Pray for the Urban Frontier

Out beyond Riverside you will find Moreno Valley. This is the urban frontier of Southern California, the place where a new civilization is rising out of the chaparral. You can look across the vast carpet of terra-cotta roofs stretching south and in the distance see dust clouds. Those are the new homes going up, the Cambria Courts, the Chardonnay Hills, the Serenatas.

And near one edge of the tracts you can find the Moreno Valley Community Church. It is located in a mini-mall, and it looks to the tracts for its flock. People can come here, rent a video, buy a quart of milk, and then drop by the church for counseling. The Community Church is not the kind of church you remember from childhood, but Moreno Valley is not like any city you remember either.

This is a story about the pastor of the church, a young man named Tom De Vries, and what you might call a new way of doing the Lord’s business. Nothing sinister here; in fact, De Vries and his fellow pastors appear to be the main agents lifting Moreno Valley out of its subdivided ooze.

And that is not a minor task, if you know Moreno Valley.

Five years ago this place was a backwater of scattered ranchettes. Then the boom came and the terra-cotta roofs began to rise from the desert floor in chunks, tract by tract, and by 1986 the population had grown to 35,000. Now the population is 100,000 and rising every day. A larval city has been born.

I say larval because Moreno Valley has never acquired the bony structure of a city. No formal city hall, no courthouses have been built here, no covered malls. You can drive for miles down a main thoroughfare and encounter nothing but the tracts and the occasional sales office. Like a warm sea, the subdivisions seem to be waiting for the bones of their community to form.

And what has emerged first are the churches. Churches in their chrysalis form. They are everywhere here, so many they seem to breed in the night. Churches in mini-malls, churches in houses, churches in abandoned taco stands. And, as I say, these are not the kind of churches you would recognize.

What they seem to resemble most are franchise operations. Tom De Vries’ church, for example, was sponsored by Robert Schuller’s enterprise, the Reform Church in America. And De Vries was guided to the mini-mall not so much by divine inspiration as by the marketing skills of the parent church.

Schuller’s operation commissioned a demographic survey that identified Moreno Valley’s baby boomers as the best target. The mini-mall was picked because it was closest to some of the better tracts. The big church then pumped out a direct mail campaign to attract the first congregation. De Vries was in business.

And good that he was, because real problems awaited De Vries. The fact is, Moreno Valley haunts its citizens with a variety of spiritual ills not seen elsewhere. There is, for example, the regret of living here at all.

This is a city designed to be everyone’s second choice, a place where real estate outcasts from Orange County and Los Angeles come to buy cheap houses and build equity. So they pick a Plan Four house at Serenata, move in, and immediately wish they were somewhere else.

And there is the frontier nothingness. Everyone has come at once, so everyone is a stranger. No past, no friends, no grandparents or uncles, no real city. Nothing but the house and the long, long drive to work. The commuters come home after three hours behind the wheel and wonder if anything in Moreno Valley is worth that drive.

So De Vries tries to deal with all of that, mainly because there is no one else who will. He counsels a man who sees his wife only between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. each day because their commutes do not match. He advises the man to think about the trade-offs, whether he wants to spend the next years without seeing his wife in daylight. The man has promised to think it over.

And in some ways, things are getting better. A community is forming, De Vries believes, and slowly the resentments about life here are beginning to pass. Some people have even started to see Moreno Valley as a permanent home.

And soon the church may leave the mini-mall. There’s raw land the congregation has bought down the road. De Vries talks about a new building that will have day care during the week and convert to a worship center on Sunday. It’s what the surveys show is best, De Vries says, it’s what his people want, and he intends to get it.