Several years ago, when Mike Housholder was on vacation in Florida with his family, he bumped into someone from his church in West Des Moines, Iowa. The congregant said, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to be Pastor Mike here around us. You’re on vacation.”
Housholder laughed and said, “Well, who do you think I’m going to be if I’m not Pastor Mike?”
Even as Lutheran Church of Hope has become one of the largest churches in the U.S., this lack of pretense continues to define Housholder’s approach to ministry, and in turn, it informs his church’s approach to outreach and evangelism. Outreach spoke with Housholder about Hope’s deep connection to its local community, the challenges of pastoring as an introvert, and how the church embraces its Lutheran heritage while still surrendering to the Holy Spirit’s lead.
When most people think of a growing, evangelism-focused, multisite church, “Lutheran” may not be one of the first descriptors that spring to mind. How does Lutheran Church of Hope embrace its ancient and beautiful tradition, yet not let that become a challenge for people who might be skeptical of a traditional church environment?
We do not hide the fact that we are Lutheran Church of Hope. There are enough people in the upper Midwest who know what it means to be a Lutheran that it doesn’t hurt us to keep that in our name. While we don’t by any means worship Martin Luther—he said some things that are deeply unfaithful; we’re all a little complicated—we do believe God used him to change the trajectory of the Christian church. The reason that happened wasn’t because of traditions or cultural things Lutherans are fond of doing—you know, Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, potlucks and lutefisk suppers.
For us, being Lutheran isn’t a cultural thing or a traditional thing. It is a theological thing. Luther started the Reformation by insisting that the church get back to the truth of God’s Word that sets us free. He grounded that whole movement on rallying cries: It’s the grace of God alone that saves us, Scripture alone is our ultimate source and norm and authority for making the connection between faith and daily life, and the priesthood of all believers and a non-hierarchical approach to our understanding of what it means to be the church. These things started the whole Protestant movement, and we fully embrace them.
Our world is dying for an encounter with a God who has grace for them instead of one who insists they earn their salvation. Luther’s emphasis on that is not just attractive, it’s transformational. Love is the only thing powerful enough to reach a restless and wandering world. When people realize the truth that there is a God who loves them by his amazing grace, well, that’s an incredibly powerful thing. It’s not something Lutherans have a monopoly on, but it is at the heart and soul of what started the Reformation.
Tell us about your church’s early days.
Hope was started in 1991 by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and they called a faithful pastor who had a two-year term. Before Hope became a church, it was in development. Back then the Lutheran Church called those folks “mission developers,” ordained pastors who were called to a place to see if it could develop into a congregation. After two years, this pastor decided it was time to go, so he took a call to Minnesota and had a wonderfully faithful career up there for the rest of his ministry. That’s when the regional bishop for this part of Iowa called me.
What did your own call into ministry look like?
I was a math major at Concordia College in Morehead, Minnesota, pursuing an educational path that would have led me to being an engineer, math teacher or something like that. I grew up as a pastor’s kid, so it’s not like I was unfamiliar with church life, but as I got heavily involved in the college’s campus ministry, I realized I was starting to experience what seemed like a call into ordained ministry.
My dad never pressured me to do that. In fact, he was fond of saying, “If you aren’t called, don’t do it.” That call is really important. When things are going well, being a pastor can be a lot of fun, but when things are challenging, that call keeps you committed to what God’s doing. When I had my call confirmed through a lot of different experiences and conversations with campus pastors and friends and family members, it became clear there was nothing else I could do or wanted to do. After graduation from college, I got my master’s in divinity at Luther Seminary and got ordained in the Lutheran Church.
I was three years out of seminary when the regional bishop asked me to restart the mission at Hope. So in the summer of 1993, I showed up, and there were maybe 15 or 20 people still around from the first two years of development. A year later we officially chartered the church as a congregation of the Lutheran Church.
What was it like to step in and lead something someone else started?
It was a small core group. They were really dedicated. Some of the other folks who had been a part of that development decided not to stick around after the pastor who started it left. It was a clean start—a do-over. That original group was filled with wonderful people, and many are still a part of our congregation. They have seen a lot of God-sized things happen around here over the last 30-plus years.
Catch us up from those early days when it was just 15 people to where Hope is today.
In 1 Corinthians 3:6, Paul writes, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow.” Boy, is that true in the story of Lutheran Church of Hope. When I got here in the summer of 1993, it took a few months before things started to spark and grow. During that time, I was deeply humbled and realized how hard it is to start a new church. There were major floods in Des Moines that summer. It became national news. We were at a standstill.
That’s when I had my come-to-Jesus moment and completely surrendered the church to God. I said, God, I’ve tried to grow this church for you, but I’ve been getting no results. I’d like to see what you could do through us if you’re the One who’s in charge instead of me doing it for you. That was a defining moment for us.
If our whole congregation was on a big ship with sails and we said, “On the count of three, we’re all going to blow as much wind into the sails as we can and see how far we can get this thing to go,” no matter how hard we puffed and puffed, we could not get that ship to move. But if we learn to set the sails to the wind of God’s Spirit, there’s great potential for that ship to move. That’s what grows the church. It’s God who makes the ship move.
Early on the leaders of this church took a missionary approach to things and thought, If we’re really going to let God build his church through us, where is it that God has planted us, and what is it this community needs? At the time, our community had a lot of little kids, so we started a preschool and a vacation Bible school program in addition to our weekend children’s ministry. We poured a lot into that because we felt like that’s where God was leading. That fueled a lot of the growth—both deep and wide—around here because when kids show up, they tend to bring their parents. Today, we have over 8,000 kids who come to VBS every year. It’s an all-church effort. It isn’t just something children’s ministers do. It’s something I’m heavily involved in as the senior pastor, and all of our pastors, everybody on staff gets involved.
We also got involved in the Alpha course early on, which changed the way we worshiped, changed the way we did assimilation of new members, changed the way we did discipleship, changed the way we did prayer ministry. We’re very appreciative of the Alpha course and still are heavily involved in that. Over 1,000 people take Alpha every year at Hope. It really ignited the spiritual fire around this place, and for a Lutheran church, that’s pretty wild.
It sounds like your early adoption of the Alpha course had a major influence on Hope’s trajectory.
We were only about two or three years old when we started Alpha. The average Lutheran church can be wonderful for people who want their worship to have a liturgy to it, have a structure to it, have a movement to it. It’s beautiful, and I appreciate it and grew up that way. I have nothing bad to say about it except it isn’t always very mission friendly. We wonder why people aren’t coming when we basically need to teach them a foreign language in order to know how to worship and follow our hymnal.
We still have a traditional hymnal-based liturgical service every week, but all of our other services are much more mission-driven. I wouldn’t call them seeker-sensitive because we preach the Word of God, and that’s very challenging. It comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. We aren’t by any means watering anything down. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make these services accessible for people we’re called to reach with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Alpha has a way of changing the way we worship. At the Holy Spirit retreat we do with Alpha, God shows up and people’s lives are changed and transformed. People get a taste of that, and they want to experience it more and more and more. It’s kind of like when kids go to Bible camp, and they say, “Why can’t church be like that?” So we just made it the same. We said, “Sunday mornings are going to be like that now. We’ll still offer the traditional service, but other than that, we’re going to follow the Spirit’s lead.”
We want to be open to however the Spirit is moving. As I understand it, there’s renewal happening in Anglican churches in England that we should be praising God for. God can stir in our hearts, souls and minds through traditional worship. We see that happen in our traditional services, too. Rather than say we’re going to pick one or the other, we offer both.
Sociologists are speculating that much of the U.S. is becoming “post-secular.” Those who don’t consider themselves religious still pray. Publishers are seeing a large increase in Bible sales. Yet there’s still a broad mistrust of institutions—particularly local churches. How have these cultural shifts informed the way you and your church are thinking about evangelism and outreach?
We have to be sensitive to people’s institutional mistrust. Rather than getting defensive about it, the church needs to admit there are a lot of good reasons people have an institutional mistrust for the church. We’ve broken our vows. We haven’t led with integrity. Too often, we’ve made it all about us instead of all about God.
That trust needs to be rebuilt. There’s work that needs to be done. Our financial books are open. We always tell people with questions to look around, to check our hearts, to hold us accountable. I’m not the boss of this church. Jesus is. I have a board. I have a church council I report to monthly, and I’m responsible for the whole staff, so we have accountability structures built within the congregation. If you have nothing to hide, then you don’t mind opening all the windows and letting the sun shine in.
When I first started at Hope, I was encouraged by the Lutheran Church to go knock on doors. That’s an old school way of starting a church. When people were going to slam the door on me, I’d say, “I’ve got nothing to lose at this point, so can I ask you one question? What is it about church that keeps you from wanting to be a part of it?” And by far the No. 1 answer—it wasn’t even close—was money. “You’re all just a business. You’re just using religion and God to get rich.”
At first I got a little defensive. I would say, “No, you don’t understand biblical stewardship.” But I started to realize, maybe there’s a reason so many people feel this way. Maybe the church has done some things with finances where we push harder than the Bible does. We try to win a battle of getting bigger offerings, but we end up losing a war that is pushing a whole culture away from the church. We’ve done things without financial integrity, and we’ve lost trust.
That’s why we have our books open. When we do big giving campaigns, we do them without pressure. We just say, “Pray about it, and what God lays on your heart, that’s what you should give.” We’ve had that approach from the very beginning, and the church building is paid for. God provides.
If we aren’t listening to what’s going on culturally, then we might miss the opportunity to set our sails to the way the Spirit wants to move us. For many years now, it’s been reported that young generations are falling away from the institution of the church, yes, but also from faith. But lately there are signs of a hunger. Younger generations are starting to look in better places for answers to the first order questions of life. For that reason, this year our annual theme is called “52 for ’25.” We’re asking one big question of faith every week for 52 weeks in the year 2025.
Alpha covers the foundational basics of Christianity in a question-and-answer format, and that stirs people’s hearts, souls and minds, and then they’re hungry for more. We encourage the questions. We don’t flip out when people ask more aggressive or difficult questions. We tell people, “You don’t have to check your brain at the door when you come to this church.”
In your bio on Hope’s website, you describe yourself as an “introvert who loves people.” What does it look like for an introvert to pastor a large multisite church?
It’s really funny to those who know me best that I’m the senior pastor of a large church. I love people, but at the same time, big crowds exhaust me. If God is able to use anything I say publicly for good, it’s a spiritual gift, certainly not a talent. When I took speech in college as a required liberal arts class, I’ll just put it this way: It was a struggle. To this day, if I give a speech about something other than proclaiming the gospel, it’s not a good experience for me or the audience.
Sunday afternoons are recovery time for me, because I put myself out there in ways that are not natural or comfortable for an introvert. It takes me some time to get back. I do sincerely and deeply love people, but it’s just so awkward. I’m in such a public role. I can shift into an extrovert gear when I need to for the sake of the gospel, but naturally I would rather hang out with a small group of friends and talk about the faith.
When a church passes a certain size, one tradeoff is that you can no longer get to know everybody’s name. As Hope has grown, have you had to manage your time differently to be the best version of yourself as an introverted pastor?
My job seems to change every three to five years because we continue to grow. One of my mentors told me, “As a senior pastor, you should always seek to organize things for what the church is becoming instead of what it is.” If you’re just organizing things for what the church is, you’re stunting the potential God has for that growth.
That said, I still make hospital visits, so I get some one-on-one there. I still have some office hours and open spots for anybody to come in and meet with me and visit with me about pastoral care type things. I feel like I need to hold on to at least some of that, even though my job description as a senior pastor of a large church demands that I have to fulfill other responsibilities in the leadership area. I don’t ever want to lose touch with the ability to meet with people one-on-one, because then I’m not as well-informed as a preacher, as a leader. I lose touch with the pulse of what’s going on in our community and our congregation.
Even though it’s a big church, almost everything we do at Hope happens in small to medium-sized groups. We only get big on weekends, for the most part, so it’s usually pretty comfortable. But when it gets big, I have to take a deep breath and say, “OK, God, you’re going to have to do this because you know it’s not my favorite.”
Maybe that’s a good thing. If we’re full of ourselves as preachers, there’s not much room for the Spirit to fill us up. If anything good happens in those moments, I know who gets the credit, and it’s not me. That doesn’t mean I go up there unprepared. As an introvert, I probably overprepare. Otherwise, I’d pass out.
Our readers who follow your Instagram account may have noticed that you announce high school football games in your spare time. How did that start?
Yeah, I’ve been the PA announcer for our local high school football games for 15 years. It’s one of the ways I can give back to the community. Back in the day, our kids were heavily involved in sports. The athletic director needed somebody to do a track meet once, and I jumped in. So I did basketball games and track meets and football games when our kids were in high school, and now I just do the football.
Churches are called to make their cities better. The best way to do that is to genuinely and authentically love our neighbors. If there are needs in our community, we want to get involved. We want to be a part of the solution. Ten to 12 years ago, a local public elementary school had a problem with asbestos in their building, and they weren’t allowed to open. We invited them into our church, and the elementary school was here for three months while they fixed their asbestos problem.
We’re not just here for the people who are members of the congregation. This congregation is here for the community.
Building that kind of culture starts at the top. How can pastors like yourself lead by example to develop cultures of outreach and evangelism in their own contexts?
In seminary, the first question my preaching professor would ask the classroom after every practice sermon was, “Was it authentic? Do you believe that what this preacher was preaching is something he or she truly believes in their heart?” That stuck with me.
In our community, we have a significantly growing population of people who came to this country from India. A few years ago, some of them started playing cricket in the park. That was new for people in Des Moines. So in a message one week, I said, “Maybe instead of wringing our hands over that, we can realize what a great opportunity this is for us to do a couple of things. One is to culturally broaden our horizons and learn from one another. And the second is to share the good news of God’s love with those who may not know it.” I said, “Rather than walk by and talk under our breath about how things are changing, what if we actually walked up and introduced ourselves?”
I thought I had better practice what I preached, so I started doing that, and they invited me and tried to teach me how to play cricket, which was really fascinating. That missionary mentality is central to our church, realizing we are not set free by Christ to just receive God’s amazing grace as spiritual consumers but to share it with the world around us. Now, because we’re here for this community, we have 300 to 400 people of Indian descent who come to our church.
At Hope, we say three things at our new member orientations. First, everyone has a job. Everyone’s a minister, not just the people who are called to be pastors, so everybody has a ministry. Second, we want to give Jesus our best. We think God deserves excellence, not our leftovers. And third, everybody invites. We’ve never had an evangelism committee. We want to create a culture of invitational evangelism where in every encounter we think, What can I say or do to serve this person, to love this person—and ultimately, in the midst of relationship—to lead this person into a life-changing relationship with God through Jesus Christ?
If everyone has a job, everyone’s giving Jesus our best, and everybody’s inviting, the rest of the things we worry about in churches are just details.
LUTHERAN CHURCH OF HOPE
West Des Moines, Iowa
Website: LutheranChurchOfHope.org
Denomination: Lutheran
Founded: 1994
Largest: 52
Fastest-Growing: 63