Chapter 4: Going to Utah
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.
Up to this point, much of my leadership experience had come from coaching. And I was most comfortable in the role of head coach, a role that involved, on an almost daily basis, standing up in front of the team and communicating to them where we were, where we wanted to be, and what needed to change to get there. But I had very few opportunities to speak to the whole church as an associate pastor, which was frustrating to me because I wanted to lead.
I eventually came to understand that more happens in the pulpit than just the teaching and preaching of the Bible. It’s the place where the leadership direction of the church is communicated—something one cannot (and most certainly should not) speak into without preaching and teaching the Bible. The church board at Cypress made it clear that they wanted the senior pastor of the church to do almost all the preaching, which was understandable because the senior pastor, Steve Highfill, was an excellent teacher. I realized at Cypress that even though we loved the church, Cypress was not going to be a long-term destination for us—they already had a head coach.
What I didn’t think is that we would be leaving so soon. Out of nowhere, we were presented with an opportunity to move to Utah.
An Unexpected Road
While serving at Cypress, I met a man named Steve Amy. Steve had been a pastor in Orange County until his life and church fell apart when he went through a divorce. He wandered away from the Lord for a time, and in that period met and married Sonja, a Mormon girl from Utah. After getting married, they realized they had issues and needed help, so they started coming to Cypress Evangelical Free Church together.
Sonja enjoyed our church and wanted to meet with me—she had many questions. I was able to explain some of the main differences between Mormonism and Biblical Christianity, and at one point I shared the Gospel with her.
She told me she wanted to receive Christ and be baptized.
I was actually surprised. “You do?”
Despite all my training and years as a Christian, I had never actually led anyone to Jesus. Since moving to Utah, I have had the opportunity to watch many come to faith, a process that typically takes Mormons years before they are ready to make that kind of decision. Getting baptized was no small thing for Sonja. She was from a family with deep Mormon roots—she understood that in coming to Christ, she was disappointing a lot of family members. But Sonja was ready. She and Steve gave their marriage to the Lord.
They were instrumental in getting us to Utah. Steve and I had a standing appointment for breakfast once a week in Cypress, and he had begun to travel to Utah quite a bit because his sister Jeri had been diagnosed with cancer. His sister was also a Mormon, but not a mainstream Mormon; she was part of a fundamentalist offshoot of the LDS Church. She was in a polygamous marriage where she and her sister Claudia were married to the same man. Jeri left this group and her polygamous marriage, and in time she too received Christ.
Whenever Steve was in Utah, he would take Jeri to the Evangelical Free Church in Orem (the church now known as CenterPoint). Before Labor Day of 1988, Steve told me that he was going up to Utah to visit his sister. Without giving it a lot of thought, I told Steve that I had a real heart for Utah.
“If you hear of any churches up there that need a pastor, let me know,” I told him.
That Sunday, as Steve was sitting in the congregation in Orem, the pastor of the church announced his resignation. The reason the pastor gave was that the church was dying and there was no way forward. The reality was that the church did not have the financial resources to bring in another pastor. The situation was so dire that actual consideration was being given to shutting the church down.
According to those that were present, the mood was as somber as you might expect. There was one notable exception. Steve was rocking back and forth in his pew, trying to contain his laughter. In his mind, he had already put me together with this church.
After the service, he told the chairman of the church board, and anyone else that would listen, not to worry because he knew their next pastor: a guy named Scott McKinney from Cypress, California. Later in the day, Steve finally got ahold of me on the phone and blurted out, “Scott! It’s all been settled. You’re going to be the next pastor of the Evangelical Free Church in Orem.”
The problem was that I had neglected to mention any of this to Sara, the mother of my four children. When I got off the phone with Steve, she asked me what we’d been talking about. I started to explain how there was this church in Utah that needed a pastor. After getting a clearer picture of the situation, Sara was pretty sure that I had lost my mind. At the same time she was open to me finding out more about the situation.
The church in Orem was open to having me come out and speak, so on the last Sunday of September in 1988, Steve and I drove to Orem to check things out. The first thing I noticed about Utah Valley was its incredible beauty; I was blown away by the fall colors on the mountains. The next thing I noticed was that there was an LDS church on every other block. But it wasn’t until we drove through the campus of Brigham Young University that reality set in. As I looked at the students walking around campus it hit me—ninety-nine percent of them were LDS. I was overwhelmed by the size of the school and the obvious wealth that the church had at its disposal to build such a place.
It was at that moment that I began to question my sanity. You’re thinking about coming here to pastor a tiny little church that will grow to the point where it makes a difference in this place?
Later that night we met with some of the leaders of the church in Orem for dinner. I listened to their stories and asked questions about the current state of the church. The picture they painted was of a church that had grown old and seemed set in their ways. A church of people that did not like living in Utah, that did not like Mormons. They had very little hope that anything would change, and it almost seemed like they were trying to talk me out of coming.
I went to bed that night thinking, “Well, that was depressing.”
A Very Specific Calling
I called Sara the next morning before I went to speak at the church, and she asked, “Do you see any potential there?”
“Absolutely none,” I said, “This is the most negative situation I have ever seen. I’ll tell you more tonight when I get home.”
After I finished apologizing for getting her worked up about moving to Utah, I left for the Evangelical Free Church in Orem. At that point on Sunday morning, I was fully convinced it wasn’t going to happen. I was wrong.
As I stood up and gave the message something happened to me. I looked at the people of that church and had what I would call a “like sheep without a shepherd” moment. The seed of vision comes when we realize that things are not what they are supposed to be. Vision comes to life when God gives us a picture of how things could be—how they should be. As I drove home, I had ten hours and 600 miles to think and pray about what could happen in Utah Valley.
I realized that I had something to say to this church. No one wants to go to a church where the people in it hate the people they live around. Churches in California that hate Californians don’t fare very well. Churches in Utah that hate Mormons don’t fare very well either. And so, I started praying: What if there was a church in Utah Valley that actually existed to love and reach out to their neighbors? What if we became a church that existed to reach the people of Utah
The closer I got to home the more I desired to be the pastor of that kind of church. As I look back at my life and the way that I had felt about being a pastor, I realized that I wasn’t called to be a pastor per se—I was called to be a pastor in Utah Valley. There is something about the challenge of this place that makes me come alive.
The Road to Utah
This was before cell phones, so I had not talked with Sara since telling her that there was no way we were going to Utah. When I got home, I told her that I had come to see things differently, that I believed this might be where God was leading us. I shared all about my sheep-without-a-shepherd moment with her. I was excited.
I said, “Yes, Utah Valley is overwhelmingly Mormon, but it all comes down to how we look at that.”
There is an old story about two shoe salesmen that are sent to an island where no one wears shoes. The first salesman gets there and writes back to the home office, “Send me a ticket home. No one wears shoes here.” The second salesman writes to them, eager and excited, “Send me more shoes. No one wears shoes here.”
I wanted to be the one saying, “Send me more shoes.” The problem with this analogy is that almost all the people of Utah Valley were wearing ‘shoes’ already, but they were a different kind of shoe. And they seemed pretty happy with the shoes they were wearing. But I wasn’t thinking about the obstacles; I was thinking about the opportunity.
Sara saw the obstacles. She made me see them too. I realized that no matter how passionate I was, I wasn’t going without my wife. Sara is a strong woman. She shows me grace, but she tells me the truth. The truth is that it was never her goal to be a pastor’s wife and going to Utah had most certainly never been on her radar. So, I did something that was uncharacteristic for me—I shut up. I prayed and asked the Lord to show Sara if this is what we were supposed to do.
One day as we were on a walk, she grabbed me by the arm and said, “Let’s go.”
Sara is a beautiful woman. She is also amazingly loyal. I have the kind of wife where people look at her and say, “We’re not so sure about Scott, but Sara really seems to love the guy so he must be OK.” She has believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself.
We went back to Orem in December to meet with the congregation so that they could decide whether or not to call us to pastor the church. While we were there, we met with one of the few young couples in the church, Melanie and Chuck Barber. Melanie and Chuck had been assigned with taking us to dinner to calm our fears about raising our kids here. What people didn’t know is that Melanie was struggling with the idea of raising her two boys here.
As Melanie told us much later, she desperately wanted to shout at Sara during our dinner, “Don’t come! Run!”
Chuck knew his wife, and just as she was about to say something, he put his hand on her knee and gave her a gentle squeeze as a way of stopping her. Melanie held her peace. The Barbers remained at the church, and we still laugh about that dinner today. The church called us to come, and in March of 1989, we did.