Land and money needs have led two very different churches to form . . . : A Holy Alliance

On a recent Sunday morning, about 2,000 worshipers streamed out of the main sanctuary of First Foursquare Church of Van Nuys. Their pastor, the Rev. Jack Hayford, lingered behind to chat with members of the congregation.

About three blocks west on Sherman Way, a slightly smaller crowd gathered in the main sanctuary of First Baptist Church of Van Nuys. Bible in hand, the Rev. Jess Moody, a big-boned Texan who dreams of creating a church for “The Third Millennium,” welcomed worshipers and asked them to pray for ill members of the congregation.

First Foursquare and First Baptist are churches with widely varying philosophies reflecting theological differences as well as the individual personalities of their pastors. But, these days, the churches have a great deal in common. Land and money have closely linked the congregations, which through circumstances have become dependent upon each other to ensure the orderly growth of both.

After nine years of talking, an on-again off-again land deal between the two churches has been revived. Earlier this month, First Foursquare paid the first $2-million installment on the $11-million deal by which it will acquire First Baptist’s 10-acre Van Nuys site.

New Chatsworth Church

By the end of 1989, First Baptist is scheduled to be in a new home in Chatsworth. Hayford will shuttle back and forth between services at First Foursquare’s existing location and the sanctuary where Moody now preaches. By then the site will be part of First Foursquare’s satellite campus, housing a school and day-care center, a graduate school of theology affiliated with Oral Roberts University, a Bible-study institute and a television production facility.

Practical considerations dictate that the two churches work together. First Baptist needs to sell its Van Nuys land to help pay for the expensive move to the West San Fernando Valley, an undertaking that is scheduled to cost about $20 million for land and construction.

Meanwhile, First Foursquare, the 6,800-member congregation that has been growing by more than 10% each of the last few years, is locked into a community offering little available land and needs First Baptist’s acreage to keep from being limited by a shortage of parking, sanctuary seating and other facilities.

This time, pastors from both churches say there’s little likelihood that the agreement will fall apart, as it did last year over the unexpected cost of having to remove asbestos from First Baptist’s existing buildings. That cost, expected to be about $1 million, will now be covered by First Baptist.

‘Our Sense of Mission’

“Buying that land simply relates to our sense of mission,” Hayford said during an interview in his church’s parsonage, a sprawling home overlooking Knollwood Country Club in Granada Hills.

“We’re entering the second era of our church and it doesn’t require any strain of the imagination to see our church have 15,000 to 20,000 members by the year 2000.”

Ironically, Hayford’s home sits just a few miles from the 25 acres or so of undeveloped land straddling the Simi Valley Freeway in Chatsworth on which First Baptist has put its hopes for the future. “I might go over there some nights,” Hayford quipped.

Moving to the West Valley, where more than half of First Baptist’s membership now lives, has long been Moody’s mission for his church.

“You have 700,000 people west of the 405 Freeway and no large church there, while the East Valley has three large churches,” he said. (Grace Community Church of the Valley in Sun Valley is the third).

“I don’t want to get in trouble with the smaller churches, but they just can’t provide the services that a large one can, the kind of services that we’ll offer.

“When we’re finished with the new church, it will be a community service,” he said, “a cultural center as well as a spiritual center.”

Emotional and Informal

First Foursquare, also known as Church on the Way, is a Pentecostal congregation aligned with the denomination founded by flamboyant evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. That denomination was called the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. First Foursquare’s worship style is emotional and informal, with members frequently speaking in tongues or showing other manifestations of what they believe to be the Holy Spirit.

“The openness of worship at Church on the Way is what attracted me,” said actor Dean Jones, a 14-year member of the church and until recently a member of its Council of Elders.

“It was so warm and inviting it didn’t take much to get used to that, even for an ex-atheist like myself.”

Tall and rapidly balding at age 53, Hayford has been at First Foursquare since 1969. The congregation had just 18 members when he arrived for what he thought would be a brief stewardship designed to get the church back on its feet.

“The idea of staying there scared the spit out of me. I thought it would ruin my career and my life,” he recalled.

Pivotal Experience

Staying turned out to be one of the pivotal experiences of his life, however. Today, Hayford is one of the nation’s best-known church leaders.

He travels the world to speak at religious conferences, is a regular on Christian television, is heard on some 70 radio stations and in 1985 was named one of the nation’s 10 leading Pentecostal/Charismatic church leaders by Charisma magazine, a leading publication in the field.

Hayford also is a songwriter. He has written more than 600 hymns and other church songs, including “Come On Down,” a pop-chart hit for Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1973.

“In Jack, you have some qualities that you don’t often have in Pentecostal pastors,” said the Rev. Russell Spittler of Pasadena’s Fuller Theological Seminary and a leading Pentecostal scholar. “He doesn’t rant, he avoids denominational parochialism and he is widely respected in broad church circles for his intellectual abilities and directness in speaking his position.”

Services are more subdued at First Baptist than they are at Foursquare. Few worshipers wave their hands in the fervent style that marks a Pentecostal service, and there is no laying on of hands to help effect healing of the ill.

“We just talk plain old American about Jesus and His words rather than speaking a lot of holy words about the rapture,” said Moody, whose preaching style is more dramatic and exhorting than is Hayford’s.

First Baptist has about 4,600 active members and is a member of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and one that has been racked in recent years by fundamentalist politics.

Moody and his largely white, middle- and upper-class congregation are only moderately conservative by Southern Baptist standards, and Moody, who has a reputation within his denomination as being something of a maverick, can be highly critical of Southern Baptist fundamentalists who have sought to impose their rigid style of biblical interpretation over the Southern Baptist Convention.

“There’s an independent streak to him,” said Herb Hollinger, editor of the California Southern Baptist, the denomination’s state newspaper. “He’s a real personality as a pastor.”

At the same time, Moody also is one of the few California Southern Baptist leaders who is well regarded nationally. He is a trustee of the denomination’s Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky., was recently named to the board appointed to oversee the tangled financial affairs of the bankrupt PTL ministry and also travels widely to address church gatherings.

A Personal God

Like Hayford, Moody is known to say that God speaks to him in prayer. But, unlike Hayford, who unabashedly proclaims, “I think God speaks to all people,” Moody is more self-conscious about such statements.

Despite his strong Southern Baptist ties, Moody hopes his new church will appeal to a broad range of Christians. The word Baptist, for example, will be part of the new church’s legal title, but its still-undecided common name will reflect a nondenominational approach, he said.

“We’re building a church that will house our philosophy,” Moody said in an interview. “We’re not going to be an indoctrination center, but a life center. We’re not big on lapel-grabbing. We want to share our faith with those who want to hear it, regardless of who they are.”

The first-stage development plans for the Chatsworth site--bounded roughly by Corbin and Winnetka Avenues on the east and west, Rinaldi Street and San Fernando Mission Boulevard on the north and south--call for a 110,000-square-foot main building housing a 2,000-seat sanctuary, an adjacent 99-seat Equity waiver theater, an outdoor swimming pool, paddle tennis courts and a jogging trail, all of which fits Moody’s “Third Millennium church” concept whereby body, mind and spirit are nourished together.

‘Better Caught Than Taught’

“The old-fashioned witness method doesn’t work any more in our fast-paced society,” he said. “We’re intending to just invite people to our home for social activities with the idea that faith is better caught than taught.”

Moody, now 62, came to First Baptist in October in 1976 from West Palm Beach, Fla., where he had led a large, affluent congregation. First Baptist, which began its congregational life in a converted railroad car in 1914 and has since spawned a variety of Valley churches, had been pastorless for two years when Moody arrived. The church was stagnating.

Within a few years, Moody led the independent congregation into affiliation with the Southern Baptists and had started the ball rolling on moving west. Over the years, his plan--one he says is based on God’s will--has met with considerable opposition from within his congregation.

Moody spoke about that opposition last October in “High Country,” his church’s bulletin, writing about how “greatly discouraged” he was over having to endure “systematic belittling and insults from certain leaders.”

Splits developed and members of the congregation left as a series of efforts to acquire property in the West Valley ended in failure for First Baptist.

Unfavorable Publicity

One attempt to acquire Los Angeles Community College district land in Northridge failed when the church was outbid by commercial developers. Neighborhood opposition, meanwhile, forced First Baptist to back out of a deal for land in Chatsworth’s exclusive Monteria Estates, which cost the church $50,000 and garnered it a lot of unfavorable publicity.

“There were times the past couple of years when we started to wonder whether we were interpreting things right,” said Rev. Jim Rives, First Baptist’s executive associate pastor.

When First Foursquare scuttled its first agreement to buy First Baptist’s Van Nuys land last summer, First Baptist flirted with a commercial developer. But that arrangement also fell through and First Foursquare re-entered the picture.

The new contract between the churches precludes the normally publicity-conscious Moody from discussing details of the sale. Only more tight-lipped First Foursquare officials may do that under terms of the agreement. Even so, Moody is again ebullient about his church’s future now that the main relocation problems appear behind him.

‘Our Place After All’

“Nine years ago, we looked at this very piece of land and we knew this was to be our place. After all that has happened, now it will be our place after all,” he said.

Hayford, meanwhile, is equally upbeat about his church’s future. “Our assignment is to serve the Greater Los Angeles area, not just Van Nuys. That’s just where our center is.

“But we’ve been searching for a way to do that. That’s why we are acquiring First Baptist’s property. I had the feeling this might happen nine years ago, but I never said much then about it because I didn’t want anyone to think we’d coveted their property.”