Where Would Dallas Go to Church?

The churches Dallas Willard joined, and what they say to everyone searching

A question keeps surfacing in the “Dallas Willard is my homeboy” Facebook group, asked by different people in different months but always in the same shape. Where can I find a church in my area that thinks like Dallas? Who is planting churches in the model of Dallas? Somebody reads The Divine Conspiracy, tastes the kingdom, looks up from the page, and finds himself in a congregation that has never heard of it. It is sincere. I have felt the ache behind it myself.

The question has an answer, though: Dallas chose his churches for their shepherds, not for their fit. Dallas went to church his whole life, and his daughter Becky walked me through the congregations when I interviewed her for my dissertation. Gary Moon’s biography tells the same story. It starts in a Baptist pulpit in Missouri.

He Joined the Churches His Friends Pastored

Dallas grew up in Southern Baptist churches and went on to serve several himself, including a stretch as a young associate pastor carrying the Sunday evening preaching, before his turn to the academy. He left pastoral ministry for the philosophy program at the University of Wisconsin, convinced he understood too little of God and the human soul to serve a flock well, and during the Wisconsin years the Southern Baptist doctoral student pastored two small Congregational churches outside Madison. Even the doctorate was pastoral at its root.

When the family settled in Los Angeles, they joined Woodlake Avenue Friends Church, a small Quaker congregation in Canoga Park. In 1970 a young pastor named Richard Foster arrived, and the friendship that reshaped modern spiritual formation began in that little sanctuary. The Southern Baptist philosopher led the singing while Jane played the organ. He taught the classes where, Moon records, he first worked out the material that became The Spirit of the Disciplines and The Divine Conspiracy. He handled maintenance and landscaping; Becky remembers planting trees on the grounds with her father. One Sunday night he ended his own sermon early so his kids could get home in time for The Wonderful World of Disney.

After Woodlake closed, the Willards sang in the robed choir of a Presbyterian church under a pastor named Gary Smith, a congregation Becky remembers partly for its cat, Second Timothy, successor to First Timothy. They worshiped at Shepherd in the Valley Lutheran Church, pastored by their friend Bill Vaswig. When Van Nuys Baptist Church split in 1977, the departing group asked Dallas to serve as interim pastor, and he preached to the new Faith Evangelical Church in a high school auditorium. For most of the 1980s the family belonged to Valley Vista, pastored by Larry Burtoft, who had been Dallas’s own philosophy student; the Psalm 23 series Dallas taught there in 1991 became Life Without Lack. On Wednesday nights across more than three decades he taught at Rolling Hills Covenant Church, where a class member named Keith Matthews became one of his closest partners in ministry. And at the end, Dallas and Jane were active members of Valley Vineyard in Reseda, whose pastor, Bill Dwyer, credits Dallas and Jane with drawing him into the work of spiritual formation. Dallas’s funeral gathered in that church.

One prayer conference from those years brought, in Foster’s words, “a Baptist pastor inviting a Quaker pastor to go to a Lutheran pastor’s church to hear an Episcopalian who used to be a Presbyterian.” Quaker, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, Covenant, Vineyard, plus five trips, by Becky’s count, to encourage Trevor Hudson and the Methodists of South Africa. Dallas swam in every stream.

When I wrote my dissertation, I put it this way: the choice of congregation for the Willards seems to have been greatly related to Willard’s relationships with the pastors of those congregations. Foster. Smith. Vaswig. Burtoft. Dwyer. He was choosing shepherds.

Burtoft had been his student. Dwyer names Dallas as the man who drew him deeper into formation. The interim pulpit went to him because a room full of wounded Baptists needed a steady shepherd for a season. Every church he joined, he joined for the shepherd already standing there, and he stayed to help that man become more fully a teacher of the nations.

“The Church Closed. That’s Not a Failure.”

Two of the churches Dallas gave his Sundays to, Woodlake and Valley Vista, stayed small, and Woodlake closed when Becky was in fifth grade. Someone in the homeboy group once ran the math on those little congregations and called them failures.

Becky answered with memories instead of metrics. She was one of the kids sent along when twenty or thirty members showed up to paint a young family’s house, inside and out. Men from the church came two separate times to help her dad build retaining walls on the family property. And after one of the men noticed the state of the Willard VW Bug, the men of Woodlake brought Dallas a set of new tires; Foster told Becky years later that Dallas received them with a quiet “thank you. I needed those.” “These people were doing life together and they were caring for each other,” she said of Woodlake. Then: “The church closed. That’s not a failure.”

Moon’s work treats Woodlake as the laboratory, the room where Dallas and Richard tested the disciplines on an ordinary congregation. Measure that room the way we measure churches and it flunks: the attendance stayed small and the doors eventually shut. Measure it by formation and a tiny Quaker church in Canoga Park produced Celebration of Discipline, The Spirit of the Disciplines, and The Divine Conspiracy, and the whole church is still eating from its garden. If Woodlake had succeeded the way churches are told to succeed, Foster likely stays a busy pastor with a full calendar and an unwritten book.

Woodlake and Valley Vista would have flunked every church shopper’s checklist we carry today.

He Went Where He Could Give

Dallas knew why the question gets asked. “Contemporary American churches in particular do not require following Christ in his example, spirit, and teachings as a condition of membership,” he wrote in The Great Omission. The diagnosis is real, and he made it more bluntly than the Facebook group does.

His remedy was different. The searcher asks which congregation can feed me. Dallas asked which shepherd he could strengthen. “One of the most heartbreaking things today is that we are divided between different traditions, and there is no fellowship; pastors don’t care for one another because they think they are different,” he told a room of ministers near the end of his life. He spent five decades being the man who cared for them, one congregation at a time.

Where would Dallas go to church? His life is the answer. Dallas would go to church where he found a pastor becoming a teacher of the nations, or a pastor who could become one with some encouragement, and he would sit close enough, for long enough, to be part of the becoming. If you are asking yourself where Dallas would have you go to church, maybe the answer is the same place you have always gone, with a new mindset when you get there.

Dallas’s pattern assumes a shepherd who can be loved toward the kingdom. Leaving is for the church that harms its people or has sealed itself against Christ’s formation. Everywhere else, the pattern is worth trusting.

I need to say this as a pastor. I am thirty-five, three years into my first full-time pastorate, young by most reckonings. Beyond the members I inherited, the Lord has in his kindness sent our church several families who needed a new church home for reasons of their own. These are people who have served in ministry for decades and know more than I do about ministry and about walking with Jesus. They could likely list things about our church they would do differently, and other churches they might prefer if personal taste were the only factor. They chose this one anyway, to help this pastor. I am eternally grateful for that, and spiritually better because of it. I think I have seen in them the same thing Dallas embodied. They found a shepherd, and they chose to help him become a teacher of the nations.

The Smallest and Nearest Church

Eugene Peterson spent part of his later ministry writing pastoral letters to a friend he named Gunnar, a composite figure built from real letters and real encounters, a man re-entering the faith after decades away. He published them as The Wisdom of Each Other. Gunnar wanted to know where to go to church, the same question the homeboy group keeps asking. Peterson’s counsel reads as if he had the thread open in front of him. “You’re better off sticking with what you started out with at your Christian re-entry,” he answers, and names the place: “the ‘smallest and nearest church.’ It’s still my standard counsel in churchgoing.”

Gunnar complained about the music. Peterson answered like a spiritual director with a grin: “No, you don’t have to like the hymns. And yes, you do need to sing them,” calling the singing “an excellent exercise in humility.” And when Gunnar grew restless with his unimpressive congregation, Peterson sent him back: “Go back to the company of those seventy or eighty people on Sunday, listen believingly to the Scriptures read and preached, offer your prayers, receive Jesus in the sacrament, and bless your neighbors. And wait for the Kingdom. It’s the Holy Spirit’s style to fashion holy lives among the inept.”

Willard and Peterson land in the same place. Willard gave his Sundays to congregations because the shepherds there were worth loving and the people there were worth investing in. Peterson told his friend that the Holy Spirit does his finest work among exactly such people. Between them stands a mercy for everyone still scanning the horizon for a church that thinks like Dallas: the best place for our spiritual formation may be the church that costs us our comfort.

For Reflection

1. When you last weighed a church, was your checklist measuring what the congregation could give you or whom you could love there?

2. Which pastor within a short drive of your house could become a teacher of the nations if you committed to him the way Dallas committed to Foster, Burtoft, and Dwyer?

3. Are you willing to wait for the Kingdom among the seventy or eighty people the Holy Spirit is fashioning into holy lives right where you are, or are you waiting on a church that’s already finished?