Doug Van Pelt

The Mission Hills Experience

WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG DEVOTIONAL SERIES ON THE BOOK OF MARK FOR THIS ELECTION DAY SPECIAL LOOK BACK AT MY EXPERIENCE AT MISSION HILLS CHURCH. Why the all-caps? What does this "Mission Hills Experience" have to do with the election? Why question myself? Who's writing this, anyway?

The year was 1986. It was February. A good friend of mine shared her exciting experience about this new church that was starting as an off-shoot of Austin's great Hope Chapel church. I visited with this friend and instantly liked it. It was a church plant and one of the former youth pastors at Hope Chapel was going to pastor it. Jayson Knox is a solid guy that takes people and prayer seriously. He launched the church with a series going through the book of Nehemiah. There was a talented musician leading worship, and the teaching, worship and fellowship at the church were very inspired and encouraging. It was called Heart Set Free. I had been attending Central Assembly of God church in Northeast Austin at the time, which was my home church for three years after coming back to the Lord as a 20-year-old college student at UT. I went to our charismatic and kind pastor, Tom Wilson, and told him I wanted to be a part of this new church plant and asked for his blessing to leave. He gave it to me with no hesitation.

I think he wanted me to leave. Ha! I'm just kidding. So, I started getting involved in Heart Set Free, attending every week. A year or so later the church stopped meeting at Hope Chapel at 3pm on Sundays, which was great for a late night owl like myself, who enjoyed going to rock shows on Saturday nights. The young church was pretty much made up entirely of young twenty-somethings -- college students and members of the work force. A few of them were married. I can't remember if any of them had kids yet. Possibly one or two couples were pregnant. This common demographic dynamic was an unusual and exciting part of the church. It was different for a church to pretty much all be the same age. What it meant was that we had no elders and no youth group. Heck, we didn't even have a nursery. It was kind of cool to see those demographics come on later. A lot of us got married and had kids together. It was neat to grow together with others in our community.

We later moved out of the Hope Chapel building and chose to use this move as an opportunity to change our church's name. "Heart Set Free" was indicative of what was happening in our midst, but it was so weird that it brought up questions from well-meaning parents. "Is this a cult? What kind of name is that?" The neighborhood that we moved to (the Riverside Drive area) had an old neighborhood name called "Mission Hills," so we changed to that much more respectable title.

The worship was awesome. We had a lot of creative people that wrote original worship songs. I miss them today, because they were really awesome. At one point we recorded a worship album, but a well-meaning idea of having the original songwriters sing on their songs kind of ruined an opportunity to record and release a killer worship album. The concept was a nice one, and cheery, but if we would have let the best musicians do it all... One small regret. No biggie.

The worship leader was a guy named Maury Millican. He was a good guitarist and singer that was in a band with his wife -- The Nation. I put one of their songs, "It Hurts To Be Broken," on a cassette compilation I released back then, called Cool Tunes. Maury excelled as a musician, a songwriter, but also as a true worship leader. Not a service would go by that he would not offer direction to us as a congregation that would instruct and allow us to "enter in" and participate in worshipping the King of kings. The worship experience was real and it was freeing. We didn't have people dancing in the aisles or swinging from chandeleirs, but if someone felt like dancing or bowing or lifting their hands, they did so without much notice or distraction. It was neat to have that freedom.

The church was governed by a "Servants Council" that helped balance Jayson out. He put a diverse group of people around him that felt called to serve our church. We grew from just a few to about 200, maybe 300. Our first move to the Riverside area was to a skating rink, which was part of a sports entertainment park. We had to set up and tear down chairs, sound system, etc each morning for our one service. Then we moved to a brick building in a strip mall not too far from The Back Room, which was Austin's premiere metal and rock club in the 80s and 90s. Lots and lots of rockers were part of our congregation. Pieces of bands like One Bad Pig, The Cry, The Paul Q-Pek Band, Sixpence None the Richer, Love Coma, The Nation, Lust Control, and many individual musicans and artists went there.

Maury Millican was our worship leader while he attended the Presbyterian Theological Seminary. When he graduated, he later came on staff as an Associate Pastor. He was a really good teacher, too. We had two guys delivering sermons and they both really did a good job. Jayson took his public speaking seriously, participating in Toast Masters, an organization that meets together once a week or so and helps improve public speaking skills. If he was not naturally gifted at speaking, you couldn't tell. He put so much effort into it that he made it look easy. I was given opportunity to speak often, which was a neat and rewarding experience.

As we grew and got older, more kids were present; one or two older couples joined up, so we eventually had that youth group and elders in our mix. This helped balance us out more. We moved from our building across the street into an old movie theater. I still remember the ceremony, where we marched across the street, worshipping and praying, carrying banners, etc. We took this church very seriously and we did our best to focus on others instead of just ourselves. We were pretty missions focused and we tried to reach out to our community, which used to be transient college students but was changing to many Hispanics that found the affordable apartment living attractive. A Spanish speaking church was started and began to share our building with us, where they met on Saturday or Sunday nights.

We kept on growing together, marrying, having kids, etc. I solidified in my convictions that church is not a consumer experience, but an organic community. One doesn't get bummed out and leave on a whim, but treats it like you would your own family. A son or daughter, brother or sister doesn't just not show up for dinner one night and the family "move on" without him or her. No, there's a connection there that doesn't allow for a loss without great pain and a serious effort to re-connect. To me, "church hopping" was like a sin.

After a major missions trip plan was changed and a reduction in giving, we had our Associate Pastor get laid off. Later on he took a position pastoring a Presbyterian church in town that had an opening. A few people connected to him via some of the thriving small groups we had going on during the week went with him there. A couple years later our head pastor had one of his annual prayer times right around New Year's Eve interrupted with a different answer from God. He used to always ask Him, "Is this where You want me?" And each year he heard a "Yes." This time, though, he heard a "No." After processing this privately for awhile, he announced it to the congregation later on that Spring. I joined a Pastoral Search Committee that spent the next nine months or so searching for a replacement. I believe Maury had already moved with his wife to North Dakota, so he wasn't a candidate. The servants council, which had a few opposited around the peacekeeper Jayson, no longer had his peacekeeping skills in the middle anymore, so there was some pulling and tugging in two distinct directions. One group wanted to see Mission Hills move further into the "prophetic worship" side of things; and another wanted to see us move further into the "Bible church" style of worship. Both were part of our personality, but now that a neutron wasn't in the middle of the cell anymore, the protons and electrons seemed to polarize a bit. This tension caused several core couples/families leave the church.

This was not good. I kind of told myself, 'If I'm going to err, I'm going to leave too late rather than too early.' The guy who helped start Hope Chapel, Dan Davis, was overseeing our church. He was on the board of directors or board of elders. I can't remember what that board was called. He was like our dad from the "mother church," though. He saw our struggle to find a new pastor. We had a couple candidates that the committee liked, but we couldn't agree on one. So, Dan recognized that another church in town -- New Covenant -- was having leadership issues, too. "Why don't you get together and explore the possibilities." We did and we ended up merging with that church.

The idea of a merge is kind of beautiful, in a way. This church was larger than ours; and ours was shrinking with dissatisfied people leaving. Our unique and young personality was kind of absorbed by the larger church. The older congregation liked our spunk, but that energy seemed to get squelched a little bit. I'm not sure why, but people leaving the mix probably had a lot to do with it. We changed our name (from Mission Hills and New Covenant) to South Shore Church. We then changed our service format, and pretty soon it looked and felt like a different church. My wife and I saw through some major changes and I prayed about it and felt like God was telling me, 'What you're loyal to doesn't exist anymore,' and I was 'free' to go.

This was a difficult thing to wrap my head around. I was Mr. Anti-Church-Hopper, so leaving almost wasn't an option. My loyalties were and are strong, but that word that I believe I received really liberated me. My wise wife decided that instead of just saying goodbye and then looking for a new home; we should spend every other weekend visiting a new church. That way, if our search took a real long time, we wouldn't be adrift out there without a church home. So, we did that. There are some really cool churches in Austin. Gateway was just starting at the time. They were kind of like a Willow Creek "seeker friendly" church, which we appreciated in spite of the popular criticism in some circles. What some see as "compromise" is a missionary's efforts to relate to a different culture in someone else's eyes. Our search soon came down to the obvious choice of Hope Chapel (our "mother church") and Calvary Chapel of Austin.

During one visit to Calvary Chapel, where my pregnant wife was at home with morning sickness, I felt like the Lord was telling me that this was the one He wanted me in. I had met the pastor, Allen Rigg, at a Guardian concert the previous New Year's Eve. It's funny how that event has come up twice in this story. Allen picked up the tab for my wife and I at Kerby Lane Cafe after-concert dinner with the band that Allen had played with back in Hollywood in the 80s. This was a musical interest commonality that opened up a friendship right away; plus he was good friends with Jayson Knox, my former pastor. When we joined Calvary Chapel (not formally, as they don't have a typical "joining" process), we talked about our experience of leaving one church and joining another.

A lot of pastors would prefer to grow out of conversion; rather than "stealing sheep" from another church, so to speak. Being a cool and trendy church, I'm sure Allen had seen plenty of people come by Calvary and say things like, "I'm so glad to be here. Our last church sucked!" As soon as he heard a statement like that, he knew this person was pretty much a grumbler and that, odds were, they'd be saying the same thing about him and Calvary later on. We weren't into bashing our old church, but were slightly sad at how things changed with it. Allen had been able to talk to Jayson about us.

He was probably able to ask him, "Is Doug really a jerk? Is he that stupid? Does he worship football or God? Is he involved with any terrorist cells?" Seriously, both Allen and Jayson participated in something really cool in Austin. A lot of the pastors in the city meet together on a regular basis and fellowship and pray with one another. I love this and am glad that it happens in a lot of cities in this country and around the world. The body of Christ is a universal entity that exists far outside the walls of a single church. Acknowledging that truth is a freeing thing that grants a healthy perspective to it all.

We joined Calvary Chapel in the year 1999 or 2000, I believe. It was a great move for us and I'm very excited to be a part of it. I trust our leaders and have some good friends. The Mission Hills experience was a big 13 years out of my life and the story I just shared was a big part of my life. The struggle to see the church change and then leave was just that -- a struggle. I'm not sure if what I've shared here is encouraging or helpful to anyone, but I just felt inspired to share it.

Posted by Doug Van Pelt at November 4, 2008 09:39 AM