Members of the Hope Baptist Church filed into the parking lot on the northwest corner of Pebble Road and Gilespie Street under the last remnants of the sunrise that had exploded across the morning of January 20—a Sunday—just before the first service was to commence, at 8:30. There was a bit of hustle and bustle to park and get inside the large, contemporary edifice, but as usual they carried themselves with an upbeat air and without the ceremonious rigor of old-time churchgoers.
It would be the same for the morning’s next two services, at 10 and 11:30. Except that the parking lot was even busier then, a little more frenzied and, in all certainty, louder. To both the fortune and misfortune of the church, there was more congregation than parking space.
Soon enough, however, that will not be the case. After a long and arduous process, the church managed to overcome objection-minded neighbors and negotiate the bureaucracy required to change anything in this county, and they secured approval to pave an additional lot with 182 more spaces.
Lord knows they need it. For the congregation at Hope Baptist Church continues to multiply by the month, it seems, and so the church’s leadership finds itself in a continual game of catch-up, trying to expand the facilities to accommodate their growth.
That, in fact, has been the church’s story since it staked its tent on the open block of Gilespie and Pebble four years ago, and prior to that, since its inception, in Las Vegas, in February 2001. Rapid and incessant growth.
Michael Laughrun, a pastor at Hope who, with his fair share of preconceptions and uncertainties, had followed pastor Vance Pitman west from Tennessee, says they liked Las Vegas for its many opportunities, and that they made the irreversible decision to start the church here on the faith that God was doing great things in this city.
Their faith, he says, was confirmed after the first year. After hosting the initial services in Pastor Pitman’s Henderson home, where some 19 adults gathered, they were offered a larger house of worship.
“Numerically, we grew out of Pastor Vance’s living room, and began to pray for more space,” says Laughrun. “That’s when Randall Cunningham came to help: He let us use his studio, and in the summer of 2002 we had 300 people in there.”
Then they outgrew that facility, Laughrun says, and had to move to another, which they outgrew as well. By 2004 they were nearly forced to face homelessness.
That is, until “a believer” offered his land in the Enterprise community. “We believe,” Laughrun says, without a quaver in his voice, “that we were prayerfully led to a relationship with the owner of the land on Gilespie.”
They moved into the new home in June 2004, and now, on any given weekend, 1,600-1,800 people descend upon Gilespie and Pebble and enter Hope’s doors.
“Eighteen hundred people a week goes to show God’s doing great things in Las Vegas,” Laughrun says.
The good people of Hope Baptist will tell you that they accomplished the miracle of seeing their church flourish in Sin City through the timeless message of hope. A message delivered to a contemporary audience, employing any and all modern mediums to get it across, says Laughrun.
“We believe we’re right were God wants us,” he says.
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The only problem is, the church’s neighbors do not want them there.
“Let me tell ya,” says Bob Chapman, who for the past 30 years has lived in his house on Rancho Destino, the road that borders the west end of Hope Baptist. “What they’re doing is, on Saturdays and Sundays, they’re going to the services while their kids play outside, and what a racket!—all that screaming and yelling.
“They’re just having a marvelous time, those kids, and I have nothing against children enjoying themselves, but the noise is so loud, and that’s most burdensome to me.”
It’s difficult to find a neighbor who does not agree with Chapman. When the church applied with the county to expand its parking lot, 47 residents of the Enterprise community, almost all from addresses immediately surrounding the church, wrote letters of opposition, citing the noise stemming from the church as an intolerable problem.
And not just from the children, for whom the church built a playground next to the short wall that delineates church grounds from the back yards of homeowners on Rancho Destino Road; but also—and of greater nuisance—from the traffic that accompanies weekend services.
“It’s an absolute mess,” Randy Fletcher says of the congestion. He lives in a cul-de-sac right behind the church. “And it’s driving down the value of our homes.”
Moreover, many of Fletcher’s neighbors say, the lights from the church’s parking lot, whose grade is significantly above the cul-de-sac’s, invade their homes well into the night.
The noise and lights were enough to force one homeowner, Jill Dalesando, out of her home, and several of her neighbors—some of whom have lived in that neighborhood for four decades—say they have considered doing the same.
Laughrun says that he understands that the noise and traffic can be an inconvenience, and can empathize with his neighbors’ grievances.
“We’ve gone to great lengths to talk to them, to work with them, because we want to be good neighbors,” says Laughrun. “Remember: The heart of our church is developing relationships.”
Susan Allen, president of the Southwest Action Network (SWAN), a nonprofit organization that advocates for residents in the Enterprise and Spring Valley townships, says that churches are the most controversial establishment you can insert into a community.
“I would’ve thought a topless bar, or maybe even a tavern, but no. A church causes the greatest reaction,” she says. “People in the church believe they are doing God’s work—who could possibly be offended?—and many people are in fact afraid to confront them.”
Allen says that the problem with Hope Baptist is its size. That is, there were no problems with the church until its growth and expansion began to encroach on its neighbors.
The church says it draws more people from the surrounding zip code—89123—than from any other.
Chad Miller, who lives next door to the church on Gilespie, and who went door to door gathering signatures for a petition against the parking lot expansion when it was proposed last year, says that no, sir—no one within a half-mile radius of Hope Baptist attends the church.
This widely held perception has left many of the church’s immediate neighbors bitter, and their speech turns acidic when discussing the way the pastors were able to come from outside and erect their church in the midst of this quaint and serene neighborhood, drawing multitudes to the neighborhood every week.
Federal law mandates that churches be allowed to go up anywhere, irrespective of zone. They are issued special permits. For this reason, Allen says, “You’re not going to be able to stop a church from going up. The best you can do is compromise. Limit heights, ensure buffers, things like that.”
The part of the Enterprise community in which Pastors Laughrun and Pitman planted their church, between Las Vegas Boulevard and Bermuda Road, from Pebble on the south to Warm Springs Road to the north, is zoned R-E, rural estates. It is one of the last authentic rural neighborhoods in Las Vegas—with its large lots, its withdrawn nature, its hallowed mornings and quiet evenings, its goats and asses and potbelly pigs. According to folks who live there, it is one of the few remaining refuges for horses in the city.
“We’re horse people around here, partner,” says Thomas Bast, who owns and operates a boarding for horses there on his Haven Street property, two streets over from the church. He says his clientele, in large part, is comprised of his neighbors.
The roads are narrow, quiet, lonely and spotted with horse shit. Enclosed and solitary, the houses sit on no less than a half-acre, with expansive front yards, redoubted with wood or iron gates and signs warning against trespassing. Each estate seems to have space enough for you to breath, to stretch out, to enjoy the Valley’s vistas and to absorb each passing sunrise and sunset as if it were meant strictly for your land, God’s little acre.
To the east of the church, across Gilespie, lies undeveloped rural land.
In this way, the Hope Baptist Church, with its height, paved lots and modern look, sticks out in the same unabashed way any nonconformist does.
“To me, it’s no real church,” says Chapman. “We’ve had meetings in there; it didn’t look like no church to me.”
Yet, the ultimate vexation for the immediate community is not the church’s appearance, nor the lights and noise. Rather, it is something much deeper—something much larger—something long-coming and relentless:
It is the slow eviscerating of the area’s rural character, the harsh usurping of the way things used to be. Growth. As represented in their minds by Hope Baptist Church and its efforts to expand.
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“But at the same time our neighbors must understand we are the fastest-growing city in America,” says Laughrun. “The church is not solely responsible.”
The pastor couldn’t be any more accurate. Development has been encroaching upon Enterprise’s rural preserve for years. Susan Allen says the southern edge of the preserve, Pebble, which has been turned into a four-lane, 100-foot road, is evidence. The opposite side of Pebble, furthermore, resembles any other urbanized region of the Valley: cookie-cutter homes, apartments, shopping centers.
The immature history of Las Vegas has been little more than a guide written by developers on how to convert desert land into a viable metropolis, and Miller has seen this coming for a long time, he says.
“Yes, sir, I’ve lived here long enough that I’ve seen people who own horses moved four times,” says Miller, a resident of Las Vegas since 1963. “Look at Trop and Eastern, and over there on Torrey Pines. They kicked all those horses out and paved the roads. Rainbow and Cheyenne, too. It’s never enough.
“We couldn’t stop the development encroaching on the other side of Pebble because it’s zoned commercial. Now the church here will keep on growing, and expanding, and encroaching. You can’t stop them. The church can overrun this whole area. It’s never enough.
“In five or 10 years they’ll drive us [rural people] out. I don’t know where I’ll go with my horses,” Miller says, his voice weak with resignation.
Not all of his neighbors, however, have capitulated. Thomas Bast says rustic atmospheres and the rural way of life have become so precious in Las Vegas now, that, on account of their rarity, they are worth fighting for to the very last bell.
Bast says he and his neighbors have victories off which to build confidence. Two years ago they defeated a condominium project that attempted to climb along the preserve’s outer edge. Two years before that SWAN managed to have the rural preserve hard-zoned, to ensure that insatiable developers and unscrupulous politicians couldn’t slither in and change the area’s zoning.
It was with this confidence that Hope Baptist Church’s immediate neighbors came together to protest the church’s request to expand its parking lot before the Board of County Commissioners on January 16.
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That board meeting was three hours long, and it was intense. About a hundred of Hope’s church members came to support a new parking lot, and dozens of Hope’s neighbors came to oppose it, and both sides believed they had a valid, irreproachable argument. And, in many respects, they’re both right. Their conflict is a microcosm of the tension that, on a much larger scale, overrides the entire Las Vegas Valley.
Mike Shannon, the county’s community liaison for, among others, the Enterprise township, says that he receives many calls from the rural preserve folks, whom he describes as very concerned and active, but that they are not unique in their concerns:
“In the southwest, regardless of township,” he says, “the biggest issues are growth and traffic.”
Of course. The county, now at 2 million strong, has doubled in population in less than 15 years, and has quadrupled its residents since 1981.
That was the year the Clark County Commission welcomed Bruce Woodbury, in whose district Hope Baptist Church presently stands, and who embodies the conflict at play in its neighborhood.
Commissioner Woodbury, who’s been at home in Southern Nevada since 1944, when the population surmounted the 20,000 mark, and who lives in Boulder City, a small town whose citizens both possess the authority to prohibit growth, has had to approve much of this region’s immoderate growth since his time on the county board, as well as the accommodations that growth demands.
Woodbury, furthermore, has said he likes things the way they used to be, and that he does not champion growth for growth’s sake.
It is a blameless character trait, because nostalgia is a common and acute affliction, and while progress cannot occur without change, not all change is progress.
“I’m one of the biggest proponents for preserving rural estates,” he says. “This was just a parking lot to accommodate the second phase of the of building at the church that was already passed two years ago.”
As if to reassure himself, he adds: “That expansion that was approved two years ago came up without any opposition.” So Woodbury cast his vote to approve the church’s request to build an additional parking lot.
Many of the neighbors interviewed for this story say if there was no opposition to the 12,000-foot expansion of the church’s building (approved in April 2006) it’s only because none of them knew about it.
In any case, Bast says, it is disconcerting to him that his representative on the County Commission would vote in favor of a church that draws its congregation from outside the neighborhood, when all the nearby homeowners are in solidarity against any expansion.
Scott Stoffer, who lives on Rancho Destino Road, says, “I thought this was suppose to be a rural preserve area, and I just want to keep it that way. So I wrote a letter to the county, but I guess it didn’t mean nothing.”
Forty-seven others wrote letters. Fifty signed Chad Miller’s petition. Fourteen sent back postcards by which the county solicited feedback from the residents closest to the church, marked “I OPPOSE.” (The county received 612 letters of approval and no postcards indicating approval.)
“Nobody considers our [the residents closest to the church] view,” says Randy Fletcher.
Miller couldn’t agree more. “It doesn’t matter how many letters you write, it doesn’t matter whose signatures you get,” he says. “You can beg and you can plead, but you can’t stop them. You can’t stop the churches. They have too many votes.”
The commissioners voted five to one to approve the church’s expanded parking lot.
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To put it in proper perspective, the matter before the board was only a couple hundred extra parking spaces to accommodate an expansion of the church’s building that was already approved, just as Woodbury says.
But that’s not how the folks in Enterprise’s rural preserve who live by the church see it. No, to them, it’s just another sign of the times—yet another inch of encroachment of a tide they can’t push back. In this way, the Hope Baptist Church, in their minds, represents the nearly complete metamorphosis that Las Vegas and the 21st century have had on the old idyllic way of life.
“The reason we moved here is, it was quiet, a lovely community that minds its own business, and very beautiful,” says Bob Chapman. “But I guess nothing stays the same forever.”
Laughrun says that he and the church’s other pastors will, at the time this story goes to press, head to a retreat together to discuss and pray over the future of the church. In any event, he says, the church has never been focused on quantitative growth, but, rather, qualitative growth in the relationships they spur with God, other believers and the world.
“But all healthy things grow,” he says.
Growth is ubiquitous; you can’t stop what’s coming. Woodbury understands it in this way, and so he says in the Las Vegas Valley the focus should not be applied to stopping growth, but, rather, to managing it.
“Lots of people move to the Las Vegas Valley because of all the jobs and opportunities, and the three municipalities seem to be in favor of it,” he says. “But what we can do is make sure the growth adheres to the county’s master plan so that we can ensure a quality of life.”
On Friday, January 25, under a sunset at once sheathed by rumbling, ominous clouds and absolutely heartrending, Randy Fletcher regarded the Hope Baptist Church from his front porch and spoke with an acerbic tone about its impact on his quality of life, and then he capped it off with this fatalistic view:
“They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.”