectrum is a “Karl Rove strategy” designed to frighten liberal voters.

But he does admit that part of the perception of Burgess as a conservative comes from attending Bethany Presbyterian on Queen Anne Hill, which Domke says is seen “as more of an evangelical church.”

Domke said that Burgess’ ties to the CWA and Bethany have given ammunition to the Della campaign in its attempt to portray Burgess in a conservative light.

“There’s this perception that Tim must be part of a group of Christians who support Republicans and conservative causes. … That may or may not be true, but then along comes this information that Tim had them [the CWA] as a client, and it fits this perception, and Della’s been hammering away on this,” Domke said. “That’s his own fault from the past … and he’s got to overcome that in Seattle,” he said.

In other cities, going to church and being actively religious would be considered a positive, but it’s a much tougher sell in Seattle, he said.

Both Burgess and his wife Joleen bemoan the stereotypes they say are unfairly fixed on them. Joleen is particularly frustrated by the caricature of Christians as fundamentalists.

“You hear about liberal Christians doing good works and things like that and being involved with the poor, but people don’t pay too much attention to that, and when they hear ‘Christian,’ they just put their hackles up, and that in this campaign has been really hard,” she said.

Both are active members of Bethany Presbyterian, where Burgess has been an elder and involved in “environmental stewardship” efforts.

His wife is quick to differentiate her husband’s beliefs from that of the religious right. As for his ties to conservative groups, she said that it’s unfair to automatically assume that he agrees with their views, out of the 100 or more clients he’s had over the years.

According to his wife, Burgess is not a friend of fundamentalism.

“He’s hated the religious right,” she said. “It reflects poorly on those who really seek to do what God is asking of us to do. … Not only does it seem like it creates a lot of hate and injustice, but it’s not the message that we want to give out.”

But the message he preaches on the campaign stump is less spiritual and more practical, and one that inspired Burgess to leave his job as a Seattle police detective in 1978. A newly married cop, he was looking for something new.

“A friend of mine suggested that I study the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament,” he said. “It really struck me as very real, and very contemporary, even though it was very old, and it affected my worldview, and it caused me to realize that sometimes we’re called to do special things.”

This calling led him to work for the next seven years for World Concern, a Christian humanitarian group based in Seattle. As an aid worker, he documented the effectiveness of the organization’s programs in East Africa and Southeast Asia.

The experience deeply affected him. “I saw social and economic injustice, I saw public corruption, I saw the brutality of war, and the wealthy reigning over people in unjust ways,” he said.

One story stands out in Burgess’ mind.

In 1978, he was visiting a refugee camp run by the UN on the Thai-Cambodian border when he heard shelling and shooting in the distance. The Thai army was squaring off against encroaching Khmer Rouge guerrillas. In the camp, Burgess was helping in a makeshift clinic for infants.

“One I remember in particular, a little girl who was 8 months old and looked like she was two days old,” he said. An intravenous drip had been administered, and the girl was clearly dying, literally in his hands.

While one of the hardest experiences of his life, he said that it confirmed his belief in an action-based faith.

He said that while he held the girl, he realized that “‘this is really hard, but what a great opportunity to present and to be helpful.’”

In another instance, he saw a pile of grain in India being guarded by security guards in a region hit hard by famine. The exposure to Third World death and corruption was depressing, but he felt like he was at least doing something about it.

“I was there, on the ground,” he said. “I was helping to feed people. I was right on the front lines.”

He carried that sense of mission back home, founding Merkle | Domain, an ad agency with an emphasis on non-profits, such as the American Cancer Society, the Lance Armstrong Foundation and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

“He has always loved his work,” Joleen said. “Every job he’s had, he has loved, and he’s gone on to something else mostly because something else looked really good to him.”

This “gung-ho” work ethic is something that’s been mostly a positive for their marriage, but “it’s something he has to work on,” she said.

But one thing her husband can’t stand is inefficiency.

“He hates meetings that are not well directed — meetings where something could be decided in five minutes and it takes five hours,” she said.

Too much deliberative process makes him antsy, he’s quick to plow ahead, she said.

He likes being in charge and getting things done.

He has been chair of the Queen Anne Community Board, the Seattle City Council’s Ethics and Elections Commission and the Citizen’s Panel on WTO Operations, the review board that examined the police response to the December 1999 riots.

If elected, he has said he will work more closely with the police and fire departments to increase both staffing and oversight. His other campaign planks include mass-transit initiatives like adding more busses and bus lanes, as well as advocating the replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a “surface option” of existing streets.

Charles Royer, a former three-term mayor of Seattle and one of his supporters, said that Burgess’ biggest challenge if he wins the election is developing patience with how Seattle politics works.

“Sometimes process is an excuse for not making the hard choices and taking action,” Royer said, “and I don’t think he’d have much appetite for that.”

Wanting to take charge and get things moving will present its own challenges, said Royer.

But her husband has a thick skin, said Joleen, and would relish the chance to work with people who disagree with him.

“He’s very much a listener,” she said. “He’s not going to write somebody off just because they have a different opinion from his.”

[Reach reporter Will Mari at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]