so several years, two internships, and a cross-country move later, we did it. We started a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Now you have to understand that I started out playing in bands, back when alternative music was . . . alternative. Are there any Pixies fans out there? Talking Heads? Violent Femmes? Midnight Oil? I understood music to be this raw art form that comes from your guts.
Do it yourself.
Strip it down.
Bare bones.
Take away all the fluff and the hype.
This ethos heavily shaped my understandings of what a church should be like: strip everything away and get down to the most basic elements. A group of people desperate to experience God.
Please realize that to this day I have never read a book on church planting or church growth or been to a seminar on how to start a church. I remember being told that a sign had been rented with the church name on it to go in front of the building where we were meeting. I was mortified and had them get rid of it. You can’t put a sign out front, I argued; people have to want to find us. And so there were no advertisements, no flyers, no promotions, and no signs.
The thought of the word church and the word marketing in the same sentence makes me sick.
We had these ideas and these dreams, and we went with them.
People would come in, there would be some singing, I would talk about God and Jesus and the Bible and life for about an hour, and then it would be over.
And the strangest thing happened: People came on the first Sunday.
I remember like it was yesterday. A few people came to get me five minutes before the first service and said I had to look out the front windows. I was not prepared for what I saw. Cars and people everywhere. They proceeded to tell me there were traffic jams in every direction; they had run out of chairs; and people were giving up trying to get through the traffic and just pulling over on the side of the road, parking, and walking the rest of the way.
Chaos.
I loved it.
Now I am going to give you some numbers. And I hesitate to do this because few things are more difficult to take than spiritual leaders who are always talking about how big their thing is. But it happened and it’s true and it’s part of my story.
There were well over 1,000 people there the first Sunday.
People in the aisles. People on the floor. Packed. No more room, not enough chairs.
I ended the message by inviting people to join us on this journey. I talked about the need to explore what a new kind of Christian faith looks like for the new world we find ourselves in. Whatever it was and wherever it led, we were going.
“Join us.”
The energy in the place was unreal.
The next morning I held a staff meeting. Which means I sat in my office and thought to myself, What have I gotten myself into? Followed closely by, Sunday’s coming again.
It was during this first week that the practical people stepped forward to be helpful and remind me that people were there out of curiosity the first week and to help me feel encouraged with my new little project. They made sure I understood that I wasn’t to get my hopes up, that all these people wouldn’t return, and that we’d be able to see in the next few weeks who was really going to be committed to this new church.
You can guess what happened.
More people came the next week.
And even more the following week.
I remember telling people we had no more chairs and if they wanted to bring their friends, they would need to buy chairs for them.
In the next month or two, over two thousand people were showing up on Sundays.
And by September of that first year, we had to hold three services, pushing things to over 4,000 people in the first six months.
A problem developed in the parking lot because people were losing their tempers when they had to wait so long to exit. I heard several stories of harsh words being exchanged and people giving each other the finger. So I stood up one Sunday and said, “If you are here and you aren’t a Christian, we are thrilled to have you in our midst. We want you to feel right at home. But if you are here and you’re a Christian and you can’t even be a Christian in the parking lot, please don’t go out into the world and tell people you’re a Christian. You’ll screw it up for the rest of us. And by the way, we could use your seat.”
People cheered.
The more honest, the more raw, the more stripped down we made it, the more people loved it.
We had no five-year plan.
We had no vision statement.
We had no goals.
We had no “demographic.”
All we cared about was trying to teach and live the way of Jesus.
It’s still all we care about.
So what did I do? I did what anybody else would do in these circumstances: I decided to teach through the book of Leviticus for the first year. Leviticus is one of the first books in the Bible, and it deals with all sorts of ancient ceremonial and sacrificial rites. There are detailed descriptions of what to do with the blood of an animal you have just slaughtered and how to clean yourself after sexual intercourse and how much of your crop needs to be given to the priests. Good stuff.
Around this time we were having problems with too many kids in the classrooms—there wasn’t enough oxygen.
And then, several months into it, the fire marshal showed up. Not good. Legal, but not good.
He said we were over code and illegal, and we would have to start turning people away at the doors. We literally had to post people at the doors, and when the room was full, they had to stand there and tell people they weren’t legally allowed to go into the service.
I have a friend who couldn’t get in the first three times he came.
So we bought a mall. Actually, somebody gave us a mall, and we bought the parking lots surrounding it.
Yes, a mall.
We blew out the walls of the anchor store to make a room big enough to meet in and then turned the other stores into classrooms for kids. A guy came to one of the first services in the mall-turned-church, sat down in a chair, and said, “Hey, I used to shoplift in this exact spot.”
So a couple of years into it, Mars Hill is still growing. There were stretches of time when a new staff member was hired every week. House churches were springing up all over the area, partnerships were beginning with other churches around the world, and people who had never been a part of a church were finding a home.
Once again I am going to give you some numbers, and I hesitate to do so, but it is part of the story and it helps to explain the rest. Two years into it, there were around 10,000 people coming to the three gatherings on Sundays.
In the middle of all this growth and chaos was me, superpastor. I was doing weddings and funerals and giving spiritual direction and going to meetings and teaching and dealing with crises and visiting people in prison and at the hospital—the pace and the workload were unreal.
I can’t begin to describe what it was like because it was happening so fast. One minute you have these ideas about how it could be and the next minute you are leading this exploding church/event/monster. All of a sudden there are all of these people who know who you are and want something from you and think you’re a big deal, and you are the same person you’ve always been. Everything has changed and yet it hasn’t. It’s hard to explain, but I found myself asking, “Where is the training manual?”
I think of people who never before cared if I existed who suddenly wanted to be my friends. And that’s why I tell you all of this. Because there’s a dark side.