Open Door's roots lie in the era of beach baptisms and mass conversions known as the Jesus movement, a movement initiated in the early 1970s, when hippies and other members of the counterculture joined charismatic and spirit-filled churches en masse.4 Reacting to what many conservative Christians viewed as the excesses of feminism and the gay rights and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicals began actively seeking to convert members of the counterculture. Jorstad Erling writes that conservative pastors viewed young men and women in the countercultural movements of that period as potential converts who would expand their churches and contribute to their evangelizing mission. Rather than condemn hippies or drug users, evangelical pastors opened their churches to the younger generation and even recruited hippie liaisons to their ministerial staff.
One of the leaders of this religious revival, Chuck Smith, was a charismatic preacher in Southern California who became disillusioned with institutional Christianity. Abandoning his larger church, he started ministering to a small congregation called Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California. Despite initial disdain and even revulsion for the hippies and surfers he noticed hanging around Venice Beach, near Los Angeles, he gradually began proselytizing to them. At first, Smith and his wife allowed early Christian converts to live in their home. When the initial group doubled from twenty-five people to fifty in six months, they could no longer accommodate everyone, and Smith rented a house where the young people could make a transition from drugs to Jesus. As the movement expanded, the number of Jesus houses increased, and the conversions skyrocketed. Mass baptismal services in the ocean, exuberant prayer meetings, long-haired evangelists, and Christian rock musicians contributed to the growth of the Jesus movement in other cities. Calvary Chapel relocated to larger and larger spaces until Smith began training the zealous young converts to plant their own Calvary Chapels in their local communities.
Today, Calvary Chapel has a reported membership of approximately fifteen thousand, with “church plants” of six hundred Calvary Chapels in the United States and a hundred in other parts of the globe. The first Vineyard Fellowship started in 1974 as a result of the Jesus movement, and it now has hundreds of churches in the United States and abroad.5 These nondenominational Christian churches emerged at a period when attendance in mainline Protestant churches was declining and fewer people under thirty were attending church services. Liberal Protestant denominations lost much of their membership as church movements like Calvary and Vineyard tapped into the inchoate energy of the youth movement, reinventing their services and using contemporary music to appeal to a generation seeking spiritual guidance. The Jesus movement reflected a significant shift in American Protestantism toward nondenominationalism, part of a wider shift in religious organization in which liberal and conservative Protestants, even within the same denomination, split into their own churches. Many churches with similar social agendas around issues like abortion, the family, and homosexuality began connecting across denominations, leading to the rise of parachurch organizations like that of the ex-gay movement. The churches like Open Door that emerged from the Jesus movement succeeded because they created associational networks and small groups geared toward all facets of a member's life.6 A member of a Calvary Chapel or Vineyard Fellowship church could and still can attend services every day of the week, multiple services on Sunday, Bible studies, and groups for men, women, singles, teens, addicts, or single parents. Most churches have ministries or outreach programs, which are both global and local. They might run a shelter for the homeless, a drug rehabilitation program, or a missionary program. Church members also gain the civic capital of learning communication and organizational skills through volunteering in one of the many church groups or ministries, which they can apply to their job or other aspects of their lives. Unlike many mainline churches, the laity or congregation of these churches drives the programs, and there are multiple venues for personal involvement beyond attending services.
New Hope and Open Door are part of the wider proliferation of independent churches in the United States, what some scholars have termed a postdenominational era or nondenominational movement in Christianity.7 In many parts of the country, the adjective “nondenominational” usually refers to a nonaffiliated community church of conservative evangelicals, depending on the background of the pastors and congregants. These churches may or may not be affiliated with an umbrella denomination such as the Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, or Assemblies of God. They call themselves nondenominational because they are not under the oversight of a denominational board and because the members of these churches often come from various Christian traditions and do not subscribe to a single creed. According to Don Miller, the United States is witnessing a second reformation in which new paradigm churches like Open Door are thriving.8 These new local congregations and churches began to set the agendas of larger denominations rather than be constrained by the institutional framework and theological dogma of their parent organization.
Miller writes that the characteristics of new paradigm churches like Open Door include the fact that most were started after the 1960s, seminary training of clergy is optional, worship is contemporary, and lay leadership is highly valued. Although Mike Riley is the pastor, Open Door has ordained other members of the church, like Frank Worthen, who don't have the educational or professional credentials to be considered a pastor or minister elsewhere. Members of the congregation are encouraged to participate in sermons and exercise their feelings at almost any time by giving testimony, shouting, participating in call and response, or raising their arms in the air. The ministry rejects the formalism and liturgy of traditional churches and urges people to act on their feelings. In churches like Open Door, personal experience validates religious belief and commitment, and experience and testimony supersede doctrine and scripture. Open Door and New Hope eschew many of the symbols of organized religion, and the emphasis in worship is on creating a church community that is loving and caring but also influenced by pop psychology, self-help principles, biblical counseling, and the importance of moral choices in one's everyday life.
Pastor Mike was caught up in the fervor of the Jesus youth movement, and Open Door was modeled on Vineyard and Calvary, even if it never achieved the same level of national prominence. “It was a time of revolution in our country—the late 1960s,” he recalled with a bit of nostalgia. “It was another revolution. In those days it went over well to go preach on the streets.” As a college student at Chico State University in California, Pastor Mike Riley wore blue work shirts with patches on the breast pocket and arm that read, “Jesus, the revolutionary.” It was in college that he began a ministry to reach hippies; later he joined Church of the Open Door. He oversaw twelve Christian houses full of drug addicts by the early 1970s. For Pastor Mike and others in the Jesus movement, even the most marginalized elements of society were potential Christian converts. Whereas other mainstream denominations may have been squeamish about ministering to drug addicts, homeless people, and hippies, Church of the Open Door embraced them. The idea that anyone could be a Christian enabled Open Door to promote the possibility of converting homosexuals.
LOVE IN ACTION
After Frank's arrival at Open Door, Kent Philpott and Pastor Mike, who was only an associate pastor at