Email This   Larger Font      Print This   Smaller Font Advertisement   Janet L. Mathews Maressa Dikeman and Brad Dikeman of Vancouver, at left, join James Rhoden of Portland at the first sermon of the Living Hope Church in the Dodge City Bar and Grill on Sunday morning. The church intends to host a satellite campus at the bar every Sunday at 10 a.m.

Monday, March 24, 2008
By ERIK ROBINSON, Columbian staff writer

As Easter services go, Sunday morning’s sermon at the Dodge City Bar and Grill offered a singular opportunity for parishioners who crave chicken strips with their salvation.

“We just wanted to reach out to lost people,” said Rick Conn, the new Dodge City campus pastor for Living Hope Church. “We’re stepping out of that church box.”

Way out of the box.

Conn welcomed almost 100 people to Living Hope’s first service at the combination church and watering hole near the intersection of Andresen Road and 18th Street in Vancouver.

Conn, a former semipro football player who carries 380 pounds on his 6-foot-4 frame, hasn’t always presented such a welcoming attitude. Widely known as “Big Rick,” Conn makes it clear that he wasn’t living the Christian life in those days.

“Drinking, partying, fighting,” he said. “The whole works.”

He and his wife, Treasa, were actually married in the Dodge City in 1998. Two years later, Big Rick was booted out permanently after one too many brawls.

After joining the church four years ago, Conn gravitated back with a new outlook on life.

On Sunday, he greeted bar patrons who were curious about the makeshift arrangement of 30 chairs on the dance floor pointing toward the pulpit of four lit candles and a bouquet. Coffee and pastries were available atop a pool table. A “March to the Championship” college basketball poster hung on the wall next to the microphone where Conn led the group in prayer.

Manager Rhonda Stephens said Dodge City owners Ray Kutch, Tony Kutch and Chris Bryden agreed to allow Conn and Living Hope to hold services every Sunday at 10 a.m.

In the history of the rough-and-tumble bar, she had seen nothing like Sunday’s sermon before.

“Not even remotely,” Stephens said.

Yet parishioners to the first Dodge City sermon — this time delivered by a special Easter broadcast on Fox 12 — said the idea of holding church in a bar makes perfect sense.

“Jesus hung out with tax collectors and prostitutes, so what’s wrong with having church in a bar with people who need it?” said Shawn Hannan, a Vancouver parishioner smoking a cigarette outside Dodge City’s front door.

Its open-arms attitude is a major reason why Living Hope has grown from five families who began meeting in homes in 1996. Today, more than 5,000 parishioners walk through the doors of the permanent church along state Highway 503 in Brush Prairie or attend services in one of nearly a dozen satellite campuses. The tech-savvy church even offers an Internet campus online.

John Bishop, Living Hope’s charismatic senior pastor, hasn’t shied from making a big splash in his quest to connect new members with Jesus Christ. Bishop once brought a tiger on stage. Last fall, he raised hackles among some with a reader board along the highway advertising the touchy topic of one sermon: “Sex.”

A year ago, the church gathered 15,000 people in Portland’s Rose Garden arena for an Easter service.
This time, Bishop said in an interview Friday, the church decided to bring the message of Jesus into their homes by purchasing an hour of broadcast time on Channel 12.

“Instead of asking people to come to us, we want to take the message to them,” he said. “We’re telling people to go home for Easter.”

And, if they weren’t home, they were welcome at the bar.