December 01, 1982 by

Chapel By The Sea focuses its outreach ministry on penetrating Hidden People Groups.

It's the last Sunday evening of the month, and for members of Chapel by the Sea in Oxnard, California, that means Frontier Fellowship time. Almost one hundred excited young Christians have gathered in the Chapel's large meeting room to worship the Lord and share their burden for the thousands of frontier people groups yet untouched by the gospel.

Up front, Kelly Green, a talented young musician, leads the group in several of the contemporary worship songs he has composed. All those songs tonight have missionary perspective because Kelly has been "converted to missions," as the young members of the church laughingly (and seriously) say.

He is not alone. Chapel by the Sea is a unique, exciting new congregation. Begun only nine years ago while its founder pastor was still a student at Fuller Theological Seminary, the church ministers to more than 500 people each Sunday morning. Even its building is unusual  a former restaurant at an important crossroads, modified only slightly.

But it is the two pastors who have made this congregation such a missions oriented group of people. Steve Robbins, the young senior pastor, worked overseas with his wife until she became desperately ill with an unusual disease picked up in Africa.

Even so, he credits Rick Love, his energetic minister of outreach and missions, with the present high level of missions awareness. Love himself is en route to the mission field, with plans to leave the U.S this summer for work with overseas Muslims.

"Missions is crucial to the life and growth of our church," Robbins insists. "This is why we have so many programs pointed in that direction," Love adds. He begins to enumerate them.

"The Frontier Fellowship is our largest program. It's exciting to see our people march for the Hidden People each month at our Frontier Fellowship meeting." The congregation marches to the front of the auditorium, family by family, to present their loose change offerings for the month."We usually collect between $400 and $500 each month from the fifty or so who participate," Love explains. "But more important is the daily discipline of reading the prayer guide and praying as a family for the Hidden Peoples. You have to really think hard to keep God's perspective on the world, and the prayer guide really helps.

"Perhaps even more important, at least for our young adults, is the 'Understanding the World Christian Movement' class we have every Monday night. It's really an extension class of the Institute of International Studies course offered on the U. S. Center for World Mission campus in Pasadena. We have 50 students from our church and our area, and are able to bring up from Pasadena most of the professors they have there. It's really great'"

Just this fall Robbins and Love have solicited the assistance of a former USCWM staff couple, Larry and Debby Estepp, to help with missions training in their church, both in the Monday evening class and at the primary school level. During the daytime they share responsibility for teaching in the Christian school which the church runs. Classroom walls are decorated with maps and the classes are saturated with missions stories.

"We feel it is essential to start at this level if we want to raise up Christian leaders to evangelize the world," Estepp says. "I am really amazed at this place. I've never seen a church like it. It is fantastic."

"There is one more program we must tell you about," Love insists. This is a special project of his: Operation Hidden People, the Chapel's most ambitious program in missionary outreach. "Thisprogram gently leads our entire membership step by step into a new simpler lifestyle so that those who are called to stay home as mission senders will be able to support those from our body who are called to go to Hidden People groups.

"Just this past summer we sent our first couple to work with a frontier people group in Indonesia. Right now our pastor and several other staff members have just returned from a short term of service in South Africa, where they implemented some new ideas for establishing churches among specific people groups. We want a lot of our people to have this first hand experience, even if they never become professional missionaries."

What a church! Chapel by the Sea in Oxnard, a small, rather sleepy seacoast town, is about 75 miles north of Los Angeles. But God has blessed it, perhaps because it is so eager to be a blessing worldwide. Already the church is bursting at the seams, and the leaders are looking for a new site. Yet their more important goal is to send a hundred missionaries in the next ten years.

"That's going to take sacrifice. That's going to be radical. My vision, my drive, my role and my gifts are to see this church explode into a missionary movement," Love says. "I see great things happening."

With that kind of faith, that kind of program, that kind of obedience, how can they fail?