State of Grace

The president of a local bank told Rick that if the church could come up with $150,000, the bank would loan the rest. Rick went back to his congregation: "I got up and said, 'You know, guys, this ministry has never been about money or buildings. It's been about people, but we obviously need a place to stay and worship. So if we're going to do this, we need to come up with $150,000 by July 27. This is the end of January. We're going to take two offerings for the building, one in two months and one on July 14. Be creative, whatever you can give."

At the first offering, they collected $75,000. "It was amazing," Rick remembers. "We wept." He asked the other elders if they believed that this was in God's hands, and they said absolutely. So Rick decided to try something. The next Sunday, they handed every person who walked through the church doors a hundred-dollar bill and told them they had the next couple of months to multiply it. "We handed out $30,000," Rick says. "It was hilarious."

On July 14, the church was packed. The elders collected the offering and sent people back to count it. Rick told the congregation they were going to celebrate either way — whether they were moving or buying the building. But as it turned out, they'd gotten their $30,000 back — plus another $75,500.

It was a miracle, Rick says. Grace Church stayed put and continued to grow, even as Greg and Rick split so that Greg could concentrate on Dare 2 Share and Rick could devote himself to the church. Today they're building a no-frills new building on the property that will seat 1,000 people; the church has 2,500 members who regularly attend services, and 8,000 people in its database. Grace has given $1 million to needy families in the community; when a housing project was erected next door, the church spent $38,000 over six weeks on meals, school supplies, appliances and a basketball court for the kids.

"I could share miracle after miracle," Rick says. "God's taken care of us."

That's why in 2001, he stopped passing the offering plate and put out collection boxes instead. He rarely mentions them during a service — but even so, that first month, the offering went up $12,000. "When people are not manipulated or coerced, they want to give," he says.

Even as his church has grown, so has Rick's reputation. When The Passion of the Christ was in production, Rick Warren — the best-selling author of The Purpose-Driven Life and The Purpose-Driven Church, and a friend of Rick's — invited him to be one of four pastors who met Mel Gibson and wrote online sermons to accompany the movie. Rick's sermons alone were heard by 250,000 Christians around the world. Here in Colorado, Rick rented out theaters to show the movie to the non-believing friends and family of his church members. Fifty families wound up joining the church, and three of them were so impressed with the outreach that they each donated $7,000, covering the cost of the screenings.

Lately, Rick has been helping new churches get started. He's worked with five — in Lakewood, Aurora, Brighton, Grand Junction and Peru, where the congregation is 7,000 Chayahuita Indians in the Amazon jungle. The idea is that these autonomous churches will grow organically in their communities, like Grace.

Rick thinks his church today looks exactly like what he and Greg Stier talked about as kids. "Less churchy, more blue-collar, very evangelistic," he says. "People would just come as they are; nobody would feel unwanted. We have people who are judges, theologians, homeless people, single mothers, people of every race and nationality, and probably 30 percent struggle with addiction of some sort. It's exactly what we hoped for."