Interview with Kyle Costello

Kyle and Joy Costello

By Brad Dupray

As a sixth-generation Mormon, Kyle Costello was steeped in the faith. But when preparing for his “mission,” he began to have doubts, and ultimately entered a Christian seminary and joined the staff of Central Christian Church in Las Vegas. What better preparation could a person have to plant a Christian church in Salt Lake City?

Early this year, Kyle and his wife, Joy, and 30 Christians from their church in Portland, Oregon, moved to Salt Lake City to plant a church in the center of the Mormon faith. Missio Dei Community is not a church that is completely focused on converting Mormons, however. The church”s mission is to reach all of the lost in Salt Lake City, the most unchurched major city in the United States.

Tell me a little about Mission Dei Community.

I got here in January””myself and my wife and almost 30 folks moved with us from Imago Dei Community in Portland. We started meeting in my home on Easter Sunday. We”re now at three different house churches with a plan for every-weekend worship services starting November 28. We have a core of about 75 to 80 people between those three house churches.

Describe your upbringing.

I”m sixth-generation Mormon. That”s just what I grew up knowing. I was born in Provo, Utah, while my parents were in college at Brigham Young University. I was raised in the Mormon church, baptized when I was 8, graduated from Mormon seminary and received the Aaronic Priesthood when I was 12.

My dad was a local leader in the church. My grandfather was a leader in the church. Our whole life revolved around that culture. We were in a small town and you were Mormon or you were Catholic or you weren”t anything.

What compelled you to question your Mormon faith?

I was getting ready to go on a two-year Mormon mission and I just started to walk through all the questions. I was trying to anticipate what I was going to be asked. When I tried to answer some of the questions, I had difficulty doing that. That led me to go to my family and try to work through it with them. It didn”t go well. Their answers made me look at Mormon scripture, and I came to the belief that it was false.

How did your family react when you walked away from your faith?

They were definitely disappointed, but my family has always supported and loved me. I wasn”t ostracized. My dad and I had a lot of discussions where he didn”t agree with my decision but he respected it.

Was there any theological point in particular that swayed you?

No, it was a general overview. It was really their theology of who God is and a bunch of discussions would flow out of that.

Who do Mormons say God is?

They believe that the god of this world used to live on another planet and he was human just like you and me, that he was separate from Christ, and that we ourselves can become gods. So I put all of those under the umbrella of that large question, “Who is God?”

How would you compare the Jesus of Mormonism with the Jesus of Christianity?

There”s a Mormon scholar named Robert Millet who wrote a book on the Mormon view of Jesus. He talks about the work of Christ, what we [Christians] would believe in as unconditional grace. He says Mormons believe in “conditional grace.” Jesus” death gets us into a heaven, but they believe in three different heavens. Where you end up in those heavens is the conditional side of it. It”s how you live and how you adhere to the Mormon conditions and how righteous you are.

Christians believe in unconditional grace. Our salvation is based on faith in the work of Jesus Christ. There is nothing we can do to earn it; it is entirely a gift from God. There are no hoops for us to jump through, nor is it based on our effort.

Was that enough to push you over the edge?

I didn”t leave because of that “conditional grace,” l left because I felt like the Mormon view of God is contradicted in their own scripture. They believed in the Bible, The Doctrine and Covenants, and the Book of Mormon, and in my opinion they contradict each other in how they speak of who God is.

What did you do when you left Mormonism?

At that point I wasn”t too interested in joining any church. I felt pretty jaded and pretty angry””like basically all of mankind was using God to manipulate people. When you grow up in something and you believe this is what life is all about and then you reject it, you feel kind of foolish at some level. So I didn”t enter a church for about two years. Not that I didn”t believe there is a God. At that moment I just wasn”t interested.

What made you restart your faith journey?

I was 20 years old and I met an attractive young lady at UNLV (the University of Nevada, Las Vegas) and we started to date. She was a member of Central Christian Church and she asked me to go with her to church. That first church service was very different than anything I had experienced””with a band and video screens and it was just 60 minutes long. I left there thinking I didn”t want to become a Christian, but I really liked this girl (my future wife) and I was sure I could handle 60 minutes a week.

What took you from 60 minutes a week to 24/7?

About the third or fourth time I was there I heard the pastor, Gene Appel, preaching a gospel message. He was talking about their building and about how they had too many people and they had to put chairs in weird places and they needed to expand it. He was saying if you”re coming for me, or the band, or the video, you”re going to be disappointed. He said without Jesus, we”re hopeless. He said Christ is the reason the church was there.
For me that was big because I had always been taught to put my faith in man””whether it was Joseph Smith or my local bishop. That was the first time I thought, this is different. It really made me go back into Scripture, specifically the Gospels, and start reading and reading and reading, which started a two and a half-year journey to figure out if this Christianity thing was legitimate or not.

What made you believe the Jesus Christ of the Bible was true as opposed to the Jesus you had learned about while growing up?

I believe God just impressed upon me one day that it was really this idea of religion vs. relationship. He wasn”t asking me to join another religion, he was calling me into relationship with him. Once I realized it wasn”t a club or a membership, it just became clear.

As you rethought the “relationship with Christ” concept, did it ever occur to you that the Jesus of Mormonism might be the way after all?

No. When I left the (Mormon) faith I was pretty sure in what I believed. I”ve never wavered in that since then.

What lessons can you take away from your Mormon upbringing to help you as an evangelist in a Mormon culture?

When I was growing up, some Christians would tell me what I believed, or maybe mock what I believed without real dialogue or trying to understand me or discussing their faith with me. When I was at Central Christian we had a large LDS (Latter-day Saints) population. We taught classes on what it would be like for Christians to connect with their Mormon neighbors so they can really have honest dialogues. Traditionally we just kind of argue and yell at each other. They are very different faiths, but they use very similar vocabularies, and it often turns into confusion and frustration and sometimes name-calling on both sides. That”s not the way we really should share Christ. What if we truly understand the other side and have real conversations?

How do you stimulate real conversations?

At Central we said, “What if we really try to get at that?” Our people were working with these folks, befriending them, having barbecues with them. I feel like we did see a lot of fruit from that. All of a sudden there almost wasn”t a week that went by that people would say, “I”m having some good conversation with my Mormon friends.” We had people that came to faith out of Mormonism and it was an incredible thing to see happen.

Is the plan of Missio Dei Community to specifically reach out to Mormons?

Salt Lake City is a large metropolitan city with many LDS folks here, but there are a lot of unchurched people as well. It”s hands down the most unchurched city in the nation. There is one traditional church here for every 5,000 people. That ratio nationwide is one for every 800 people. Three percent of the people go to a traditional church””that includes the mainline and Catholic churches.

Our vision, as much as it is to love and engage Mormons, is to love and engage the city. I love the city, I love living in the city. So we seek to pray for the city, to be influencers for the city, and to serve the city. I understand that Mormonism is a big part of that, but a large part of the population is not LDS.

Brad Dupray is interim president of Church Development Fund, Irvine, California.