A HISTORY OF JPL BIBLE CHURCH ... January 2002 to 2008

Pastor Steve Sorensen arrived in the Coachella Valley in 1988 after serving as a missionary in West Africa with his wife Marty.  He served the church in the valley as both a volunteer and as a paid staff pastor.  In October 2nd 2001 Greg Chastain and Steve Sorensen began meeting together, praying and working towards starting a church as teammates and friends.  They were very different in personality and gifting and believed that these differences could be combined with great effect.  They gathered a core of about 15 people and a church planting consultant named Scott Horn and made plans to begin the new church.  The name JPL came from Pastor Steve's idea that a church should be fun (joy), well run with effectiveness and accountability and without political intrigue (peace) and full of friends: relational Christianity (love).  Joy, peace and love are the first three fruits of the Holy Spirit. 

The Early Days of JPL

The first JPL Bible Church gathering took place in Palm Desert in Greg and Lindy Chastain’s backyard on January 4, 2002, with about 80 friends and family in attendance.  The kids played and lunch was served.  We met once more in the Chastain backyard and then on January 18, 2002, began meeting at the Shadow Mountain Country Club in Palm Desert .  The kids and youth met in three different classes in the club boardroom.  The band set up in front of a large stone fireplace and the congregation sat around circular tables.  Pastor Steve preached under a disco ball and Karen Hammers began a JPL tradition with a fruit, coffee and donut table called the "Garden of Eat'n."   JPL outgrew Shadow Mountain in six months and began meeting in Heritage Palms Country Club in Indio, CA.   Pastor Steve found himself preaching on a dance floor and once again under a large disco ball!  Over the next 18 months the church added a paid, part time youth minister and continued to grow. 

Greg Chastain had been interested in the old Cinema 3 theaters in Palm Desert ever since the church began.  The JPL leadership decided to take a big risk of faith by investing all of our money to renovate this abandoned theater.  The only way the nervous landlord would rent it to us is if our lease had a 30 day out clause!  The theaters had been abandoned for several years and had been stripped to 3 large, empty concrete rooms without screens or seats.  The day after we signed the lease a member of the church was driving through Palm Springs and happened to notice a pile of theater seats in a theater parking lot.  It turns out they were renovating the theater. We asked for and were given over 500 seats, many fixtures and curtains!  And the seats were just like the ones that had been taken out of the Cinema 3 Theaters years earlier!  Over 400 seats and fixtures fit exactly in two different theaters.  Pastor Steve still insists that he personally moved every seat at least once during that remodel.  Every night for several months people joined in and helped.  The process of working with the city was not easy.  What we thought would take 2 months took us 4 months.  Those were some trying times, but God always provided, though looking back we wonder how!  Greg Underwood forever went down in JPL lore, showing up every day to do whatever needed to be done.  Many others, too numerous to mention, but forever appreciated, worked and worked to transform those theaters into a wonderful memory in JPL church life.  In fact, today our friends at Champion LIfe church continue to meet there.

JPL "Goes to the Movies"

JPL moved into the theaters in February 2004 and it was a definite ‘wow’ moment.  We had all we needed, a concert type theater for the adults, a big jamming open room for the youth, and a Disneyland like theater for the kids, and a couple of spare rooms for the pre-school.   We moved in to the theaters knowing that we did not have the people to fill it or the offering to sustain it, but we believed God would grow us into it.  One month later we held an opening dedication and the theater was packed to overflowing with adults and kids!  Beginning in early Fall, we started to see a steady growth that culminated in two wonderful, packed Christmas Candlelight services with more then 500 people in attendance.

God is able to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think!

We all thought we would be in the theaters for years and even dreamed about one day purchasing more of the shopping center.  Only ten months later our youth pastor, Derek Siani, learned that a local church was planning to relocate and wanted to sell their church.  Greg Chastain immediately sensed God wanted us to buy it even though we had no money!   One month later a member of JPL felt an amazing call of God to arrange the purchase and by early January 2005 JPL Bible Church had purchased the 5 acre campus just two miles north of the theaters on Monterey Avenue.  

JPL Finds a Home

Once again we all went into action and spent a couple of months reconfiguring and renovating the new campus.  We were almost finished by Easter and decided to hold an Easter 2005 "Grand Opening"  service.  We set up outside on the grass with stages, chairs, banners and balloons and that morning the cars just kept driving in and we kept setting up extra chairs on the grass until we had an estimated 700 people in attendance!  The service was a festival atmosphere and ended with the release of hundreds of white balloons to symbolize our risen Lord Jesus!  The Easter spike attendance dropped back down towards normal the next week and JPL began the task of growing into this large campus that the Lord had given us with people and finances.  We have a 9:00 am acoustic worship service (without childcare) and a 11:00 am service staffed by full time and part time youth and children’s ministry directors serving babies to grade 12.  But what makes every church work are the many volunteers working together with the staff to create a spiritual family growing in quality and quantity.

The JPL of Today

On Sunday, November 30, 2008 Jesus Christ initiated a period of major spiritual renewal. Pastor Steve Sorensen and the JPL staff, unpaid staff and some of the core volunteers met together for two Friday nights of prayer and worship and two Saturday workshops with church consultants Scott and Delores Horn to essentially 'replant' the church! We are much stronger than we were in the Chastain backyard, but once again we will seek the Lord for the vision and structure of JPL as a spiritual family able to support each other with words and deeds in easy times and through trials. We know that as long as we seek the kingdom of God above all else and live righteously, he will give us and the church everything we need. In fact we believe that the Lord will give us more than we need so we can overflow in joy and generosity into the community around JPL and through missionaries to various places in the world, in particular the French speaking world through our association with SIM, an international mission organization that Pastor Steve served with 20 years ago.

The JPL of Tomorrow?

Christ is always leading his people to their next step of continued health and growth. It is our prayer that we make full use of this 5 acre resource by expanding our service into a community daycare and a Resource Center on the property that can serve as an extension campus for Biblical studies and Worship Arts to train leaders in skills that can build the kingdom of God. We desire our church journey and life journeys to be God adventures, and God adventures are beyond anything we might ask or think. When God is in the house, anything can happen! Pastor Steve Sorensen believes that the next steps of JPL will end up fitting in with the supernatural churches described in the book of Acts. Beyond that, who can say? We believe God accepts everyone exactly as they are at JPL and so do we, but nobody at JPL wants to stay exactly as we are! You are welcome to come and join us on our amazing journey to becoming in every way more and more like Christ at JPL Bible Church. May God use us all to help change this valley and the world one person at a time.