State of Grace

As the band finishes its first set of gospel hymns, Rick Long walks onto the stage at Grace Church in a Hawaiian shirt. His sermon this Sunday morning is about the Book of Daniel, and as he begins to talk, people rustle through their purses and pockets for pens and pencils, so that they can follow along on the worksheets they picked up on their way in. Rick asks everyone to underline the word "respect," and to think about how others see them. "Christians have been defined by words that are not very flattering," he says. "Hypocritical, judgmental."

Those are two words that Rick has never wanted his church defined by. Or himself.

As a Christian kid, the last place he wanted to go was a Christian school. He wanted to stay in public school, playing football with his friends. But his father, who had a rare blood disease and had been sent home by his doctor to die, wanted his sons taught at a Christian school if he couldn't teach them about God himself. So Rick went to a Baptist school, where he felt like an outcast because his family couldn't afford clothes and shoes that were as nice as those of the other kids.

But almost miraculously, Rick's father made a full recovery. And when Rick was twelve, his parents sent him to Arvada Christian School, where he met Greg Stier, his future best friend. The school's founder, Ralph "Yankee" Arnold, saw Rick as a born leader. He became instrumental in the youth ministry at Yankee's Colorado Bible Church, singing and playing the guitar at a service that averaged 450 teens a week, sometimes double that. Rick's future wife, Shelley, performed, too, and "could sing as beautiful as any girl you ever heard sing," Yankee recalls.

While Rick, Shelley and Greg were still in high school, Brad Holder — a close friend who attended youth ministry with them and has since died of cancer — started a haunted house to "literally scare the hell out of people," Rick recalls. Brad, who was a couple years older, bought an old barn and moved it to a couple of acres in the middle of nowhere, where he created Frightmare. The first year, 1,000 people came, and Rick, Shelley and Greg used the attraction as an opportunity to talk to people about Jesus.

After he graduated high school, Rick went straight to the seminary school Yankee had started on the same Arvada campus: Colorado Bible College. Shelley was already there, and the two got married. That first year, Rick took 24 credit hours, played on the basketball team and worked — which left about two hours for sleep each night. He was killing himself trying to earn a four-year degree in two years. Then Yankee resigned to return home to Georgia, where he's now a traveling preacher, and people left the church in droves. "I couldn't believe it," Rick says. "It's a church. It's not about an individual. It's about Christ." Three months later, the school, the college and the church had all closed their doors. Rick couldn't transfer anywhere without losing half his credits. Finally, he stopped trying and instead started a business fixing washers and dryers. He was too busy and disheartened to look for another church. "I didn't see a church that was really concerned about reaching people where they're at, loving them and caring for them," he remembers. "I just saw a lot of holy huddles with a lot of judgmentalism and a lot of money poured into social events for the Christians."

But Shelley did find a new church — Community Baptist Church, which Greg also joined — and soon Rick started going, too. He'd been there a couple of months when Greg and a few of the youth workers cornered Rick and asked him to do outreach for the youth ministry, because he'd done it so successfully before. "I knew it was going to freak this church out, because I'd bring in gothic kids and kids who were going to be smoking in the parking lot," he says. "I knew exactly what it was going to look like." He went for it anyway, decorating the church basement like a California hangout, naming it Surfside and putting together a Christian rock band. "We just rocked every week, and the kids loved it," he remembers. "We had ten kids the first week and 130 kids the third week, and sure enough, it was freaking everybody out at the church."

Still, Rick was hopeful that he and Greg could convince the pastor that they needed to reach out into the community. They even wrote up a plan called Operation Arvada, and week after week, they'd ask him if he'd read it. He never did. And after they watched the 1989 Super Bowl, Rick told Greg it was time to start the church they'd planned as kids. Three months later, Grace Church had its first service in Brad's living room.

The church soon outgrew the living room, then a daycare center it leased, even a high-school gymnasium. In 1994, Rick became Grace Church's first full-time staffer while Greg continued as a part-time preacher. By then, after six moves, the church had settled into a rented building at 69th and Sheridan. In 1996, its owners said the church had six months to buy the property for $650,000 if it wanted to stay. At the time, Grace Church's entire budget was only $150,000 a year.