Chapter 7: Coming and Going

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.

In the 1980’s, our church saw almost no conversion growth. Orem EFC had only two baptisms in the decade before we arrived—one was a pastor’s daughter, and the other was a woman in her eighties. There was little reason to believe we would see a movement of people coming to Jesus from within the unique religious culture surrounding us in Utah Valley. Yet that was exactly the kind of church we hoped to become.

The key question was: what would it take?

The answer was, and still is, simple. We must build invitational cultures within the local church—cultures in which people invite their neighbors and friends to come and experience Jesus for themselves.

We were a long way from that. There was an attitude in our church that said, “It will never happen here.” There was a strong momentum moving in the direction of defeat and despair. How do you change a culture of negativity and defeatism into one of joy and hope?

We need hope. As we arrived in Utah, I started looking for like-minded people who shared a similar heart for this place and its people.

I got to know Les Magee, pastor of Washington Heights Church in Ogden. Les was not flashy. He was a soft-spoken, middle-aged man. He led this small Baptist church into a period of sustained growth during the 1980s, and by the 1990s it had grown to nearly a thousand people.

Les had an interesting background. He had been a missionary in Brazil, and he looked at Utah and realized it was every bit as much of a mission field as Brazil. He loved and cared deeply about the people who had called him to lead Washington Heights, but he never forgot that the church existed to reach the people of Utah.

I was encouraged by Les. Whenever I encountered the “It will never happen here” mentality, I pointed to the example of Washington Heights and tried to give people a sense of optimism based on their story.

In response, people in our church would say, “But that is Ogden. This is Utah Valley.”

There was truth in what they were saying. Ogden was, and still is, different. The number one employer in the Ogden area was Hill Air Force Base, where every year large numbers of people relocated for work. In Utah Valley, the largest employer was Brigham Young University, where almost all faculty and students were Latter-day Saints.

It did not take long before people in our church began to believe they had made a mistake in calling me to lead the church. Within a few months, the chairman of our board, Lee Brown, took me out to lunch. He said, “Look, this approach you are trying to bring here is not working. There is no shame in packing up and heading back to California.”

He made it clear that there was a great deal of murmuring and grumbling taking place. As the meeting ended, I told him I appreciated him coming to me, but I was committed to this for the long haul.

Lee had come to me with good intentions. He genuinely cared about me and my family. He had seen many pastors come and go. In the church’s forty-five-year history, Lee thought he was watching a familiar story play out once again. In the past, when enough people became dissatisfied with the pastor, they would stop giving financially, and eventually the pastor would have to leave because there was no money left to pay a salary.

This time, however, something was different. We knew that the church here could not provide a full-time salary. Before we left California, people from primarily two churches—Cypress EFC and Fullerton EFC—came together to support us financially for three years so we could devote ourselves fully to leading the church.

We were not dependent on Orem Evangelical Free for our financial support. That outside support not only allowed us to give our full energy to the ministry, but it also made people in Orem realize that I was accountable to a greater vision.

That support network went beyond finances. People in those two California churches began meeting regularly to pray for us. The effort was led by JAC and Leanne Redford, former Mormons from Utah who had left Mormonism and were attending Fullerton Evangelical Free Church.

This group faithfully supported us through prayer. Eventually, they sent two different mission teams to help build additions onto our building and to host Vacation Bible School programs at the church. They embraced the vision of a church in Utah that existed to reach the people of Utah. They gave us hope.

Over time, that hope began to impact the people in our church. Within the first year, we started to grow. The initial growth came from non-Mormons living in Utah Valley. That growth led us to a defining moment.

Before coming to Utah, I had written a letter to the church explaining that we needed to prepare for growth. We were blessed to have a building, but I asked an important question: “Are we going to build the ministry of this church around the building, or the building around the ministry?”

I mentioned that the sanctuary contained pews that seated only around eighty people. What would happen when we grew beyond that? What was the priority—pews or people? I asked whether they would be willing to sell the pews and buy chairs in order to seat more people. For the first generation of the church, the pews represented security. Most of them believed that the pews were safe- after all, this was Utah Valley.

When attendance grew beyond one hundred people, it became clear that we needed more seating. We sold the pews and bought chairs. The morning the pews were being loaded onto a trailer and taken away, a group of senior members from our church arrived in the parking lot. They stood silently as I helped load the pews. At that moment, we all realized things would never be the same.

In that moment I felt for these people. 1 Peter 5:2, Peter tells pastors to “be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care.” Yes, we had been clear about the vision and direction of the church, but I had also been called to shepherd these people. I could see how difficult this was for them.

What was happening in our church was not unique. Give any church enough time, and it will inevitably go through leadership transitions in which the torch is passed from one generation to the next. It is easy for people to feel as though some new pastor has come in and taken their church away from them.

The important question for us became: How do we care for the older generation of the church?We chose to love them and shepherd them without ever losing sight of the vision. Sara was remarkable in the way she cared for the church’s first generation. At the same time, we tried to help them become excited about the church’s future. I often quoted Les Magee to our seniors: “Let’s build a church your grandkids would want to go to.”

During the 1990s, the church grew in ways that defied expectations. How did it grow? We did begin to see some conversion growth. The baptistry finally started getting some use. But for the most part, growth still came from the outside.

Local computer companies like Novell and WordPerfect began hiring people from all over the country, and many of those families came to our church. As the church grew, we completed two building projects to accommodate the growth. By 1996, attendance had grown to nearly four hundred people. When you experience that kind of growth, it is easy to become excited. But numbers can sometimes mask a deeper reality.

The truth was that we were not all that different from what the church had always been. We were still made up largely of people from somewhere else.

Pastoring a church full of transplants is challenging. People came from many different backgrounds and carried many different ideas about what the church should be. Many who moved to Utah Valley had strong opinions about church life and how things should be done. I tried to explain that they were not going to find the same kind of church they had back home.

At times, it felt as though people came to us simply because we were the largest church in the valley and seemed to offer the most for their families. Since there were few other options, they settled on our church.

People in our church held strong opinions about what now seem like minor theological issues. This was the 1990s, when many churches were preoccupied with end-times prophecy. There were strong opinions about church governance. People pushed for programs that had worked in churches they previously attended.

We argued over worship styles. We had conflicts over preaching styles. We experienced personality clashes and political disagreements. In other words, we struggled with the same issues churches everywhere struggle with.

In addition, there were things that we dealt with that would only be issues in Utah. There were people at our church had different ideas about how we should approach Mormonism. We were committed to making Sunday mornings welcoming to our neighbors. We did not talk about Mormons or Mormonism from the platform. We made Sunday mornings about Jesus. Some people wanted a much more confrontational approach.

Being an optimist by nature, I believed we could somehow make it work for everyone. The reality, however, was that we were a transient church. When your growth depends on people moving in, it is easy to forget that one day those same people may move away.

In the 1990s, many of the tech companies that had attracted outsiders to Utah Valley went through massive layoffs. At one point, twenty-three families in our church worked for Novell, and when layoffs came, almost all of them lost their jobs. During that same season, six of the nine people serving on our leadership board moved away. It often felt as though every time we gained momentum, we lost key people.

Around that time, I read a quote from Utah author Carol Lynn Pearson: “Oh, this world has more of coming and of going than I can bear.” That deeply resonated with me because there seemed to be an endless cycle of people coming and going, and over time it takes an emotional toll. The hardest departures are the ones in which people leave because they no longer believe in the direction of the church. Those departures often feel personal. Part of you feels rejected.

If you are going to pastor for the long haul, you must accept that ministry involves a great deal of coming and going. I gained perspective from Pastor Nate Poetzel of Faith Chapel in Billings, Montana. He once told me: “One way or another, everyone is going to leave your church. Some will move away and be sad to leave. Some will get angry and leave upset. Eventually everyone dies. But one way or another, everybody leaves.”

My struggle with all the coming and going led me to ask a foundational question: Why am I doing this? You can pastor for the wrong reasons. Most pastors I have known are motivated by a genuine love for people, and that is a good thing. But there is a temptation for the unofficial purpose of the church to become “making everyone happy.” That cannot be done. You cannot make everyone happy.

There is another motivation that is equally unhealthy: pastoring people in order to make ourselves happy. It happens when pastors use people as a means to fulfill their own ambitions. Pastors must remember that the people in our churches do not exist to fulfill our vision. In the end, we have to know that the church does not belong to us.

In Acts 20:28, Paul reminds the leaders of the Ephesian church whose church it truly is: “Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.” Over the years I have continually had to come back to this foundational truth. The church that I pastor—with all its comings and goings—does not belong to me. It belongs to Jesus.