(Granite Bay, California) There are few people like Pastor Ray Johnston. Some call him a visionary--a leader among leaders. A reluctant pastor, he started Bayside Church with just a few families in response to a tragedy in their community.
Pastor Ray describes his early life as a life of chaos.
"I grew up in Southern California. I never in a million years thought I'd be a pastor. I grew up in an executive, pretty high-octane Southern California home. My dad was president of a company at age 40. My dad was an atheist. My mom was an agnostic. I grew up being an atheist. In fact, I actually talked a guy out of becoming a Christian when I was 18 years old, which does not look good on a pastor's resume. What happened is my dad ends up becoming an alcoholic, and then became an alcoholic rage-aholic. I had two younger sisters, and it was crazy. My mom was an alcoholic too, and they drank their whole future apart, the entire home. I have two younger sisters, and it would get so crazy sometimes, about midnight or one in the morning, they would come running in my room, crying. I'd take the screen off the window. I'd hop out the window, and we'd be walking the streets in this nice neighborhood. But after it died down, I'd put them back through the window, and they'd sleep in my room. And then they got divorced. Matter of fact, my dad was a big deal. Guys wanted to run him for governor of California. He turned them down, and they ran a guy named Ronald Reagan instead."
Everything changed when Ray was a senior in high school.
"I was 18, a friend of mine that was, we're on the same basketball team, we just struck up a friendship, and this guy started bringing me to his church. It's this large church in Southern California. And my first thought, to be honest with you, is, these people are pretty sharp. How can such smart people believe such stupid stuff like the Bible? And it took me about six or eight months, and I finally woke up one day, and I went, oh no, it's 51 to 49. I now believe more than I don't believe. And the minute that happened, I went, I'm in. So ended up by this great church, introduced me to Jesus, discipled me, reordered me into my entire life.
My parents ended up getting divorced. Which is no great surprise, because every single person in my family tree, going back 150 years now, is divorced. Every single one. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, sisters, everybody. Carol and I celebrated our 42nd wedding anniversary this year. Which means we have the longest running marriage in the history of my family tree.
And out of all of Jesus, the Bible, and a great church. I love it when somebody comes up and says, I just don't think Jesus makes that big of a difference. All I have to do is take up my family tree, and He broke 150 years of past disaster patterns in one generation. We cut our family tree down in years of rekindling to build a whole new one."
"I'm kind of living proof that there is nothing in your background, nothing, nothing you've done, or nothing that's ever been done to you, that will stop God from doing something great in your future if you will let Him in. So I'm living a life I never thought I'd live."
After going all in for Jesus, Pastor Ray describes the way that God's will was done, despite his own thinking.
"I did not want to be a pastor. But we were living in Granite Bay. There were two copycat suicides of teenagers in Granite Bay. And four people began to pray that God would raise up a church that would attract teenagers. And so, they came to us and said, 'would you be the pastor?' And I said, 'no.'
It's a little bit like God says, 'here am I, send someone else.' They bugged us for six months. Finally, I took the coward's way out. I said, look, I will help you start the church. But the minute we're up and rolling, you'll call a pastor, it will not be me. We did a Bible study, and 26 people showed up. A month later, 28 people showed up."
Ray still doubted that the church would work.
"We picked the name Bayside, and we were, let's try a test service, see if anybody shows up. So we rented this tennis club, set up in the upstairs room. There's about 100 chairs set up. I take down 50 of them, so it'll look full when only 30 people show up. And 162 people showed up. And we're pretty simple, like the in and out of churches. We teach the Bible and worship. But at the end of that message, I said, I don't think some of these people are Christians. So I gave a crystal clear invitation to receive Christ as your Savior and make Him your Lord.
I just said, if you prayed that prayer, raise your hands, half the hands in the room went up. We ended that service and said, hey, thanks for coming. We don't have a church. We'll do this again in a month. So a month later, we rented a school down the street. I arrived, there's 180 chairs set up. I take down about 50 of them, so it'll look full when only 100 people come back. 226 people show up in the second service. Same thing, worship, teach the Bible, give an invitation, see if people become Christians."
God's plan would prevail in spite of Pastor Ray's ambivalence.
"I went to a prayer summit in Chicago. It's the second night in this late night prayer meeting. I prayed in this thing, it's about a thousand leaders from all over the world. I prayed, I mean, I prayed out, I prayed for everything I could think of. And then I think, wait a second, I should pray for Bayside that God would give it the right pastor, because it's not going to be me. And to be really honest, and this is embarrassing, I didn't want to be the pastor because I was afraid. I was afraid we'd try to start a church and nobody would come. I was afraid we'd try to start a church and people would come, but no help would come. I was afraid we'd try to start a church and people would come and help would come. But we'd have to raise money, buy land, build them all. I was afraid of everything. I never had the guts to tell people I was too afraid to do it. I just kept saying, God has not called his servant ready to do this.
I'm in this prayer meeting. It's two services. It's three days later. I'm in this 11 o'clock at night prayer meeting in Chicago. And I start praying that God would raise up the right pastor for this church. Now there's a thousand people in this room. So I'm going, Lord, that person's got to be here. Light him up, levitate him. I'll go talk to him."
What happened next shocked Ray.
"While I'm praying, God crystal clear says to me, 'read Acts 18.' I open up my Bible and I look down and it says these words, Acts chapter 18. The Lord said to Paul in the night, which this is by a vision, which this is starting to feel like. And the next words are to not be afraid.
And I went, oh, no, I don't want to do this. I'm going to keep reading. There's got to be a loophole. Well, we had already planned our move back home to Marin County from Sacramento. The next verse says Paul stayed where he was and taught the word of God.
I start crying. I walk out of the prayer meeting. I go up to my room and I call my wife, Carol, to find out if I've heard from God or not. Husbands will understand that one. She started crying and she said she'd already started a Bible study up here. The wife of the coach of the Sacramento Kings was coming. It was flourishing. She started crying. She said, I knew God was telling us to do this. I just been praying for you that He would make it real obvious because if anything gets hard around here, you'll know it was the call of God.
My wife's amazing. And that's how I ended up at Bayside. It was I did not want to do it. I was afraid to do it. It was a crystal clear, only time in my life call of God."
And with Ray's yes, everything has changed. Bayside now serves an average of 20,000 people across ten campuses.
"I don't believe large churches are better or more spiritual than small churches. There are some small, great churches. And there are some large, unhealthy churches. I think the thing is health, not size. We will have about 18000 people this weekend. There will be about 60000 people on Easter. It's crazy. We got a Mark Clark, incredible communicator. He preached during our Christmas services and we had close to 3000 people not just accept Christ in the services, but go to follow up tables to get material. It's I never dreamt of stuff like that.
Even with the incredible success of Bayside, God had more pruning to do. He used an older pastor to gently show Ray what more needed to be done.
"In 10 minutes, I'm a disaster. I mean, tears are streaming down my face because what everything changed. What happened is this guy just got up, took Acts two. And he said, here's how the early church lived. He says, quote, selling their possessions and goods they gave to anyone who had needs. He said, evidently, the early church started with good with good deeds. It says they had favor with God and all the people. I mean, the Christian church in America does not have favor with people. And he said, evidently, their good deeds led to goodwill. And the very next the very next verse says, and the Lord added to the number daily those who were being saved. And he wrote good news. And I'm I'm a wreck. I'm crying because I'm going the early church had good deeds led to goodwill, which led to the good news."
Pastor Ray realized that although his church was growing, it wouldn't be sustainable unless they were doing it God's way.
"Like almost every church in America, we've been trying to deliver the good news without good deeds. So there was no goodwill. And I mean, it just wrecked me. And so I call our staff together and I said, I don't care if it wrecks our church, destroys our church. We will do this God's way.
We have 85 projects and we raised eight point three million dollars to give away to 85 projects here, there and all around the world. For example, when COVID shut the world down, remember that we get a phone call and downtown somebody called and they said, hey, there's 300 kids downtown. And those 300 kids are locked out of school because they're poor and they're from really bad poverty stricken areas. And they don't have Chromebooks and they don't have Wi-Fi in their homes. So we call a Zoom call, had a gazillion people go on Zoom, told them to get out your phone. People gave $250,000 in 12 minutes. Within three days, we worked with the people and they got all those kids Chromebooks, got all their family's Wi-Fi hotspots and prepaid them for two years. And they were all back in school. We would not have done that before Acts two.
"Can you imagine if all 360,000 churches in America that became the new operating system? However, until God put me in a room where an older pastor got his Bible and hit me across the head with it, it wrecked me, but it changed our church."
When asked what's the most important thing he does as a leader, Ray is quick to answer.
"I'd say, what's the most important thing you do as a leader, as a Christian, as a husband or a wife, as a mom or a dad, as a teenager? Make sure I stay encouraged. Because if I'm not encouraged, I'm going to be discouraged. And discouragement precedes destruction. Discouragement is the quicksand people get into. No young guys ever come up to me and said, I'm so encouraged about my marriage. I'm getting a divorce. Nobody's ever said I'm so encouraged about school. I'm dropping out.
We have a definition of discouragement. Discouragement is the anesthetic that the devil uses on a person just before he reaches in, carves out their heart and wrecks the rest of their life. Which means the single most important thing about a person is to figure out what drains me, what discourages me and do less of that."
How does Pastor Ray stay encouraged?
"First of all, I avoid things that are discouraging. There are some people they are so discouraging. If you're with them, you walk out worse, which means you just have to spend less time with them. There are other people that are so encouraging. I love going to worship. Anything that recharges my batteries.
All human beings have two levels. You have a challenge level and you have a support level. You have two levels and those things interact. When your challenge level goes up and your support level doesn't go up or it drops, the distance between your level of challenge and your level of support is destructive stress and destructive stress causes every emotional problem. In other words, stress, if that gap gets too wide, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, all affairs on the part of men are not because they're in love, it's inappropriate stress relief, which means, and the problem is this, most of us, when COVID blew up and the whole world went crazy, what happened is people's challenges went sky high and the support level dropped.
Every person needs to figure out, how do I raise my level of support? And so who is it that supports you? Spend more time with them. Get in a group, whatever it takes. What is it that drains you and discourages you and do less of it? I always walk out of church better than I walk in. I don't miss church.
Americans right now are going to church three out of every eight weeks. The Christian faith is more than the consumption of content. It is being in the presence of God with the people of God, worshiping a living God. It's being transformed by that. It is it is hearing the word of God in a compelling way.
I'm in a group of guys. Matter of fact, I go away every six months. I go away with a group of guys. We're away about four to five days. I walk out better."
Bayside and Pastor Ray are active with area churches--building them up and supporting their initiatives.
"If instead of launching a ton of churches, if we can help every church get better and they can help us get better, then everything gets better. And so, for example, we raise money and we're giving it to different churches to do different projects. There's a great church down the street from us. It's a large Russian Ukrainian church and it's moving beyond just that limitations. It's called House of Bread. They're amazing. We do a ton of stuff with their pastors. And so, for example, I'm talking to one of their pastors and they said, we do stuff in the Ukraine, which is still that whole war is breaking out. People are dying. Bombs are dropping. And these people courageously fly over there. And they plant churches while bombs are dropping. And these people are heroes. So I said, 'what do you guys work on now?' And they said, we keep meeting these teenagers over there whose dads have been killed on the front line. They're a mess. Bombs are dropping. Their emotional health is gone.
They said, we would like to fly 30, 40 of those teenagers over here, have them be in our church, help them experience America, and see if we can restore some emotional health to these kids. Maybe lead them to Jesus and make them part of our church. We offered to cover the cost of airfare. What does it cost?
On Christmas Eve, we stood up and we said, we're taking a second offering right now. Just at the Granite Bay campus, we had 14 services and I said, not only are we going to fly all those kids over here, but we would like you to give enough money so we can buy them a three day park hopper pass to Disneyland. They just need to enjoy some stuff and they'll be here later this year."
Ray encourages us all to step out in faith.
"Fear is the dark room where negatives develop. Never let your fears stop you from living fully into your future."
Hear the full conversation with Monika Kelly and Pastor Ray Johnston:
