Montavilla Neighborhood Association

Properity's Preacher (New Beginnings Church)...

Apr 10, 2000

Heaven really can wait. Former junkie Larry Huch has built one of the nation's fastest-growing churches with the promise of earthly rewards.

BY RACHEL GRAHAM
Willamette Week, March 29, 2000
rgraham@wweek.com


Heaven really can wait. Former junkie Larry Huch has built one of the nation's fastest-growing churches with the promise of earthly rewards.

Pastor Larry Huch has a thick, outlaw mustache and rides a Harley. He once fed his drug habit selling smack and has an assistant who did time in San Quentin. Billy Graham he ain't.

For one thing, Pastor Larry, as his congregation calls him, is more charismatic. Equal parts inspirational speaker, psychologist and old-fashioned evangelist, Huch, 49, works the purple-carpeted stage at New Beginnings Christian Center like a macho, born-again comic. Pausing occasionally to check his notes, put on his reading glasses or pick up his Bible from the portable, clear-plastic pulpit, Huch mixes personal stories and impersonations with traditional biblical exegesis.

"When I got saved," Huch told his congregation one Sunday last month, "I was instantly delivered from drugs. I never touched them again. No more heroin, no more cocaine, no more marijuana. Just the occasional LSD"--dramatic pause--"but that's for the visions."

The congregation laughs at his joke. These days Huch's visions are of New Beginnings' booming congregation and expansion plans, rather than of bleeding colors and talking dogs. From 10 members in 1990, New Beginnings has grown to a community of more than 4,000 today, making it, according to the Hartford Institute for Religious Research, one of the fastest-growing congregations in the nation.

Two weeks ago Huch announced to his congregation details of New Beginnings' 84-acre development in Gresham. Expected to be worth well over $100 million, it will be the biggest East County real estate deal in years (see "If You Buy It," page 36). The development, complete with a very large worship center and neighboring business complex, will undoubtedly raise New Beginnings' profile and test Huch's unusual and somewhat controversial interpretation of the Bible.

Huch, you see, is an entrepreneur for God. He's identified a niche market and tailored his message to it: Money, good health and happy marriages are God's reward for faithful, positive-thinking Christians.

While many pastors reassure their congregations about personal wealth, few encourage them to pursue it as explicitly as Huch. "All good things come from God," he said during one sermon. "God has put in your heart the desire to feed the hungry and clothe the poor, but He's also given you the desire for a nice car, a nice house, to drive a Harley."

For New Beginnings' racially and economically diverse congregation, Huch's message is a godsend. It offers hope, love and the opportunity for personal transformation. For some church observers, however, Huch's "prosperity gospel" verges on blasphemy. None of the religious leaders WW spoke with for this story would comment directly on Huch or New Beginnings (few, in fact, were aware of the church), but with carefully chosen words they expressed discomfort over the idea that God not only wants us to be rich, but will help us get there.

"We can all communicate with God," says Cathie Boerboom, program director of Rosehaven Shelter, a drop-in center for homeless women, "but sometimes I wonder whether people really aren't hearing their own desires."

As Doug Parker, director of communications at Multnomah Bible College says, in the world of religion a spiritual message of conspicuous consumption "is a whole, big can of worms."

Whether you're coming for the Wednesday evening service or for either of the Sunday morning services, a trip to New Beginnings, at 7600 NE Glisan St., begins with a search for a parking spot. Parked cars line the street five blocks east and two blocks west of the church. The church itself, a nondescript brick building occupying a full city block, has just 90 parking spots for the estimated 2,000 people attending each of the two Sunday morning services.

Carpooling can't come close to solving the problem. Huch often forgoes Sunday morning altar calls because parking constraints preclude services from going into overtime. "We really have to watch the clock," he explains. "We have to get one herd out on time and the next one in."

Most mainline pastors wish they had such problems. Take, for example, First Congregational United Church of Christ, a 149-year-old grand dame of Portland churches located on the south Park Blocks downtown. Despite Portland's population boom, the congregation of 550 has struggled to expand its membership, gaining fewer than 100 new members between 1990 and 1999. And, by national standards, First Congregational is doing well. Since the mid-1960s, mainline Protestant denominations, the traditional bulwarks of American churchgoing, have lost 20 to 40 percent of their members.

In contrast to mainline churches' shrinking congregations, nondenominational churches such as New Beginnings are growing rapidly. And Oregon, according to one survey, has almost double the number of denominationally unaffiliated Christians as the national average. Many of them are flocking to new, large and distinctly nontraditional evangelical churches.

Called variously "seeker-sensitive," "7-day-a-week" and, if they are big enough, "mega" churches, these houses of worship downplay doctrine and emphasize individuals' present relationships with Jesus over any past personal failures. Dress is casual, music contemporary, and the churches generally offer an array of social activities for adults and children.

Those characteristics describe a half-dozen relatively new churches in the Portland area, including City Bible, Crossroads Community Church in Vancouver and New Beginnings. But a couple of things set New Beginnings apart from the rest. One is its leader.

Huch (rhymes with "luck") says he was a 24-year-old junkie on the run from the St. Louis police when he got saved in an Arizona church. He arrived at the service under the influence and, by his own description, left it high on God. Before that time he thought churches were boring, God was vindictive and Christians were hypocritical.

When Huch found God he also discovered not all Christians are charitable. No one in that Arizona church, he says, would come forward to pray for him. "I had long hair, needle marks in my arm," he recalls, "and they thought I would never last." The memory gives Huch insight into the hearts of the unchurched and newly churched few other ministers enjoy. "I always think," he says, "'What about this would turn me off?'"

Huch's personal history has left its mark on his church. New Beginnings takes its moniker literally. Like most mega-churches, it has "cell groups"--small groups that meet in a member's home for weekly Bible study--but unlike most, it has one that is exclusively for former drug addicts and prostitutes.

From the top down, New Beginnings is infused with the message that anyone can start over: Three of the 12 pastors were drug addicts before getting saved. That personal knowledge, they believe, makes their ministries particularly effective. For example, in addition to its cell group for ex-addicts, New Beginnings hosts Overcomers, a 12-step program run by former San Quentin inmate Larry Reed (see "They Shall Overcome," page 35), a prison ministry and an annual conference for ministers who have fallen or are burned out.

A second way that New Beginnings differs from other mega-churches is Huch's belief in the prosperity gospel.

Given the sustained surging economy, it's no surprise that more and more churches are preaching the message, "It's OK to be rich." What differentiates the prosperity gospel is the belief in an everloving father who not only wants His children to live the high life, body and soul, but also provides a blueprint for doing so in the Bible: Get saved, work hard, tithe 10 percent of your income and have faith that God will provide. "Imagine if Bill Gates were your dad," Huch often tells his congregation. "Well, that ain't even close."

Sometimes referred to as the "name it and claim it" or "health and wealth" theology, prosperity gospel's central premise is that Christians, through Jesus' crucifixion, became the new heirs to God's covenant. Believers are entitled not only to eternal life in heaven but also to financial, physical and emotional well-being on earth.

Want proof? For Huch it's as simple as Diet Coke and Twinkies. That, he says, is the modern equivalent of what Jesus provided at the Marriage at Cana, when, with his first miracle, he turned water to wine. If God cared enough to provide snacks for a party that was almost over anyway, Huch argues, then you know He wants to help you take care of the rent. "The word of God," according to Huch, "is full of teachings on how to make this life wonderful."

Huch's prosperity teaching combines traditional elements of the Christian gospel with tidbits from the mind-healing movement ("Say it and see it," the former Transcendental Meditation teacher often shouts to his congregation) and the late Norman Vincent Peale's "positive thinking" philosophy ("If someone gives you bad news," Huch said in one sermon, "say, 'I don't receive that.' If you can't get anyone to agree with you, agree with yourself.")

Christians' only barrier to enjoying their inheritance, the prosperity gospel goes, is a lack of faith. Many Christians, Huch says, fail to prosper as much as they could because they don't trust that God really is there to help them, and therefore they don't appropriate what He has provided. As a result, Huch recently preached, "Heathens are enjoying the Promised Land. They are driving our cars, eating our food, living in our houses. We have to get our stuff but we have to get it a different way than they did; we have to get it through spiritual ways."

Huch didn't start out with these views. For years, he traveled through the United States and Australia preaching hellfire and brimstone and what he refers to now as the 'poverty message'--that money is bad, Christians shouldn't seek it, and churches and ministers certainly shouldn't display it.

Then, about 14 years ago while living in Melbourne, Australia, Huch experienced an epiphany. It came, of all places, in the shower. Huch says he had a vision of God's enormous goodness, love and desire for Christian prosperity. It was the beginning of a spiritual and financial turnaround for Huch and his wife, Tiz, who looks like a kinder, gentler Brigitte Nielsen. They started to invest portions of their income and a small inheritance they received from her mother.

"Because we were givers," says Huch, "we saw God open doors for Tiz and me to purchase a piece of land years and years ago that nobody wanted, and suddenly it's rezoned and now we can build a subdivision on it." After a year in Melbourne and one in Oregon City, Huch and Tiz felt called to plant a church in Portland.

By their own admission, the Huchs have done well with this gospel. They wear designer clothes; own a 1988 Jaguar, a '93 Volkswagen and a stable of motorcycles, including his 1981 Harley with the license plate "TIZ1." "I can refute the anti-prosperity message because I'm not prospering just because I'm a pastor," he says. "I'm prospering the same way anybody else can"--by believing God wants you to be successful, pursuing success for yourself and tithing 10 percent of your income to the church.

Aggressive tithing isn't unusual among nondenominational evangelical churches. It's a biblical requirement and, in the absence of a denomination to draw on, a financial necessity. What makes tithing different at New Beginnings is the concept that money dropped into the translucent, plastic buckets every week is more than just a donation, it's an investment with a guaranteed return. During services, Huch tells of people who began tithing and subsequently received cars, buildings and better-paying jobs.

You can be a good Christian without giving up a tenth of your income, he recently reassured his congregation, "but if you don't tithe, then you are limited to the sweat of your brow, to this cursed earth. But if you give a little, God will give a lot."

God has given a lot to Bart Jensen in the two-plus years he has been a member of New Beginnings. A professional parachutist before succumbing to drugs, the 38-year-old beams and opens his arms wide while talking about God. He ended his 21-year addiction with the help of Overcomers. His wife's cancer was cured miraculously, he believes, through prayer. And Pastor Larry helped him identify and defeat a "family curse" of anger and insecurity inherited from his grandmother's abandonment of his mother. Perhaps most amazing is that Jensen says from time to time strangers show up at his door and give him money.

Jensen initially was offended by New Beginnings' emphasis on tithing. "But one day," he recalled, "I was coming to church wearing torn-up clothes in my Honda with a broken windshield and I saw people coming out of church looking nice, so I decided to try it." He says he began giving 10 percent of his weekly paycheck even though his family needed the money. By Jensen's estimate, he and his wife tithed more than $4,000 last year--over a tenth of their income. They have received, he says, more than that. "People just walk up to me and give me money. They say, 'God wanted me to give you this.'"

Common sense says that if someone stops doing drugs and starts working regularly, his or her health and bank account will improve--with or without God's involvement. People who aren't Ed McMahon showing up at the door with a big, fat check, on the other hand, defy logic.

The idea of God as investment broker offends many people's religious sensibilities. Where do the Beatitudes ("Blessed are the poor...but woe unto you who are rich for you have received your consolation") fit into prosperity gospel's equation of "good faith equals material rewards"? What of being "in the world but not of it"? And how does prosperity gospel answer liberation theology's concept of God's preferential option for the poor?

While prosperity gospel's message of personal change and divine intervention can be individually empowering, it pays scant attention to the socioeconomic roots of poverty, addictions and racism, and its give-to-get message can cross over into crass bartering with God.

"I've heard preachers talk about reading scripture to dried-up cotton bolls and the cotton's exploded while other fields remained barren," said Rice University sociology professor William Martin. "That's heretical. It just feeds false hopes that if you donate to God's cause, you will automatically succeed."

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the prosperity gospel is its failure to adequately grapple with believers' continued suffering and failure. "So often," said Paul Metzger, professor of postmodern theology at Multnomah Bible College, "we soft-pedal the gospel because we know that in America people want to hear the good news of health and prosperity."

The unspoken flip side of believers achieving material, physical and emotional fortune through prayer and tithing is that they are to blame when their luck doesn't turn. What happens when God doesn't hold up His end of the bargain--when you follow Huch's rules and still, your '84 Civic blows a head gasket on the way to your radiation treatment?

Huch pins blame on the devil and urges followers to have the patience of Job, but he doesn't really grapple with the problem of evil. "The reason most Christians fail," Huch said in one sermon, "is that they hear and see the word of God but the devil, because we're not strong enough in our faith, is able to uproot us." As in the parable of Job, Huch insists that anything the devil takes, you are owed back seven times: "If he breaks down your car--God has a better car waiting for you; if he messes up your job, God has a better job waiting for you."

But what about a loss that can't be replaced? If God is so concerned for our emotional prosperity, why do children die? That, Huch says, is unanswerable. He simply knows God is not responsible for children's deaths. Huch's God does not do bad things.

For many people, believing Christians among them, Huch's prosperity gospel requires a leap of faith across a theological chasm that is simply too wide.

At the same time, there is an aspect of New Beginnings that is harder to dismiss. In contrast to many other conservative Christian churches, New Beginnings welcomes people without judging them, no matter their personal histories.

Explaining why they started attending New Beginnings, parishioners repeatedly said, "I felt comfortable and loved here." And in contrast to many liberal congregations, which often sympathetically preach about people who don't sit in their pews, New Beginnings is able to reach a too frequently marginalized audience and help them effect significant personal changes.

This is not a slick suburban preacher helping high-tech millionaires feel comfortable with their wealth. Huch delivers his message of goodness and empowerment to people who often have seen little of either in their lives.

Huch has drawn together a diverse, largely unchurched congregation. A 1997 church survey shows that congregants are predominantly working- to middle-class, with an average household income below $40,000. And New Beginnings defies the adage that 11 a.m. Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week. The rainbow congregation and staff make it one of the most racially diverse gatherings in the Portland area.

"Our friends sometimes ask us how we can sit under a white pastor," says Delores Douglas, an elegantly dressed African-American woman who attends New Beginnings with her husband and adolescent daughter. "We come because this feeds our spirit. We've tried other churches but always come back to this one--Pastor Larry preaches pure Word, not candy-coated."

In addition to telling people God wants them to prosper, Huch and New Beginnings provide practical means for people to improve their situations. Currently the church provides tutoring, ESL classes, low-cost day care, a weekend youth center and a Montessori preschool, available to church and unchurched alike.

At the new facility, the church will be able to fulfill what Huch sees as its mission on an even grander scale. In addition to ongoing programs, the Gresham campus will have a multimillion-dollar kid's facility with free video games, movies and adult supervision; counseling for abused women and children; and possibly an office complex with medical, dental and even bail-bondsmen services.

Huch says that by providing these types of services for individuals, his church is addressing broader societal issues.

"The normal mom and dad," he says, "don't care about the world going to hell when their own world is falling apart. I believe the main thing is to teach you and your family how to get your life out of that living hell. Let's get you born again so you can make heaven your home, but let's also bring some of heaven here on earth so you can enjoy the good life, the good news Jesus intended you to have. Once you're set free, you can help others."

Lori Cooley is doing just that. The 44-year-old, brown-haired woman, who favors floral patterned skirts, was already free of her cocaine and heroin addiction when she started attending New Beginnings in 1991. She had visited Beaverton Foursquare intermittently but came to New Beginnings, she said, because of its openness and ministry to addicts and other traditional outcasts.

Cooley now hosts a weekly cell in her home and works with Overcomers--checking attendance, pow-wowwing with attendees over new jobs or determining new bus routes, handing out name cards, and repeatedly soothing her own and others' souls. "I tell people," she says, "I will match my time with their efforts. That's the same with God because when you leave your addiction and come to the Lord it's really a survival of the fittest. Whatever is strongest in you will win."