part0009

The move to Manhattan Beach severely loosened my grip on that old ring. The project was bigger than anything in my past, leaving little room for control, but that didn’t keep me from trying.

The consequences of failure would now affect my wife and infant son as well as myself. I had long before surrendered my life to the Lord. What I couldn’t surrender were the details. I would follow willingly, if I could spell out the circumstances. Control takes many forms. In this case it appeared as fear.

When we cling to control, we covet God’s position in our lives. This is the root of sin . Lucifer got thrown out of heaven when he tried to take God’s position. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit because it promised power of choice and would make them like God. They lost the joys of the Eden for the sake of independence from God’s plan for them.

When we grasp for control and usurp God’s role in our lives, we slip out of his canopy of blessings. God doesn’t want us to live as robots. He does, however, desire alert trusting people who will obey in the face of risk. The eleventh chapter of Hebrews details the lives of faithful risk takers, those men and women who consistently surrendered their plans to the Lord. They all let go of that proverbial ring.

God expects the same of us. And our move to the beach demanded similar faith and surrender.

We had the use of the Manhattan Beach building plus $150 per month, for just four months, to help with overhead. Ruby and I could take up to 40 percent of the offering per week as salary. However, where there were no people, there would be no offerings. The church building, by that time, had been closed for several months. We planted a new church in an empty, but debt-free, building.

Ruby, our baby son and myself, along with my brother-in-law, Tim Correa, along with his friend Paul Rose, moved to an apartment in a tired section of Redondo Beach in August 1971. The rent was $225 a month. Our life savings were $2,100 (due to inflation, you can multiply those numbers by 10 to get an accurate picture of our situation). We began church services in mid-September that year .

During my years at Granada Hills, a man named Leland Davis was acclaimed as a prophet by everyone who knew him. I wasn’t so sure. A traveling preacher, he made yearly rounds to our church. He would sometimes interrupt his preaching to prophesy to individuals in the church about life-changing details.

I was troubled by it all. I feared that he was a hoax, but couldn’t say so because his sister, Ella, was a dear friend. Then he prophesied to my friend Ray Boyd, Dan’s father, concerning God blessing him in many business ventures. As a result, Ray changed his life plans. Every bit of the prophecy came true. Suddenly, Leland Davis had my attention.

At a later date, he prophesied over me in front of the entire congregation. I was first embarrassed, then frightened as he explained how I would fall out of favor with the church, but eventually be restored to a place of respect and fruitful ministry. I’ll spare you the details, but that prophesy was fulfilled with painful reality, followed by wonderful blessing.

Two weeks before our departure to the beach, Leland returned to Granada Hills. He brought another message from the Lord: “The Lord wants you to know that he is going to do a new work through you and through a church that doesn’t yet exist. You are to trust him and move with the Spirit. It will be different from anything you have seen. It is going to be a brand-new thing; you just relax and trust him to do it.”

Two months later, in Hope Chapel Manhattan Beach, with no possible knowledge of Leland or his words, a woman we’d never met before told us almost the same thing. She addressed her words to the tiny congregation, but I felt God was telling me to trust him and not lean on my own devices.

More than a year later, on the first anniversary of the new church, we hosted a guest speaker named Ray Mossholder. After the service, several of us were hanging out in the back of the auditorium when Ray suddenly said, “Let’s pray.” He soon interrupted the prayer with a “word from the Lord.” It was as if he quoted Leland Davis and that woman—with one crucial difference . He said, “You can’t even pray for this, the Lord is going to do something brand new and you can’t visualize it enough to pray for it.” Again, God was telling us, “Don’t try so hard to control things.”

Someone recently displayed the words “Let Go and Let God!” on a bumper sticker. It is a clever, if oversimplified, way to summarize much of this book. Ours is to be a walk by faith, sight. God is as interested in the process as much as the goal. He wants us to let go, but that is seldom enough. He uses our struggles to mature us toward plans far larger than ours.

Growth usually involves pain. It often works like this: We let go. Then we encounter difficulties and freak out. After that we turn to God, trembling until he rescues us through a miracle.

Paul tells us to rejoice in this process. He writes, “…we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5 ESV) .

Paul further states that endurance generates strength of character, which raises expectations of victory. Victory is assured because of the love of God, which will never disappoint us (Romans 5:4-5). However you slice it, there is a price to pay and a race to run. But, because of him, we win in the end.

Consider a 25-year-old preacher with no guaranteed income, in a car that long ago passed the obvious end of its serviceable life, driving his wife and infant son around in the heat of August, looking for shelter during a housing shortage. Add a three-piece suit and a whitewall haircut in a day when his generation was into long hair and ragged clothes. Place the guy in a church building designed for 66 persons with a parking lot set up for seven cars. Add vision for 2,000+ people and stand him, suit and all, behind a monstrous pulpit trying to preach to a handful of people, including several bikers, a tiny baby and a topless dancer…

You have a picture of a guy with plenty of trouble to rejoice over. You also have a description of me on my third Sunday as pastor of Hope Chapel.

The first Sunday was relatively easy. Only 12 people in church, all friends. We simply sat the people on the front two pews on one side of the aisle and held a Bible study.

A Granada Hills buddy, Ron Parks, drove up from the Marine base at Camp Pendleton. He brought his mother to play the piano, his sister Suzie and her boyfriend Mickey Hall (many years later, Mickey and Suzie would partner with James Edwards to help launch Hope Chapel in Big Bear, California). A young girl from Granada Hills, Diane Bennett, showed up as did Wally and Joyce Larson, who would drive 180 miles each Sunday for three months (two round trips per week) to help us get started. My own household accounted for the rest; including Ruby, my young brother-in-law Tim Correa, his buddy Paul Rose and our six-month-old son, Carl.

By the third week, I was desperate. The nature of our congregation changed radically that day. Suzie Parks brought a friend, Toni Corbett, on the second Sunday. A couple of us went to her house and led her to the Lord two days later. Toni proved to be an evangelist, bringing her mother, two sisters, their boyfriends and about 10 other people. Some of them were rough around the edges while Ruby and I were still quite conservative.

We didn’t know how to serve them. That third week I went home and cried, “Lord, what am I doing here? I’m not cut out to pastor these people. This is out of control.”

Here’s what triggered the pity party. One of Toni’s friends, Mike Howard, prompted the crisis when he tried to open a sticking door. I went to help him. Picture this in your mind—me with my three-piece suit and short hair trying to help this biker clad in a black leather jacket, heavy boots and flaming red hair past his shoulders.

The door wouldn’t open no matter how hard we shoved. Mike got angry, stepped back, and kicked the door open, while cursing it. The door opened. It also got a hole in it. I went home scared, really scared!

I thought I didn’t fit with “those people” and could never adequately pastor Mike and his friends. I wanted to run away from the whole project .

The real problem was my stereotyped view of ministry. It reflected most pastors of the era. When I finally relaxed, those “rough looking, long-hairs” showed themselves as the fruitful backbone of the church.

Incidentally, Mike eventually graduated from a Bible College and served as a pastor. His friend, Randy Weir, began ministry by picking up hitchhikers on Pacific Coast Highway so he could tell them about Jesus. Randy went on to help plant three churches, including one he both planted and pastored, Hope Chapel Ventura. Nearly three decades later, his son, Josh, served with my son in a youth ministry in Huntington Beach and later in Hawaii. Another of those early converts, John Hille, married a wonderful woman named Charlotte Bohot. They eventually planted a house-church in Houston, Texas. “Let go and let God” is not easy, but it sure works.

Despite all the dramatic stories of the early years, I dare not forget one wonderful, if quiet, person. Her name was Mary Deriberprey. This soft-spoken Puerto Rican lady was already retired when we started the church. Yet she remained active in its ministry until she passed away at eighty-plus years of age in 1997. She was, in fact, our first member. The final weeks before the building was padlocked, the entire membership consisted of Mary along with the former pastor and his wife.

The building remained closed for several months and she “discovered us” a couple of months after it re-opened as Hope Chapel. Mary became one of the pillars of our church. Her age and stability demonstrated that Christianity worked in the long term. In those days, she didn’t yet speak a lot of English, but displayed a special kind of hope to our young adults.

It was Mary, by her actions, who taught me that Hope Chapel only exists for “young” people. This includes the physically young along with those gray-haired “young folks” who remain flexible because they exude the love of Jesus. Mary set an example to the young because of her longevity in Christ. She was also a perfect example, to older people, of someone fulfilling her assignment to train the young in wisdom, family and submission to God in every area of life (Titus 2:4-5).

After we moved to Hawaii, her letters were a monthly source of strength and encouragement to us. Her small monthly financial gifts to the church in Hawaii taught us to respect every dollar of God’s money and the sacrifice it represents. I also know her prayers stood strong in the face of satanic opposition to our new church. Mary is a real treasure and one of the first people I’ll look for when I get to heaven.

The name “Hope Chapel” didn’t come easily. My wife and I tossed names around for weeks. We bored our friends with a continual flow of church names. It finally came to three choices. All of them rejects!

Had we thought to check the phone book, we could have saved a lot of wasted energy. As it was, late one night we drove around South Bay only to discover our top three church names firmly attached to existing church buildings. Very depressing!

Our opening date pressed hard upon us. The first service in the “Church-of-No-Name-in-the-Little-Green-Building-on- Manhattan-Beach-Boulevard” didn’t seem real exciting. It was time to lay aside the brainstorms in favor of prayer.

Not to say that we didn’t pray before. But now we let go of the situation and simply committed it to the Lord. We’d open without a name if necessary. God came through in one stroke.

It happened while I was visiting high school students from the church during our final summer in Granada Hills, I was registering them for summer camp. I felt the Spirit tugging in a new direction as I exited a home in Reseda. My next stop was in Santa Clarita, 20 miles to the north. However, as I drove to the freeway, my brain kept getting signals to drive to the Valley Book and Bible Store in Van Nuys. The store was several miles south and out of the way.

The impressions grew stronger as I continued the drive into Santa Clarita. Upon arriving, I gave in to the Spirit and U-turned to Van Nuys. (No, I didn’t quickly finish my business in Santa Clarita. If you let go of the ring, you’ve got to let go completely).

By the time I got to the store, I was fairly convinced that the Lord sent me so he could give me a name for our church.

I felt a little foolish, but I was determined to find whatever God had for us. I decided to walk in the front door, trek straight to the back of the store. If something caught my eye, I would investigate. If not, I would head back to Santa Clarita, assuming that I had not heard from the Spirit.

Upon entry the first thing I noticed was a plaque displaying a crude anchor accompanied by the word “hope.” The same symbol appeared on bookends, jewelry, etc. My cynical mind told me that fish and crosses had reached market saturation, so maybe anchors were good for a few more bucks .

As I walked through the store, nothing seemed noteworthy. I did, however, notice a new book by a best-selling author named Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer had become a hero among counter-culture Christ-followers. As I reached for it, I noticed another book entitled, Symbols of The Earliest Christians. I thought, “Maybe God sent me here to get a church name from this book.” Sure enough, there was that anchor with a detailed explanation of its significance.

During the second century of Roman persecution, no one wore crosses on their lapels or Christian bumper stickers on their chariots. Faith in Jesus Christ could only be secretly revealed to a trusted friend or neighbor.

One method of revelation was for a person to nonchalantly draw a symbol that looked like a backward version or our capital letter, “J.” If his acquaintance were uninitiated, the drawing would appear as mere doodling. However, if the other person were a believer, they would align another, normal J symbol to the first so that drawing became an anchor. The anchor was symbolic of Christ, who is the anchor of our souls.

The whole concept gains significance in Hebrews 6:19 (KJV ): “This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast....”

The symbolism gets better. Early Mediterranean sailors had a trick for overcoming windless days on the ocean. They would load the ship’s anchor into a smaller boat and row in the direction of travel. After the line was fully extended, they dropped anchor. Then, their peers on the ship would winch in the anchor rope, pulling the vessel forward. It was laborious, but it worked. The smaller boat was called a forerunner, but it was the anchor that offered assurance of forward motion—Jesus is our hope; he is both our forerunner and anchor .

We picked up the anchor symbol as our logo and called the congregation “Hope Chapel.”

Though it was a Biblical name, we took flack for it. It seems other pastors dealt in “faith,” which they saw as more valid than hope. In ignorance, they threw away an important scriptural concept. Because of the background of our burgeoning congregants, other churches called us “Dope Chapel.” It’s easy to miss God when we focus on tradition rather than changing hearts. The good news is that many who disparaged those early days of the Jesus Movement later became some of its greatest proponents.

The Lord, though, understands hope and hopeless people. He gave us a name that offers help and a new way of life. Hope is as necessary to the president of a thriving company as it is to the homeless person in the street. Everyone looks for an anchor.

As Hope Chapel Manhattan Beach got moving, I re-encountered an old hang-up. It was fear concerning my leadership potential. I had enjoyed some exciting times in the ministry in Granada Hills. On a couple of occasions, we had twice as many people in youth activities as we had in the Sunday congregation. But, for some reason, the youth group only ever measured about 30 kids in consistent attendance. This was one-tenth of the draw to our major events. As a result, I had worries that I was only capable of pastoring about 30 people. That anxiety eroded many nights of sleep.

When we started the church, we encountered fewer than 30 people for several weeks. There would be 22 people or 24, or 28, then 21 people again—but never more than 30. I was frustrated and prayed for breakthrough. Fear was a blessing, because it drove me to seek the Lord. During that time, I gained a deeper understanding of God and of my role as a pastor.

The funny thing is that our church never had a Sunday with 30-something people in attendance. We jumped from the mid-twenties to the mid-forties and kept growing after that. It gets better as the week we jumped into the 40s I was away, leaving one of our younger members to preach on what turned out to be a breakthrough Sunday. I learned that most of our anxiety is a product of Satanic meddling. God really does want to bless whatever he initiates.

God indeed did a new thing in our church, but it came in some unexpected ways. His help came through the encouragement and example of two very dissimilar people, Robert Schuller and Chuck Smith.

Ruby and I heard Schuller lead a seminar at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. We were impressed with his faith. I had already read his book Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking. In the book, he told of his fears and frustration in early pastoral ministry. He also outlined his intent to seek the Lord, and grow in faith, which he called “possibility thinking.” Over and over in that seminar I heard the statement, “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26 KJV ). He also said, “If there is something you think God called you to do and there is any way you can envision accomplishing it, then it probably wasn’t God. Because God will only call you to do things that are bigger than you are.”

He spoke directly to my frustration. I thought that I couldn’t pastor more than about 30 people. Yet, I felt that God showed me that the church would grow to more than 2,000 people (the actual number he put into my head was 2,200 which is where the first two churches I pastored topped out under my leadership). I even believed that God had directed us to a building that would house a congregation of that size. Both the congregation size and the building cost were impossibilities of the first rank. Schuller’s words rang out as a bid to greater faith.

Dr. Schuller told how he found himself stuck off the side of a highway as he drove from Michigan to California to start Crystal Cathedral (at that time the congregation was known as Garden Grove Community church). He had $500 in his pocket and an electric organ on a little trailer. He was halfway across the country when a rear tire on his car went flat. He pulled off the side of the road only to discover that his tire jack was broken. There was no way to change the tire.

Faced with this problem, he began to pray, asking God for direction. The Lord inspired him to dig a hole underneath the tire with the tire iron. He dug deep enough to get the old wheel off and put the spare. It was a great illustration of God showing us a way to get past any obstacle to ministry.

The primary message of the conference was to “find a need and fill it.” This meant looking for hurting people and praying for grace and wisdom to minister to them. When you address suffering, you’re often forced to find solutions that don’t yet exist. However, the Lord is creative and gives innovative wisdom. He also deals in miraculous answers to prayer. Schuller taught me to walk the unpaved road .

A bit of homework, prior to the seminar, asked each participant to list the 10 greatest unmet needs in their communities.

Ruby and I found several obvious problems in our town. One was the emerging American narcotics revolution. Everyone under 30 seemed to be experimenting with drugs. Churches were upset, but not reaching out. Most Christian leaders condemned drug users without offering any spiritual solution to their predicament.

In those days if you didn’t dress like everyone else, you weren’t welcome in church. People using drugs weren’t putting on white shirts and ties to come to church. God had resourced those churches, but their leaders weren’t willing to share them with the people who needed them the most. We were different. We cared but had few resources. If we jumped into this area of service, God would have to provide financing for us.

Another need in our community was for a church that would minister to single adults. If you weren’t in high school or college, but remained unmarried, the church didn’t know what to do with you. It was worse if you were a divorced woman. Some churches thought of these ladies as “husband-stealers.” If you were a single parent, for whatever-the-reason, you could forget the church.

Since no other church wanted to deal with singles, we chose to get involved. We decided to cut as narrow a slice of the sociological pie as we could and do the best job possible with these people. Finding a need, we set out to fill it. We ran ads in the paper and distributed literature targeted at young single adults, particularly those associated with the drug culture .

You can imagine what happened. Several churches in the South Bay reacted against us. We were “just a hippie church,” and I was a “young punk who wasn’t interested in meeting the needs of whole families.”

But we were involved with families; we wanted to help create them. I regularly prayed that God would turn our church into a “mating ground” for young Christian adults. Too often, I had watched young Christ-followers grow discouraged while searching for a mate. They’d finally wander into a bar hungry for love. Then their life would go down the drain. One or two kids, a divorce and a load of debt later, they would wander back into church looking for help. We wanted to break the cycle.

Ruby and I prayed that God would send single adults into our fellowship. We hoped that he would introduce them to each other and that we could perform many Christian marriages. Hope Chapel Manhattan Beach (now Hermosa Beach) grew on the answers to those prayers and builds strong families as a result. The same prayers held for Hope Chapel Kaneohe Bay (re-named Anchor Church) and then our last church plant, Hope Chapel Honolulu. We still intend to pass the gospel on to the next generation. We realize that the formulation of new families demands that we remain attractive to single adults.

Two weeks before starting the church, Ruby and I attended a one-night pastor’s gathering. We heard a speaker who overwhelmed us with his story. I could easily identify with this man and a lifelong respect for him was born in my heart that evening.

He, too, ministered to young single adults. A lot of them were hippies flocking into Orange County, California. The church he pastored would grow into one of the centers of the still-fledgling Jesus Movement. No counter-culture icon, here was a middle-aged man with a bald-head fringed in graying hair. He wore a tan business suit supported by a black turtleneck sweater. The turtleneck was somewhat radical as he spoke to a bunch of pastors outfitted with suits and ties, including me. Before speaking, he paused and smiled for what seemed like minutes. That smile was a half-mile wide. I’d never encountered such warmth in my entire life.

Of course, this was Chuck Smith, pastor of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California. He told how God had earlier released him from pastoral ministry after a bout of contention with my own denomination over gimmicks designed to bring people into church.

The denomination held a contest between churches, rewarding those that grew the fastest over six weeks. Many marketing dollars later it turned out that Chuck’s church won the contest by doing nothing but teaching the Bible (as opposed to preaching Chuck). He resigned his pastorate in disgust, having no taste for gimmickry in church. Later the Lord brought him back to the pulpit by way of a flourishing home Bible study. Afterwards he accepted the call to pastor a small congregation in the Newport Beach/Costa Mesa area. The church soon grew to about 350 people and erected a building to suite.

The counterculture intrigued him, and he wanted to meet a “real hippie.” Chuck told how his son invited a youthful longhair home to meet his dad, the middle-aged pastor. This young man lived on Pacific Coast Highway, hitchhiking back and forth between Canada and Mexico. His goal was to declare the gospel to whoever gave him a ride .

Greatly impressed, Chuck hired Lonnie Frisbee as youth pastor on the night they met. The church supplied their new staff member with a two-bedroom house. Within a couple of weeks there were 40+ people living in, and around, that tiny house and yard. Through the partnership of Chuck and Lonnie, God mushroomed Calvary Chapel into national significance. A youth movement was born that would result in several hundred thousand people finding Jesus Christ in a few years. Leaders like Greg Laurie emerged from the ministry. The total result stretches into the millions as Calvary changed the face and posture of the church in America and throughout much of the world.

All this was in parallel with the work of the Spirit across America. The “Jesus Movement” seemed to break out simultaneously in Seattle, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, Hollywood, Michigan, Illinois and even in Manhattan Beach, California. Chuck Smith was an icon of stability inspiring leaders much younger than himself. He was a standout in a movement of people, mostly under age 30.

That night, I knew God had sent Ruby and I to receive basic direction from this man. He taught us to cope with growth by changing the church paradigm. I was used to the traditional church, with a cradle-to-grave Sunday school, followed by a worship service. Add a Sunday night “evangelistic service” and a midweek prayer meeting and you have a template for American church from the 1940s to the 1970s. That program demands ample facilities and a large ministry team. We had neither. Our church was designed to house just 66 people. We hadn’t yet opened the doors but were hoping that God would eventually touch 2,000-plus people through whatever he had in store for us .

Chuck said that their congregation had done away with adult Sunday school. He just taught the Bible to adults in church while the kids enjoyed Children’s Church. When we first heard him speak the church held five services every Sunday morning. The whole ministry aimed at Bible education that would equip members to minister to others (Ephesians 4:10-13). Sunday nights found Chuck teaching the Bible for a full hour—ten chapters of scripture each week. Wednesday night prayer services gave way to hundreds of midweek Bible studies in homes or on the beaches of Southern California. Our takeaway was to move away from a pastor-centric setup and into a mode where every member was a minister.

Chuck’s model would allow us to move into multiple services, stretching the logistical capabilities of our small building, meeting the need for space (something outside the tradition and approval of our denomination at the time). Hearing Chuck also laid the foundation for discipling members into church planters—but that would come later.

Chuck pressed the issue of teaching Scripture rather than entertaining or simply soothing God’s people. His approach restored the role of prophet and teacher to the church.

He even addressed church growth from a different angle. He challenged us through two of Jesus’ charges to Peter: (A) Jesus told Peter that he , not Peter, is responsible for building his church (Matthew 16:18). (B) He informed Peter that his role was that of a shepherd, feeding his sheep (John 21:15-17). In other words, a pastor should equip the saints and leave church growth up to the Lord. Jesus would bring growth through new birth as Christians grew to maturity and brought their friends into the family.

I’d spent much of my life trying to figure out how to build a church. I attended seminars looking for the new plan that would change the world. It took years for me to discover the reason for the grand new plans, each year, was that the old ones never worked. I was ready to buy into what this man was dealing.

Chuck’s model was born of Jesus, and Jesus wasn’t telling Peter (or me) to build a church. He said that he would build his church. That turned me on. Chuck also reminded us that Jesus told Peter it was Pete’s job to feed the sheep. Most pastors I knew put “sheep feeding” very low on their priority list. One man I knew even left sermon prep till early Sunday mornings before church. This is a formula for spiritual disaster as recorded by the Old Testament chronicler of Israel. He wrote about how lousy things got in Judah without a teaching prophet (2 Chronicles 15:3-6).

Too often a church lacks a teaching prophet and the people are like starving sheep. Chuck said his mandate as a pastor was to tend the lambs and feed the sheep. That meant to serve God’s Word in generous helpings. He would leave church growth up to Jesus.

At that time, Calvary Chapel was the fastest growing, and soon to be the largest, church in North America.

Chuck didn’t have any secrets, other than doing what the Lord had told Peter, and anyone could obey the Lord if he chose. Through Chuck Smith, I discovered my primary assignment: “Teach the Bible, very well!”

Robert Schuller taught us to, “Find a need,” and pointed us toward single adults and people caught in the drug culture. Chuck Smith taught us to, “Feed the flock.” He role-modeled Bible teaching in a verse-by-verse manner, defining words and teaching historical context, but in a way that made it fun to learn Through these two men, God gave us a workable game plan. We couldn’t help but succeed .

The church grew steadily and my Bible teaching slowly improved. Young and old attended our services and love mostly abounded in our midst. However, life was not free from discouragement.

I remember one middle-aged couple who showed up during the first four months in Manhattan Beach. They took us to dinner a couple of times, even bringing flowers to my wife. We embraced them as friends and mentors. Then, one day the wife called to tearfully inform me that they wouldn’t be back. She said my teaching was shallow and didn’t meet her needs. Black despair filled my heart and mind as I hung up the phone. Our attendance may have grown past 30, but she left me hurting because my teaching wasn’t up to par.

While I prayed and agonized, the woman called back and hoisted me off the miserable hook. This time she was angry (maybe even drunk). “Well, I just had to tell you one more thing about your church, and maybe this is the real reason we’re not going there. Would those people dress that way, if Jesus came to that church?” Click!

I realized that no one could meet this woman’s needs. She focused on outward appearances, not new hearts. Jesus did come to our church in the hearts of the people—and he was saving “long-hairs” who came to the us sometimes barefoot and dirty. He was radically changing hopeless, wrecked lives through the teaching of the Scriptures in church and in a dozen Bible studies led by recently minted disciples of Jesus.

That poor woman couldn’t see the miracles because she wouldn’t look past the hair and clothing into the eyes. Her attack served to remind me that the first cluster of people that Tony Corbett brought to church had been rejected by another congregation because of the way they dressed. Those people had missed a great opportunity and we were fortunate to profit from their mistake. The difference was that we were willing to look beyond appearances and into hungry hearts.

Later, I came under pressure to be a little more “middle-of-the-road” and specifically to lay off the singles focus. The old ring made an occasional surprise appearance when the pressure came from a couple of our biggest contributors. However, that nasty woman had liberated me. In the beginning, I pastored whoever came. As a result of her phone call(s), I chose to focus more directly on hurting people. As Jesus said, “It is the sick who need a physician” (Mark 2:17).