Chapter 1: “Great Gig”

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.’

We first met at the baggage claim in John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California. Both of us were alone and, since there was nothing better to do while we waited for our luggage, we started talking. I wanted to talk about Utah basketball. He wanted to talk about anything else. So, he asked what I did for a living.

“I’m the pastor of a church just a few miles west of Brigham Young University,” I said. BYU is, of course, the Utes’ archrival.

He looked at me and whistled, “Tough gig.”

He knew. He knew as perhaps only a cultural ‘outsider’ coaching the Utah Utes’ could know. A non-Mormon church in the same town as BYU was the ultimate underdog.

The Heart of the LDS Church

CenterPoint Church, the church I was pastoring in 1996 when I met Coach Majerus, is located at the very heart of a culture dominated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There is no place in America, not even in the Bible Belt, where one church dominates in the same way as the LDS Church does in Utah.

To fully grasp CenterPoint’s context, it’s important to understand the ways in which Utah is central to global Mormon culture. LDS apostle Russell Ballard put it this way in 2015:

In one sense, the Church in Utah is the heart of the worldwide Church body. The heart is a muscle that pumps blood through the blood vessels of the circulatory system, providing the body with needed oxygen and nutrients. The Saints in Utah help pump gospel truths through the entire world—giving the members important spiritual oxygen and essential nutrients. (LDS Living, Sept. 16, 2015)

While the headquarters of the LDS Church are in Salt Lake City, the things that make Utah the heart of the LDS Church are by and large happening 45 miles south in the town of Provo and in its neighbor, Orem—CenterPoint’s home.

Demographically, Orem is the youngest city in the youngest county in the youngest state in the United States. The town’s above-average birth rate certainly contributes to this statistic, but the dominant factor is the roughly 85,000 college students attending the two nearby universities.

Utah Valley University, located only a half mile north of CenterPoint, is the largest university in the state with over 48,000 students enrolled in the 2025-2026 academic year. Despite its size and the emphasis that UVU has placed on establishing its own secular, state school identity, it is still viewed by many in the region as an overflow for Brigham Young University.

In terms of religious self-identification, BYU has a notably monolithic student body. Of the 35,000 students enrolled in 2025-2026, approximately 400 did not identify as members of the LDS Church, meaning a shocking 98% of the student body shares the same religious affiliation.  This statistic may seem surprising at first, but it makes sense when considering the school’s context.

BYU was established in 1903 and named after founder Brigham Young, the second president of the LDS church and the first governor of the Utah territory. Since the beginning, BYU has been governed by the LDS Church Board of Education, a body presided over by the current president of the LDS Church and comprised of high-ranking church leaders. In addition to traditional administrative duties, the Church Board of Education also maintains a strict honor code for all staff, professors, and students.

The BYU Honor Code is enforced for the express purpose of creating a community that follows the religious and behavioral rules of the LDS Church. To ensure ongoing commitment, the university requires that students get an annual "ecclesiastical endorsement" from an LDS bishop or a university-appointed chaplain before enrolling in classes. Since enrollment is conditional upon these religious evaluations and commitment to the honor code, BYU tends to attract a predominantly LDS student population.

As such, BYU continues to hold a prominent role in not only the secular education, but also the religious training, of the next generation of Latter-day Saints. In fact, adjacent to BYU is the Missionary Training Center, where prospective LDS missionaries come from all over the world to be trained before going out on missions all over the world.

Like a heart, pumping oxygen and nutrients throughout the global LDS church body.

There is a dynamism about this place—spiritually, culturally, and economically—that originates from these two universities.  And it is here that CenterPoint Church calls home.  

Mutually Competitive Evangelism

It is CenterPoint’s location that would make Coach Majerus think that being its pastor is a tough gig, and he’s not wrong. But it’s not as some have thought, that we face active opposition or persecution from what we often call “the predominate religion.” That’s not been the case.

The reality is that the LDS people have been kind and nice. This has been a great place to live and a great place to raise a family.

What has made this a tough gig is the feeling at times that we (as in, evangelical Christians) are invisible and irrelevant. That was true when we arrived in 1989, and there are still reasons we feel that way today.

In the Introduction, I stated that people are leaving the LDS Church in increasing numbers. At the same time, I need to be clear—the LDS Church continues to grow and thrive. LDS missionaries continue to be sent throughout the world. People continue to get baptized into the LDS Church. Over the last generation, the LDS church has moved from the margins of American culture to the religious mainstream. Today, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the wealthiest religious organization in the world.

The challenge of pastoring a church like CenterPoint in a place like Orem is that we live in a missionary culture. The LDS people are committed to taking their gospel—that they call the “Restored Gospel”—to the world. That means that we are trying to reach people that are aggressively trying to reach us.

We are as much their mission field as they are ours, and that mutually competitive evangelism creates friction.

The rub between LDS culture in Utah and the culture of churches like CenterPoint comes down to our purpose. When we got here in 1989, the LDS Church was fine with non-LDS churches existing in the valley. After all, non-Mormons that moved here for work needed to have a place to go to church while they lived here. And what better place to share the “Restored Gospel” than to those that voluntarily moved to the heart of the global LDS Church.

But my vision was never focused on reaching the evangelical Christian people that moved here, although that’s certainly a strong part of our ministry.  No, my vision was to reach the people that are from here —the LDS people.

But why do we need to do that? If the LDS people are good neighbors and such nice people, why not leave them alone?

To Seek and Save the Lost

Our God is a God who shows up. When Jesus came to dwell among His creation two thousand years ago, He showed up in a place called Judaea, a place even more religiously monolithic and rigorously observant than the one we live in here in Utah. Of all the people for whom he could have shown up, Jesus came to proclaim the good news to that kind of people.

In Matthew 9:36, we are told that Jesus looked out at these people and saw that they were “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” In Luke 19:10, Jesus stated his purpose in clear terms, “The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.”

There were people that Jesus ministered to that were lost and who knew they were lost. Then there were people that were lost but didn’t know it. I’ve found that the people that are lost but don’t know it are often very religious people.

After being here for 35 years, I can tell you that there are a lot of lost people here in Utah Valley. The issues that plague people elsewhere in our culture, they plague people here. And there is a genuine hunger in this valley for Jesus, for a gospel that actually restores, for a God that actually shows up. We believe that it is worth it to keep showing up with God and bringing the good news of Jesus to the lost who don’t yet know they are lost.

The Role of the Local Church

The primary way that the good news is making an impact in Utah is through the local church. That was not the case a generation ago. When we arrived here in 1989, people thought there was one approach to ministry with Mormons—if you prove to them that what they believe in is false and what we believe in is true, then they will come to Jesus.

During my first year in Utah, someone from an evangelical ministry to Mormons came to me and asked if we would sponsor an event at the high school across the street from our church. He wanted to show a movie highlighting the major problems with Mormonism.

I told him, “Yeah, we’re not going to do that.”

He was shocked and said, “But if you don’t do events like this, then how will the LDS people ever be evangelized?”

My answer was and still is, “We’ll do it through the local church.”

Let me say this loud and clear—the truth matters. We must stand on the solid foundation of truth that is found in the Bible. I also need to say this loud and clear—people hear the truth when they are loved. “Speak the truth in love,” Paul wrote to the Ephesians, and we try to do the same today. When people show up at CenterPoint, they are not going to hear what we are against; they are going to hear about whom and about what we are for.

One major change that has taken place in Utah in recent years is that when someone from an LDS background walks into a church like ours, they have already walked away from many of the central truth claims of Mormonism. We don’t have to convince them that the teachings of the LDS Church are not true. Not only that, but evangelical ministries are no longer the primary way that LDS people are exposed to challenges to Mormonism. In recent years, the greatest influence on people leaving the LDS faith are former Mormons, people like John Dehlin who produces the Mormon Stories Podcast.

Throughout our country’s short history, there have been plenty of reasons to be critical of evangelical churches. I have often said that the greatest miracle of the Christian faith is the resurrection of Jesus. The next greatest miracle is that Jesus uses His church to get His message out. Over the last generation, plenty of people have walked away from the Christian faith too. As I’ve listened to people who have deconstructed their faith, it always seems to involve disappointment with the church and with Christians. Nevertheless, the greatest argument for the Christian faith is still the local church.

In his first letter to Timothy, Paul calls the church “God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.” But how does the church act as the pillar and foundation of the truth? Simply put, the local church makes the truth look true. That’s the opportunity pastors have when leading local churches in Utah. We not only proclaim the truth, but we also make it look true in the way that we live it out.

Not a Tough Gig, a Great Gig

Proclaiming the truth and living the truth. That’s the main reason I can look back today and say that this has not been a tough gig, but a great gig.

Over the last generation, one of the great, untold stories of the Christian church in America is the growth of the church in Utah. There has been a church planting movement in Utah over the last 25 years that has led to substantial growth in the number of evangelical churches in the state. Through the 1990s, there wasn’t a single Protestant church in Utah consistently over 1000 people. Today there are five churches in Utah—Washington Heights in Ogden, The Well in Sandy, the multiple church plants of Alpine Bible Church, multi-campus South Mountain Church, and CenterPoint in Orem—that are all over 2000. There are growing churches in Utah all over the state.

If there has been one common denominator in churches that have grown, it is that they have created invitational cultures, cultures that leave someone feeling like they are home. Cultures that encourage former Latter-day Saints to invite their family and their neighbors, something that will never happen if they know that the LDS Church is going to be ridiculed and degraded from the pulpit. That was their community, even if it isn’t anymore.  And for many, LDS people are still their family.

They don’t need to hear who we are against; they need to hear who we are for.

Today, Mormons are embracing things that they never would one generation ago. It is very common for Latter-day Saints to visit evangelical churches. Many are now listening to contemporary Christian music. Many are now reading Christian authors. On December 14, 2025, LDS Church leadership gave its members permission to read modern translations of the Bible. Many Latter-day Saints are putting down their King James bibles in favor of other translations.

I can no longer say that evangelical churches are irrelevant and invisible in Utah. The LDS Church is very aware of evangelicals and the impact we have had on their members, both current and former. There is an emphasis in modern Mormonism of themes like grace and forgiveness. Mormons talk a lot about Jesus now. Why the change in emphasis? The LDS Church is making a concerted effort to incorporate things that Mormons find attractive in the messages they are hearing from evangelicals. They want you to believe that you can have grace and Jesus in Mormonism, in addition to everything else they are teaching.

That presents a challenge, yes, but also an opportunity. Mormons and Evangelicals are getting to know one another, a significant change from a generation ago.

When we moved here, we had a neighbor who had grown up in Provo. She confessed to us once that, even though she had known of non-Mormons living in the area, she had never actually known any of them personally until our family moved in across the street. At that time, most of the contact that Mormons had with evangelicals were the encounters they had on their missions. In their neighborhoods, we were irrelevant and invisible. Not so much anymore.

Mormons are beginning to realize that we really do love them. But building relationships with our neighbors does not come without its own challenges, challenges born out of our love for these people. If we are really going to love them, then we need to continue to stand for the only Gospel that saves—the one that says we are saved by faith alone in Christ alone and we know that from the Bible alone. The one that says Jesus is enough!

I am so grateful that I got to share that good news in this place. I have come to love this place. This has been a great gig, something important that God has given me to do. Something worth continuing to show up for.