The LDS Church lives with a tension: it would love to distance itself from the practices and beliefs that once put it on the margins of American society. At the same time, it cannot distance itself from those things without distancing itself from the foundations of its faith. The more it seeks to join the American mainstream, the more it undermines its own foundations. How does it continue to move into the mainstream without undermining its unique claims to authority that arise from the early period of its history? This is the tension that Mormons live with.

This tension is experienced most clearly in three areas…

My experience as an outsider interacting with Mormons for the last four decades is that there are times when Mormon Utah seems so normal and all-American. I will admit that I find it attractive. There are moments as we live here in Utah when you get the feeling that this is the way America is supposed to be. There is another experience that occurs when you live in Utah. It is when we have those “Oz Moments,” when we realize just how different this place is.

The reason there are two different experiences is because the LDS Church has a story, and Mormon culture is a product of that story. There are two distinct periods of Mormon history. From 1820 to 1890, we have the period when Latter-day Saints, by and large, conflicted with American culture…

In Acts 1:8, the resurrected Jesus sends the apostles out to “be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The apostles were eyewitnesses to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As they move out from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, that message does not change, but the way it gets communicated does.

We see this when Peter stands up and preaches in Acts 2 in Jerusalem. He does so as an insider. He addresses his listeners as “Fellow Jews.” When he speaks to his fellow Jews, he does so by referring to the Scriptures that all Jews believed in. The heart of the message is that “This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead…”

A year or two after I became a pastor, I was floundering a bit trying to find my footing in my new role in our church in Cypress CA. The reality was that we were living in Orange County, California, a very expensive place to live. We were living on an associate pastor’s salary, and we had just had our fourth child. I really did not see how we were going to make it financially.

One night I came home, and Sara and I turned on Jeopardy!. I started playing along, and I was getting a lot of questions right. At one point, Sara said, “You are pretty good at this.” I watched until the end of the show, and I heard the announcer say, “If you would like to be a contestant, call this number.” I thought, “There it is.”

A big part of CenterPoint’s story is the fulfillment of the vision to build a building on the freeway. In doing so, we went from a place where we were hard to find to a place where we were impossible to miss. From 2016 to 2026, the church has grown from under 400 to around 2,500. In the fall of 2026, CenterPoint is opening a new campus in Payson, 25 miles south of Orem.

Some of this growth has come from move-ins, but primarily the growth has come from the people of Utah Valley. The growth of CenterPoint is not measured in buildings but in changed lives. One way to measure that is in baptisms. Since COVID in 2021, CenterPoint has baptized over 1,100 people. The Lord has done way more than we would have ever asked or thought.

We bought the land on the freeway in 2007 and immediately began making plans to build. We worked with a company that handled every aspect of the construction process. They gathered input from people throughout the church, and the result was a very ambitious—and very expensive—building. Even so, we moved forward with confidence.

Our building campaign was scheduled to kick off on the Sunday after Labor Day in 2008. The timing could not have been worse. At the end of that summer, the economy collapsed, ushering in the Great Recession of 2008. Many of those who had committed to give toward the project were no longer able to do so. Our plans to build were dead on arrival…

As we entered the 2000s, I was exhausted.

At home, Sara was recovering from Stage 3 cancer, and my brother Keith had died from pancreatic cancer. At church, we had endured several difficult seasons. We were finally able to hire a youth pastor, only to let him go a year later. Our staff struggled with conflicting agendas.

I attended several pastors' conferences and listened to stories of churches that had experienced remarkable growth. The message was simple: Build your church this way, and yours can grow too.

But our context was different…

Looking back at the early years of our ministry in Utah, our goal was to make the church a place that would draw our neighbors. We tried many things to encourage visits, but the real reason the church grew was that we began building an invitational culture where people said to friends and family, “Come and see.” Over time more people caught that vision. Nobody embodied it like Sara. Sara has a true gift of hospitality—she simply makes people feel welcome.

One reason I wanted to do a second edition of this book is that I failed, in the first edition, to adequately convey how impactful her role had been. In Chapter 3 I described how Sara influenced our decision to come to Utah. She also played a huge role in keeping us here…

As we were getting to know our neighbors, we were also getting to know the people of the Evangelical Free Church in Orem. The people in our church lived very different lives from those in our neighborhood. In our neighborhood, we lived among people who were insiders in every way. Our church, however, was filled with outsiders.

The church had been started in 1945 by people who moved from other parts of the country to work at Geneva Steel. Like many churches in Utah, its existence and growth depended on people moving in from the outside…

Orem, Utah, in 1989 was not the first place where a local church existed among “giants in the land.” Consider the overwhelming odds faced by the church in Rome around A.D. 60. They were trying to establish a church in the capital of the Roman Empire, perhaps the greatest military and political power the world had yet known. The believers there needed hope and encouragement.

Where could that hope be found? Paul wrote them a letter and said this in Romans 15:4: “Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.”

We were about to move to Utah in early 1989 when I went out for a walk one night to think and pray and dream about what was ahead. I was fired up and ready to go.

Then a thought occurred to me out of nowhere: “This is going to be hard.”

The conversation in my head continued: “Yeah, I know it’s going to be hard but what an opportunity!”

Then, clear as a bell: “You have no idea…”

I served at Cypress Evangelical Free Church for two and a half years, overseeing small group ministries, youth ministry, and men’s ministry, counseling members, and officiating weddings and funerals. Many of my tasks involved handling the minute details of ministry and keeping things from falling through the cracks. In doing so, my understanding of the local church became much more complete…

I ended up becoming a pastor.

That was certainly not the plan as I began my faith journey. When I look back on my life today, I realize that I ended up going through two distinct conversion moments. The first conversion was to Jesus—being born again, raised to new life. My other conversion was to the work of the local church. When I started my walk with Christ, I didn’t want to be a pastor…

There is one thing that I love about Utahns—they are genuinely friendly people. It’s completely normal here for strangers to meet and talk to one another without pretenses, something that I believe LDS missionary culture has made more normal here than almost anywhere else in the States. Many Utahns have served on missions for the LDS Church, where they became experts at engaging in genuine conversations with complete strangers. It’s not hard to get to know people around here when so many of them are former missionaries.

In 1996, I had the opportunity to meet the University of Utah men’s basketball coach, Rick Majerus. Coach Majerus was one of the most well-known Utah residents during the 90s; he and the Utes were on an amazing run in those years, making it all the way to the NCAA national championship game in 1998. As a non-Mormon, he was very much an outsider in Utah culture. And he was also quite a character, never shying away from ‘telling it like it is.’

I began writing Keep Showing Up in 2019 and it was published in 2021. It took me much longer than expected to complete because it went through so many revisions. I finally sent a manuscript to an editor, who helped me develop a finished manuscript. The first edition of Keep Showing Up was then printed and became available on Amazon. We also bought copies and made them available here at CenterPoint.