We go to church to bless (and are blessed)

The Legacy Christian Church, Clovis, California
We were sitting at the end of a row toward the back of the church (as we often do. On rare occasions we want to make unobtrusive escapes). A minute or two before the start of the service, a bearded man walking down the aisle turned to us and said, “Welcome, beloved! God bless you!” before continuing to the front of the church. We received many friendly greetings from people (Mindy said four different women greeted her after the service), but his welcome stood out , so I immediately jotted down what he said.

Mindy had seen the church’s Facebook event about commissioning their new building, and we noticed a sign for the church on our way home from shopping in Clovis. Google maps led us to a shopping center I’d never been to before (with a discount movie theater I’d never seen before. Wish I’d known about it earlier rather than days before moving out of the area.)

Immediately to our right as we entered the building, a notice board contained tags listing items the building still needed. They were clothespinned to the board so that people could take the tag if they wanted to give the item (among the items were acoustic panels and indoor plants). Directly across the lobby from the door, we couldn’t miss the “Vision 2020” mural with the church’s goals. The last one read, “NO LONGER MOBILE BUT MOBILIZED.” We would soon learn that when they launched Vision 2020 in January, they had no idea that just six months later that last goal would already be fulfilled.

Before the church even thought about moving, they had already made huge changes in the first couple months of the year. They launched the vision on January 7th. On January 14th they confirmed nine new board members when there had previously been three, and on February 4th they installed fourteen elders (again up from three). Expanding the leadership team allowed for shared labor and was intended to prevent burnout. The leadership hoped more people would also provide more ideas.

At the time, The Legacy was meeting in a school with offices in another location and worship service supplies in a storage unit. Every Sunday, staff loaded a trailer and hauled everything to the school where they had to set up and tear down everything every week. I’ve been part of churches that have this weekly ritual, and it can be wearing.

The church also adopted new bylaws on February 15th. In many churches the process of writing and passing those bad boys can take years in itself. Just three days after that, they heard about a building that might be available. By April 7th, they were in that new building.

That first Sunday, we heard, there was dust everywhere, but that was okay. They didn’t have to load up that trailer anymore. The trailer is parked in front of the church now, and it’s used for storage. As he recounted the events of the past six months, Pastor Andy White noted that churches usually move slowly, and a church making so many changes in six months is...Well, he used the word, “insane.”

Something else happened during the last six months. Pastor Andy and Pastor Ben Bertolero became part of the Clovis Pastors Cluster. The program for the commissioning service thanked a number of pastors from other churches, and some of those pastors attended the celebration.

Pat Biggs. the owner of the building being commissioned, attended the celebration as well. He’d previously rented the building to Encounter Church, which he attended, but when that congregation decided to merge with Valley Friends Church in Clovis, Pat needed another renter, and he hoped it would still be a church. He prayed for the congregation, blessing the building and the people who gathered there. He also noted that in spite of the transition from one church to another, he’d never missed a payment.

Pastor Andy admitted that we were there that night under false pretenses -- people were supposedly attending a building commissioning, but the church isn’t about the building at all. Andy said, “We’re pregnant.” (Certainly an attention-getting phrase.) “God is at work inside our body with a vision.”

He continued by saying that praying for a building was a little strange -- kind of like asking people over to announce you were getting a new van would be strange. But, he went on, if you’re getting a new van because you’re going to have a new baby, people would be excited and the invitation would make sense. The Legacy Church is excited about a new building because they were excited about God’s vision to reach people. The building will house the people.

As the service closed, everyone was invited to look around the building and to pray for the ministry the church will have there...and to have some cake in the fellowship room. So I walked around the church, in the meeting spaces and supply rooms and even the restrooms, and then I did go to the fellowship room for cake (I even helped take the cake out of the boxes).

Mindy had found a seat at a table, so I joined her there. Amy was also there with two of her children, and I asked when she first started attending the church. She said she came as a teenager when her neighbor invited her. After a few minutes, we realized that she has another connection to the church now: she’s married to Pastor Ben and they serve as the church’s care pastors. While we were talking, he came over, and I saw that he was the bearded man who’d greeted us before the service began.

We told him about our project of visiting churches and our year long trip, and about our book about the trip. Ben invited us to come to a Sunday morning service, but we told him we were moving out of the area within a week, so instead, he asked if he could pray for us. Ben and Amy put their hands on our shoulders and asked God to bless us as we traveled and looked for work, and Pastor Ben asked if he could pray for our van, since we’d be driving that as we moved. (After we left, I noticed the humor of this, following Pastor Andy’s remarks about the oddness of praying for a van.)

We walked out to the parking lot and showed Pastor Ben the bumper stickers on the minivan, and he laid hands on the hood and prayed. Our Dodge Caravan has over 223,000 miles on it, so his prayers were especially appreciated. We’ll be praying for The Legacy too, because as Pastor Andy said, “To say God has done a work in Legacy Church in the last six months is a gross understatement.” We’d have to agree.

We go to church with a truck

Clovis Missionary Baptist Church, Clovis, CA
“What does that say?” Donny asked.

Mindy and I read the sign. We were certain it clearly read, “Doc’s Garage.”

“That’s not it,” Donny told us. As I pondered my literary competence, Donny explained, “It’s Disciples of Christ’s Garage. There’s a madness to my mayhem,” he added. The stage under the sign is used every Friday night from May to September for the church’s hot rod gatherings.

Donny mentioned that there are many car shows in the Valley, but, he said, “we don’t do anything the way we’re supposed to.” The church doesn’t take sign-ups, charge admission fees, or limit the kinds of cars displayed. They don’t bring in food trucks that gouge the crowds; instead, the church sets up a barbeque and gives out food on a donation basis. It just so happens, they usually get more money that way than if they’d set a price for the food. Donny said, “It may seem we know what we’re doing… We just trust God.”

Clovis Missionary Baptist Church has been holding Hot Rod Gatherings for nine years now. They usually have at least three or four new people every week -- and a lot of regulars. Donny told me he overheard one of the regulars telling a visitor, “We don’t talk like that here at our church.” Donny said the regular had never been to a Sunday morning worship service, just Friday nights, but he considered CMBC his church. Some those Friday night folks have reached out to the church for help with counseling, for weddings and funerals, and some have even come for worship on Sunday morning.

Pointing to the sanctuary, Donny said, “People ask questions they wouldn’t be comfortable asking inside that building.” He said the gatherings are a good two-way street, allowing outsiders to get to know people in the church and people in the church to get to know outsiders.

We weren’t visiting on a Friday night -- we came for a Sunday night worship service on the church lawn. Nonetheless, there were cars (and a motorcycle) on display on the front lawn where the Hot Rod Gatherings are held.

The song leader (the only person wearing a tie that evening) said instead of using songbooks, we were going to sing familiar songs, beginning with “Victory in Jesus,” continuing with “Amazing Grace” and “God is So Good.”

Russell Bailey, the pastor of the church for the last thirteen years, came forward to speak. His text was Luke 14: 28 - 30, the passage about counting the cost before building a tower, so he talked about taking on a project without considering all that was in involved. He brought along quite a visual aid: a 1955 GMC pickup truck he’d traded for on Craigslist -- a truck that ended up needing much more work than anticipated.

“There are areas in our lives we need help, and there are people who can help,” he said, describing how others had helped him with the truck (which isn’t quite running yet). He pointed out that we’re often afraid to admit we need help. We lie to ourselves and say, “This won’t be a big deal.” His sermon closed with an invitation to receive Christ (as all good Baptist messages do).

After the service, we chatted with Pastor Bailey. He mentioned that for a long time the church emphasized foreign missions (after all, the church has “missionary” in their name.) But they realized that while they’d been obeying Christ’s call from Acts 1:8 to go to the ends of the earth, they hadn’t been going to their “Jerusalem.” With that realization, they began to put more of an emphasis on local ministry.

One of those ministries is Rafa Ranch, which uses “equine assisted learning” to help kids (I take it that means horses are involved). At Christmas, church members provide free hot chocolate to people seeing the lights on Candy Cane Lane. They participate in the Big Hat Days Clovis Rodeo Parade, and as far as they know, they’re the only church that does so. And they have a program called Clovis Connect to reach the community.

After the brief worship service, we headed into the fellowship hall with our chairs for sandwiches. The selection of fillings and breads were abundant; an old-school drinks cooler was filled with bottled water and sodas, and the dessert table was full of cookies, pies, cakes, and homemade ice cream.

I sat down with Donny and Cole (who runs the Clovis Connect program). During the week of Clovis Connect, they do a variety of projects. They go to markets and hand out free quality shopping bags. They do free car washes. They hold a daytime VBS program. They do a Pay It Forward program. And they figure on carrying on many of these programs throughout the year.

Donny told us that DOC’s garage, along with much of the promotional artwork for Hot Rod Gatherings, was done by a man who attends the Hot Rod Gatherings, but doesn’t attend the church. The church loves his work, but they’ve decided, for a variety of reasons, to do away with the brand names in the backdrop. They’ve painted over the “Firestone” on the tire, but are trying to decide what to put in its place. I suggested “Godsrich” -- you know, like “Goodrich” but not? 

I doubt they’ll take my suggestion because Hot Rod Gatherings at Clovis Missionary Baptist Church tend to do things better than that.

We go to church to learn about science

Science and the Bible, Clovis Church of Christ, Clovis, California
“We’ve got a loose one up here,” Steve Byrd, the evening’s speaker, said about the small child running toward the front. The mother corralled the kid; this hadn’t been a problem other times when Byrd taught the same material at Clovis Church of Christ. Before, he’s taught junior and senior highers; I’m sure that instead of one kid trying to run wild, there were many doing so. It was a Friday evening, and there was a good crowd with a wide range of ages to hear the first of two presentations on “Science & the Bible.”

Many people greeted us as we came in the building and even after we sat down. One of the elders, Scott Young, recognized us as visitors and gave us a visitor’s card to fill out. Scott also introduced Byrd to the congregation as a “member of the church” and a “Bible believer.”

“I’ve always wanted to present this material to everyone, not just the kids,” Byrd said as he got started. He mentioned that as a child he was fascinated with dinosaurs, as many little boys are. He thought he had to choose between dinos and the Bible.

He went on get his degree in biology at Cal Poly. “I’ve seen everything that evolution has to offer and everything that the Bible has to offer. And the Bible has more.” He said that he believes the Book of Job in the Bible even offers dinosaurs.

Though his expertise was in biology, he began by talking about archeology. He talked about the Mari tablets that mention names from Abraham’s family (though not Abe’s name), but then he discussed what he (quite rightly) called the greatest archaeological discovery of all time: the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Before 1947, when the scrolls were discovered, scholars of the historical-critical method had questioned whether the transcription of the Bible through the centuries was trustworthy. Made up of over eight hundred scrolls, written between 200 BC and 68 AD, the Dead Sea Scrolls contained portions and/or complete texts of all the Old Testament books except Esther and revealed that Scripture had been transcribed with incredible fidelity through the years.

Steve went on to talk about “finding these little nuggets of science hidden in plain sight in the Bible.” He believes that there are scientific revelations that prove that God wrote the Bible, arguing that there are two options, the Bible was either written by “Hebrew shepherds or by God.” I think that is a false dichotomy, perhaps even a slightly heretical. II Timothy talks about Scripture being God-breathed, people divinely inspired to write. Just as Jesus is understood by orthodox theologians to be fully God and fully Man, I believe the Bible is also fully divine and fully human. It is not an either/or.

I’m sorry to say the “nuggets of science” he found didn’t resonate with me. He talked about how in the last few decades, scientists have come understand that the sun follows a path in the Milky Way, making a rotation every 230 million years, then pointed to Psalm 19, which describes the sun running its course. He said this word choice indicated the course the sun makes in the Milky Way. That interpretation didn’t seem the most likely to me; instead, I think the writer was talking about the sun moving daily across the sky, which isn’t technically what happens (actually the earth moves) but it is true in the same way we all still talk about “sunrise” and “sunset.”

But despite my quibbles, it was good to see so many people coming to learn about Christian apologetics, to gain a greater intellectual understanding of their faith. And it was wonderful that they were so cheerful and welcoming while they were learning.

Dean goes to a missions conference

Valley Bible Church, Clovis, California

Mindy loves missionary slide shows. When she was growing up and missionaries came to her church (as they often did), she enjoyed hearing their stories from the farthest parts of the earth, from Africa or Asia or South America.

Sadly, she had to work the night I went to the opening event for the Valley Bible Church’s missions. She could have heard from a missionary all the way from San Francisco, California.

The church holds a mission conference every year, and the Friday evening event I attended was billed as a family night. Guest speaker (and missionary) Alan Bond of Jews for Jesus, a parachurch ministry, spoke about the Gospel in the Feasts of Israel. The next night, his topic was “The Yeshua Message,” preceded by a dinner for junior high through college students. The conference would continue during the Sunday morning worship service with “The Messiah and the Jewish People” as the topic, and the entire event would culminate with a potluck meal after the worship service.

Friday evening's portion of the conference began with a dessert potluck. Mindy had made some chocolate cookies for the event, which was held in the church’s fellowship hall.

One wall of the room displayed the different missionaries the church supports. Some of those ministries were in distant locations, like Africa and Europe, but there also were displays of local ministries such as Valley Mission Jail Ministry. One table was full of pamphlets from Jews for Jesus’ ministry.

Jews for Jesus was founded in 1973 by Moishe Rosen to introduce Jewish people to Jesus as their long-awaited Messiah. The ministry began in San Francisco but now does work throughout North America and in Australia, England, Russia, and other parts of the world, including Israel. But -- as I mentioned earlier -- the conference’s speaker works more locally, from the original San Francisco office.

While enjoying dessert at one of the round tables in the fellowship hall before the lecture, I chatted with folks. I learned that Valley Bible Church was now a combined ministry of three local churches that had merged over the last decade. As one man put it, “Our building had outgrown the congregation.” At first, the three pastors of the three churches served together, but that proved impractical over the long run, and the church now has one head pastor, Del Foote. People around the table spoke admiringly of Pastor Foote, and a couple of people said he was the reason they attended the church.

Richard said he’d grown up Catholic. “They have Jesus, but the Scripture isn’t as important to them. They don’t bring a Bible to church.” I mentioned that Catholic churches do have four scripture readings as part of the mass, but he said, “They don’t have a fifty-minute sermon like we have here.” He lamented the lack of young people in the church (I’d guess that besides the younger Pastor Foote, attendees that evening seemed to be in their sixties and older).

Pastor Foote introduced Alan Bond, whose message focussed on the feasts of Leviticus 23. He drew parallels to the life of Jesus from the seven festivals in that passage, including Passover with its images of sacrifice. He connected Paul’s discussion of Jesus as the First Fruit of new life (in First Corinthians 15) with the Feast of the Firstfruits in the Leviticus passage.

At the conclusion of his talk, Bond invited questions. I asked whether the many secular Jews of the Bay Area still celebrated the feasts. He said many Jews only go to Temple for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the equivalent of “Christmas and Easter Christians.” Pastor Foote closed the evening in prayer and urged all of us to leave a love offering for Bond’s ministry at the door as we left.

As I stepped outside, I noticed a woman arranging herself in her wheelchair and pulling out a flashlight for her journey home. She said she didn’t need assistance; it was only a few blocks from her home. I was impressed with the efforts she made to be at this event and wondered how many missions conferences she had attended over the years. Sometimes the most difficult, and essential, mission we have is local.