From Fear to Faith: Ray Johnston’s Journey to Church Leadership (Part 2)

Don’t miss Part 1 of our interview, where Ray Johnston talks about coming to Christ from an atheist family, initially resisting the pleas of others 25 years ago to take the reins of a thriving church plant in California’s Sacramento area, and receiving his call at a prayer summit in Chicago.

Do you think that the church tends to be embarrassed by its own doctrines?

Part of what’s going on in America right now is that for 300 years we taught grace to truth-based Christians. The whole thing in the last 20 years has changed. This new generation is grace-based, but they don’t have a spiritual backbone. Our task in the next decade is to teach truth to grace-based.

How important is it for the church to both change and stay the same?

Jim Collins, in Built to Last, says things thrive over time when you have a small set of core values that never change. Any church or denomination that is drifting and changing their core values is dead in the water; they will decline. But you also need a commitment to expand, which requires change. At our church we have a small set of core values that never change and a radical commitment to expansion.

Let’s focus on critical transitions that changed Bayside. Tell me about an early experience that was revolutionary.

We started with a vision to reach kids and teenagers. I think that was critical. Our church was eight weeks old, had about 150 people meeting in the ugliest elementary school you ever saw, and our stage was a piece of plywood. I told our people, “We are going to do a summer day camp for kids.” We recruited literally everyone in church to work at this thing. We had 170 kids at our first camp, which was more than our Sunday attendance. Today, we are in Week 4 of our current summer day camp. There are about 1,200 kids focused on extreme sports. Local schools have started to put our camp info in their end-of-school-year packets.

Why do you think the camp has been so successful?

A couple of things come to mind. First, parents come to Bayside because we sucked in their kids. Second, it leads kids to serve at a very early age. What happens now is the kids go to day camp until they are in seventh grade. Then they start serving in day camp. Once people start serving, that changes everything.

Every single thing we do with kids has a leadership component. We do leadership trips for high school students. We have 1,000 or 1,200 students go to Mexico for a week. We also started a thing called Apex about six years ago. We didn’t have money for it, so I came to our church and said, “We’re going to take a second offering. If you believe in teenagers, give as much as you can.” The first time we did Apex, we hired 35 kids for the summer. We tell parents it’s like boot camp, so we “own” their children. We tell them their kids will learn how to work and be discipled and mentored. The cool thing about these kids is they are leading thousands of kids at our summer camps. Apex removes them from all peer pressure for the summer, it bonds them to each other, and they start getting a feeling that God can use them to make a difference. In the last five years, Bayside has hired 60 of our own students.