Chapter 5: You Have No Idea

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 really didn’t have any idea what I was getting myself into. I’m not saying that pastoral ministry in Utah is harder than anywhere else, and I can think of a lot of different places that would be harder to pastor than Utah. In the Evangelical Free Church, CenterPoint Church is part of a district that also includes Southern California and, let me tell you, I often find myself thinking that pastoring in Southern California would be far more difficult than Utah.   

In recent years, I’ve been hearing many California pastors lamenting the great ‘Texodus’—churchgoers leaving California and moving to places like Texas, Tennessee, Idaho, and even Utah. I know a little bit about that; in 1989, we were moving out of California at a time when everyone seemed to be moving in. A pastor friend told me how unwise it was to leave a good church in Orange County: “Once you leave, you might find it hard to move back in.”

And it wasn’t just him; many of our friends and family were concerned about where we were moving. We had four kids aged one, three, six and eight. People wondered how our kids would adapt to growing up in a place where everyone—statistically everyone—in their schools belonged to the same religion. Will they have friends? Will they be accepted?

I’ve learned something about doing ministry in the place you live: the attitude you bring to it is everything. Our desire to embrace both the people and the place is what drove us to Utah Valley. My kids had their challenges, but they have had a great experience growing up here. They made friends both inside and outside of our church, and we can honestly tell people today that we can think of no better place to raise kids than this valley.

A Brief History of the Church in Orem

Going back to that night in California, when it came to the kind of difficulties we would face, I had no idea from where the greatest challenges would come. I expected them to come from the Latter-day Saint culture that permeates the valley. That has not been the case.

Across our many years of ministry in Utah, the greatest challenges we faced came from the culture—the values, practices, and attitudes—of the church that we came here to lead.

From very early on, I knew that the culture of the Evangelical Free Church in Orem needed to change. It was a fairly typical, non-LDS-church-in-Utah kind of church in those days. The church was established in 1945 by a group of steelworkers who had come to Utah Valley to work at the newly opened Geneva Steel. Several new local churches were started at this time to accommodate these immigrants to Utah Valley. These newly arrived immigrants could see that even though there were churches here, they were not a kind to which they were accustomed.

This meant that the founders of the Evangelical Free Church in Orem were outsiders within the culture in which they now lived. For the most part, they were unprepared to respond to the spiritual challenges of living in an environment that was overwhelmingly LDS. When we first arrived, the founders of the church described the opposition and difficulties they faced here in great detail: discrimination at work, isolation in their local communities, how other children in the neighborhood were not allowed to play with their children. It wasn’t easy.

A high point in the story of the Evangelical Free Church in Orem came in 1965, when the congregation raised funds to construct a building across the street from Orem High School. It was a thrilling moment for the church. That building made them feel like they were a more established part of the community.

The church remained isolated. Over time the church developed a fortress mentality, where people went to protect themselves from the cultural dominance of Mormonism. I’ve met many Orem High graduates over the years who have said things like, “I always wondered what that building was.” The problem with a fortress is that people tend to get picked off. A number of the founders of the church endured the painful experience of seeing their children married and converted to the LDS Church.

The Church Where Pastors Come to Die

The idea of actually reaching Mormons was far-fetched in the minds of the first generation of this church; they were just trying to survive. And the size of the church largely depended on the number of people hired from outside the area for work here in the valley. No one was coming specifically to minister to Utah Mormons, and they quickly realized how difficult it was to live here as a non-Mormon once they arrived. When we moved here in 1989, we realized that the congregation of our new church would rather live almost anywhere else but here. They felt stuck.

And that culture needed to change.

The hard part, the part I could not foresee that night in California, was how hard it would be to change the culture of our church. Several years after we arrived, I met one of the former pastors of the church and learned that this church had a nickname: The Church Where Pastors Come to Die. By that he didn’t mean that the former pastors of this church actually died on the job (praise Jesus); he meant that this place was so discouraging that pastors didn’t merely leave this church, they left pastoral ministry altogether. By 1988, the Evangelical Free Church of Orem was defeated and depressed—an endangered species waiting to die out.

The People Not Yet Here

By the grace of God, I was not discouraged by any of this. Before we moved here, I asked one of the few young leaders in the church, Dave Holcomb, to give it to me straight. “Is there any potential in this church for growth?”

He said, “The potential is not with the people that are here, but with the people that are not yet here.”

I still get excited when I think about that.

The first step was to move from a fortress mentality to an outreach mentality. Matthew 16:18 gives us the first mention of the Church in the New Testament: “I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it,” Jesus said. In this definitive statement on the Church, Jesus describes a force advancing and moving against fortress gates, seeking to set free those trapped behind those gates. It’s Hell that has a fortress mentality.

And in those early years, I worked tirelessly to communicate to our new church that the Church is not endangered, the Church is dangerous—a danger to corruption, a danger to oppression, a danger to evil, a danger to Hell itself. When it seeks to live by the mandate that Jesus gave us, to “go and make disciples of all nations,” the Church is not stuck or isolated, but always on the move and always pressing in.

Before we agreed to come to Utah, I wrote a letter to the Evangelical Free Church in Orem. I didn’t want the changes that were coming to take anyone by surprise, so in that letter I said that we needed to honor the service and sacrifice of the first generation of the church, but that we were not coming to keep alive a church on life support. We needed to face the reality that this church was dead and in need of resurrection.

My vision for this resurrected church was for it to reach the people of Utah Valley. I made it clear that I truly believed the church would grow and that we needed to prepare for that growth. To do that, we needed a youth movement. We needed to focus on attracting young families and college students. In a sense, we needed to hold a funeral for the old church and start a new one together.

That was hard for the people of the ‘old church’ to swallow, understandably so. Very few really believed that the church would grow, or even could grow, but there were not a lot of options. So, the people of the church were willing to do what many dying churches won’t do: hand the reins over to a new generation. As our work began, that is the tone that I brought to every message I preached.

A Land of Milk and Honey, Grasshoppers and Giants

The first sermon series I preached at the church was on Numbers 13 and 14. In these chapters, the children of Israel had been freed from slavery and were on the move across the desert to the very edge of the Promised Land. Before they crossed the Jordan and took the land, Moses sent out twelve spies to check things out. Their initial report was encouraging: the land was flowing with milk and honey.

From there, however, the twelve spies divided into two camps. The majority reported, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there… We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them” (Numbers 13:32-33). There were giants in the land. That seemed like an apt description of the way that the people of Orem Evangelical Free saw themselves in contrast with the LDS culture— “we seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

There was another report, a minority report given by Joshua and Caleb, that told a different story: “God can do this. We can take the land.” They were right, of course, but the people chose to believe the majority report instead. So, God barred them from entering the land, they wandered in the wilderness for forty years, and then that generation died.

As I preached on these chapters, I explained to our church that the Israelites died in the wilderness because parts of the culture that they had brought from Egypt needed to die. The real giants were not those that were lurking in the land that God had promised to them; the real giants were the fears that lurked within them. The grasshopper mentality says, “God will never do anything here. If we try to do this, we are going to be devoured,” and that mentality needed to die.

I also began asking people to look at Utah Valley with a fresh perspective—that this is an incredibly beautiful, safe place with a growing economy that is a blessing to call home. What we experienced instead was a disconnect with a lot of people in the church: “I hate this place. If only I could get back to the place I came from.” We found that for many Utah ‘transplants’, the church existed so that they would have a place to go to church while they had the misfortune of living here. However, that wasn’t a universal perspective.

I was encouraged early on by people like Zach Knappenberger. Zach came to Utah Valley to be a teacher at Orem High School, and he was one of the first people in the church that I heard say, “This is where I want to be.” Zach married Karla and they raised their two kids here. In fact, they’re still here and I recently asked Zach about those early years. His insight amazed me.

“Scott, in those days you gave people permission to love their neighbors.”

When churches are unhealthy, the simplest, most basic aspects of the Christian life become radical and life giving by comparison. Jesus was crystal clear in Matthew 22:39, calling his disciples to “love your neighbors as yourself.” Jesus took that even further when he said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-44).

It’s not an understatement to say that churches like ours considered LDS people to be an enemy. There was, and still is, a commonly held belief that ministry to Mormons was all about attacking them and winning arguments. Just like when Israel sought to take the Promised Land, that kind of battle is against people—that’s an Old Testament mindset. In the New Testament and for the Kingdom of God, the battle is always for people.

To be clear, we can’t love people if we don’t love the truth. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and the way that we know about Jesus is the Bible. Everything we believe stands on this foundation. We must love people enough to speak the truth about who God is and what he has done, to not waiver in boldly proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus. This good news and this truth and this Jesus, they compel us to love our LDS neighbors, to care deeply about them, and to desire fullness of life for them. 

That’s a significant departure from, “I hate this place. If only I could get back to the place I came from.”

I knew that our attitude towards the LDS people needed to change, but I had no idea how hard it was going to be to change it. Back in 1989, I thought a sermon series on “taking the land” was all it would take. Once I finished with that series I hoped everyone would get on board. “Now we can go out and win the valley for Jesus!”

It took forty years for the grasshopper culture in Israel to die in the wilderness; I should have seen it then—culture change doesn’t take place overnight. Even today, we still fight the drift towards negativity and fear when it comes to the place and the people we have been called to live among and serve.