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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.
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.”
