Preface & Introduction

Preface

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.

With the rewrite we are going to do things differently. I guess you can say that I am going “old school.” I recently learned that some 19th century books like Dickens’ Great Expectations were written in serial form, published one chapter at a time in a magazine from week to week.

In that spirit, I am going to publish the revised edition, Still Showing Up, in the serial fashion—one chapter a week.

We will send each chapter to those on our email list, where we will link people to our website: scottandsaramckinney.com. I want to thank my friend, Jack Reece, for editing this book for me. I am also grateful for my niece, Amanda Patrick McKinney, for managing the website. Jack and Amanda are amazingly gifted in what they do, and I could not do this without them.

I am also doing it this way because I feel a sense of urgency. God is moving in this region. I want to do what I can to encourage this movement.

It is my hope to involve the people we know and those that have supported us over the years. One way people can be involved is to share it widely.

The goal is to rewrite the book over the course of a year. A lot of the content will not change, but there are some chapters I would like to add and some things that are no longer as relevant that I will not include. One thing that I will include are people’s stories, stories of their journey towards Jesus in Utah.

My hope is that the rewrite will be completed by the end of 2026, at which time we will decide what should be done with what I have written. I want to invite you to join us on this journey this year.

Introduction

In 1989, my wife Sara and I moved from Southern California to Utah Valley to pastor what was then known as the Evangelical Free Church of Orem. I had the privilege of pastoring this church for 35 years until I retired in the summer of 2024. Much has changed in those 35 years. The church is in a new location, on the I15 Freeway just south of the University Parkway exit in Orem. It also has a new name: CenterPoint Church. Nevertheless, the purpose of the church has not changed. We came to Utah in 1989 to grow a church that would reach the people of Utah Valley. Today, CenterPoint Church is doing just that.

Now, that might not sound too out of the ordinary for a church. Talk to any pastor and they will speak of their desire to reach their community as a way of fulfilling Jesus’ Great Commission: “go and make disciples of all nations.” But when you are leading a church, there is frequently an alternate, default vision that pastors feel pressure to fulfill: “What is it going to take to make everyone in this church (or at least the people that mean the most to me) happy?” When making people happy on the inside is the goal, you tend to forget the community that the local church is called to reach on the outside.

I can say that CenterPoint Church today really does exist to share the good news of Jesus Christ with the people of Utah Valley. CenterPoint’s location is its unique defining trait. There is no place in America like Utah Valley. Utah Valley is itself the center point of a vastly influential religious culture dominated by another church: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known commonly as the “LDS Church”).

We came to Utah with the conviction that “God loves to do things in places where people say that it cannot be done,” and in 1989, Utah Valley was such a place. At that time there were a dozen or so evangelical churches in Utah Valley, and they all had one thing in common—they were struggling to survive.

Our church was dying. In the first 3 months of 1989, the average attendance was around 25 people. In the minds of those people, growing a church that could reach the people of Utah Valley was a preposterous idea. The church was old and tired. It did not need to be revitalized. It needed to be reborn. The story of CenterPoint is that of a church that went through a death and resurrection.

By the time I retired in the summer of 2024, CenterPoint had grown to around 1300 people worshiping together on Sunday mornings in three services. Most of these people were coming from an LDS background. The baptismal at the old church building had cobwebs in it when we arrived in 1989. After my retirement in the summer of 2024, we baptized 154 people in the Provo River in a single day. God had done something that could only be explained by His presence and power.

Passing the Torch

My retirement in the summer of 2024 had been in the works for over 5 years. I was about to turn 70, and I had already watched several churches where long term pastors had gone through leadership transitions. It can be a dangerous time for a church, and I did not feel like it was wise to just wait and let it happen. Letting it happen would mean one of two things: 1) I would show up one Sunday and say, “I can’t do this anymore;” or 2) one day the church would have to tell me, “You can’t do this anymore.” Either of those scenarios would not have been good for CenterPoint.  

If I was going to shepherd this church well, then I could not let this leadership transition just happen. That is why, in 2019 (when I turned 65) we initiated a transition process and developed a plan to hand the leadership of the church over to the next lead pastor. Through this process, I did not want to see CenterPoint lose its unique vision— “We want to make Jesus the CenterPoint of our lives and make Him known from the CenterPoint of Utah Valley.” How do you pass that vision along?

In 2019 I started writing a book called Keep Showing Up. I made the purpose of the book clear in its first pages: “In the coming years, there is going to be a necessary transition for CenterPoint where I will no longer be the lead pastor of this church. There are some important things I want to pass on to this next generation of leaders.” Keep Showing Up was written for the next generation of leaders at CenterPoint, and specifically for the next lead pastor.

We identified Mike Smith as a potential next lead pastor in 2019. Mike was a campus pastor at Mountain View Fellowship, a sister church in Heber City 30 miles away. When I handed Mike a rough draft of Keep Showing Up, I told him that I was writing it for the next lead pastor of CenterPoint. Mike read it and said, “If this is who you are then this is where I want to be.” Mike came on staff in the fall of 2019. 

I remained Lead Pastor until Mike stepped into the role in July of 2024. The Lord has used this book to help CenterPoint maintain its DNA; the title of the book says a lot about who we are as a church. So often when pastors write about their ministries, you get the impression that they had a plan, they worked the plan, and they became successful. It hasn’t worked that way at all at CenterPoint.

We have learned a lot of things the hard way—I have made many mistakes. We’ve taken some wrong turns. But at the heart of CenterPoint’s story is that we have found something that mattered, something that was worth doing. We had a vision to see God do something that could not be done, apart from Him doing it. We kept showing up to do it.

Catalysts and Culture Shifts

Since my retirement in the summer of 2024, CenterPoint has continued to grow at a strong and steady pace. In the Fall of 2025, CenterPoint experienced explosive growth, largely due to a single, catalyzing event. On September 10, 2025, only a half mile away from CenterPoint, Charlie Kirk was assassinated on the Utah Valley University campus.

Obviously, Charlie Kirk’s death was nationwide news. But for the people of Utah Valley, it hit home, and something unexpected happened. On the following Sunday, CenterPoint had 750 more people in attendance than the week before. We were shocked, exhausted, and left wondering: Why would people start coming to a church like ours after a horrific event like that?

This is where the culture of our valley comes into play. Utah Valley has the most religiously observant population in the United States; more people attend church here than any other place in the nation—until recently. Over the last four decades, increasing numbers of people have begun to leave the LDS Church. In the 1970s and 1980s the LDS Church retained almost 80 percent of its members. Today that number has slumped to 36 percent.

Do not misunderstand, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is wealthier, more influential, and more powerful than it has ever been. At the same time, the body of the LDS Church is changing. The people I meet and live near no longer feel the same kind of connection that they once did to the church that existed a generation ago.

The assassination in Orem in the fall of 2025 was a destabilizing event, and it made sense that people would head back to church. The question was, which church? And an equally important question for CenterPoint, what would we do if a sudden influx of people from an LDS culture came to our church one Sunday—would we be ready?

CenterPoint was ready because the people have continued to do what we set out to do in 1989—they have kept showing up. In the Fall of 2025, CenterPoint saw an average Sunday attendance of 2,500 people, and over one hundred people have been baptized. A building for a new CenterPoint campus was purchased in Payson, 25 miles south (to be operational in 2026).

What has happened at CenterPoint over the last few years is the continuation of an amazing story that began a long time ago. This is not a church based on a single personality—my personality—it is God who continues to use the leadership of CenterPoint to lead this church as it seeks to fulfill His purpose. And His purpose for CenterPoint remains the same, to keep showing up making Jesus known from the center point of this valley.

A New Kind of Showing Up

The summer of 2024 was the right time for me to retire, and after retiring, Sara and I needed to ask a hard, practical question about the future: What is my relationship with CenterPoint going to be now that I am no longer Lead Pastor? CenterPoint remains our church family. We help and serve where we can. Just as in any family, relationships change over time.

We have seen this in our own family. Sara and I have four children. They’re adults now with their own careers. They are raising their own families. We have sixteen grandkids. We love all of them, but our relationship with them is different now—Sara and I are no longer in charge. That is how I feel about CenterPoint. My love for CenterPoint is undiminished, but I am no longer in charge.

At the same time, I have a lot left to give and the Lord has led me to something new. CenterPoint Church is part of a denomination called the Evangelical Free Church. I have taken a new position with the EFC, as “Regional Catalyst” for Utah and Southern Idaho. My goal is to encourage churches in this region to reach the people in those places where they are located.

There are a dozen or so churches in our region with whom we work, each one in its own unique community. What the churches in this region do have in common is that they are all (to varying degrees) located in places where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a powerful cultural influence. My hope is that the things I have learned as the lead pastor of a church at the center point of this culture will be helpful to churches throughout the region.

Most of the things I want to share with these churches are the things I wrote about in Keep Showing Up. I began reading Keep Showing Up again as 2025 came to a close, and as I read it, it became apparent that the important things I learned, those foundational and fundamental things about ministry in Utah, have not changed. But many other things in this region have changed.

We are living in a different world than the one that existed in 2019. Utah has changed. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has changed. The evangelical community in this region has changed. The global church experienced substantial change during the worldwide pandemic in the early 2020s. And just as importantly, my own perspective has changed. I am not the Lead Pastor of a local church but now have a role where I serve multiple churches.

Why this New Edition?

When I closed the back cover of the book I had written seven years ago, I came away with the conviction that this book needed to be rewritten, rewritten with an awareness of the changing realities that we face in this region and with a larger audience in mind.

I have had some hesitation about taking on this project. I’m not a writer; I’m more of a talker. But I’m writing because there are some things that I want to say to the church and this next generation of leaders in this last chapter of my ministry. For that reason, 2 Timothy, written at the end of Paul’s ministry, has taken on special meaning to me. In 2 Timothy 2:2, Paul gave Timothy this mandate:

The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.

I am sure that Paul had talked to Timothy about the importance of passing onto others what had been passed on to him, and we would not know about that instruction today if Paul had not written it down and sent it to Timothy in a letter. Yes, something powerful happens when you sit down with people one-on-one and share your life and the truths that bring life.  If your influence is limited to your ability to get together with people and spend time with them in person, then your influence will be limited. That is why in this last chapter of my ministry, I feel compelled to rewrite Keep Showing Up.

The first edition of my book was self-published and primarily sold on Amazon and made available at CenterPoint church. It was not a best seller, but I am surprised by how much the book has been passed around to people outside our church. It has made an impact on people in ways that I did not expect.

The first edition has had a profound impact on current members of the LDS Church. The book was not written for them—it was written for the people of CenterPoint—and I was concerned how Latter-day Saints would react to it. After living here since 1989, I have naturally developed very close relationships with members of “The Church.” Their feedback has been encouraging, and many of them have expressed their appreciation that I would so openly share my honest perspective.

They have also shared that they appreciate the tone; there was a tone to Keep Showing Up that I seek to maintain in the relationships I have with my LDS friends. Simply put, I am not trying to argue them out of their faith, nor am I trying to get them to leave their church. I am pointing them to Jesus. It is the same approach that Jesus took with a Samaritan woman in John 4, a passage central to our ministry through the years.  

I have also been surprised by a second group of people who have benefited from the first edition of my book: people that are leaving the LDS Church. People often tell me how much it means to them to be understood as they navigate the challenging journey from the LDS faith to a different community. My hope is that the Lord would use what I am going to write in this second edition to help people on that path.

Over the last generation, God has done a great work in our region. The harvest has already begun. I write in the hope that the harvest would continue. That is why I am calling this rewrite Still Showing Up. My prayer is that in this next generation, we would be able to say that Jesus’ Church is still showing up.