New Life Ministries’ Pastor Troy Campbell follows the example of Jesus, not Jerry Johnston

As Pastor Troy Campbell roams the courtyards of the Chouteau Courts housing project on Independence Avenue, a boy jumps on his back. Campbell is a strapping 6-foot-2, but the boy slides off, having grown too big for piggyback rides.

It’s a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon. Campbell is knocking on doors and talking through windows of the project’s two- and three-story brick buildings. He invites the residents he encounters to attend Family Jam, a 90-minute church camp — songs, crafts, snacks — that New Life Ministries hosts every Sunday in the project’s youth center.

New Life, which started meeting in downtown Kansas City a year ago, has informally adopted Chouteau Courts. As he makes the rounds, Campbell dodges sprinklers watering sod that church members and workers from the Housing Authority of Kansas City helped lay.

“They’ve been consistent,” Lizzie Brown, a tenants’ association leader, says of New Life’s congregation. “They come when they say they’re going to come.”

Campbell is white and lives in the suburbs. The residents of Chouteau Courts are predominantly black and live downhill from the fleabag motels along the Paseo. But being part of New Life means getting out of one’s comfort zone. “I think I’ve learned more at Chouteau than I did at seminary,” Campbell says.

Campbell attended the Heart of America Theological Seminary in Independence. The seminary is part of Tri-City Ministries, a Baptist church firmly planted on the religious right. The head pastor, Carl Herbster, is also the founder of AdvanceUSA, which, its Web site says, aspires to protect the nation from “activist judges and the militant homosexual agenda,” among other demons close to the hearts of churchgoing conservatives.

Campbell, 32, represents a different face of evangelical Christianity. It is younger and more cosmopolitan, and it shows less interest in the culture wars.

The evangelism New Life practices is not a soft version of Christianity. Campbell says he spent 10 hours preparing a recent sermon. This fall, New Life will make an intensive study of 1 Peter and 2 Peter.

But its mission is not electing Republicans; its test of faith is not the fierceness of one’s opposition to a gay wedding.

This is not to say that young evangelicals will clinch elections for Democrats in November. However, they do share some of secular citizens’ concerns about the religious right. According to a 2007 survey, 47 percent of born-again Christians age 40 and younger felt that the political efforts of conservative Christians posed a problem.

Tony Totta, a sales rep and New Life’s ministry coordinator, uses words such as stale and claustrophobic to describe the atmosphere in the churches he used to attend. Many Americans have come to perceive Christians as judgmental, he says. “But in the Bible we’ve been called to be characterized by love.”

Totta, 28, says he was excited to attend a church stripped of “peripheral things.” He shared Campbell’s vision of a church that reached out to people and was relevant in their lives.

New Life held its first service in the ball­room of the Scarritt Building at Eighth Street and Grand. Today the church meets at the Union Hill Veterans Hall. An architect has drawn plans for a more lasting home on the fourth floor of the Corrigan Building at 18th Street and Walnut.

Average attendance is 175. “We’re not a church defined by walls,” Campbell says. “Church is the people. Church is the body. It’s who we are.”

Campbell and I first spoke as New Life prepared for its initial service on Easter Sunday in 2007. I was curious about a church that had never met but could afford billboards. A little document chasing turned up Campbell and his ties to Tri-City, where he was the adult minister. (The billboards and other marketing materials, it turns out, were gifts from generous friends of the new ministry.)

I had written about Tri-City in 2005 (“Blessed Are the Moneymakers,” April 28, 2005). The story tried to make sense of the church’s financial dealings — Tri-City had sold unregulated securities to members, seen a former business manager admit to embezzling $618,000 and turned prime land off Interstate 70 over to church insiders.

Guilt by association made me wary of Campbell. But unlike Herbster, his old boss, he agreed to speak with me. He sounded sincere. He even invited me to have coffee.

We’ve met three or four times. Gay marriage and stem-cell research have never come up. Instead, Campbell talks about counseling an ex-con and working with Defenders USA, a nonprofit dedicated to eradicating commercialized sex by concentrating on the demand end. “Men can’t go out on the streets and rescue prostitutes,” Campbell says.

He also talks about closing the gap between the church described in the New Testament and what’s happening in the suburbs today. “The church has possibly been one of the most selfish organizations around,” Campbell says. To that end, he doesn’t foresee a day when New Life builds a fitness center for its members. “I’d rather go to the YMCA and hang out with people who don’t go to church and get to know them,” he says.

For the record, Campbell has never dished any Tri-City dirt to me. When he talks about ministries gone awry, he speaks generally. “They’re doing good things in their own way,” he says of Tri-City.

Still, it’s pretty comical to compare New Life’s quest for authenticity with some of the more visible evangelical houses of worship in the city.

Jerry Johnston, the founder of First Family Church in Overland Park, wields an American Express “black” card, lives in a half-million-dollar home and leads sojourns to such spiritually embattled places as Hawaii. First Baptist Church of Raytown, another ministry that buys TV time, spent more than a year in litigation answering an accusation that Mark Brooks, son of senior pastor Paul Brooks, coerced a church member into having sex. The case was settled. Correspondence in the court file outlines an agreement in which the plaintiff would receive $200,000 and Brooks, who claimed the affair was consensual, terminated his parental rights to the baby the woman delivered.

Away from the klieg lights, at Chouteau Courts, New Life members follow Jesus’ examples. During the activity session, church members play chess and fold paper with the children. Campbell uses a power drill to make a smiley face in a piece of wood. “I decided against the circular saw,” Campbell jokes as a couple of kids look on.

God, it appeared, did not bless Campbell with the talent of woodworking. But Campbell has succeeded in getting out of his comfort zone, and that’s a lesson everyone can use.

Click here to send a letter to the editor.