God just loves us. He can’t help himself

San Diego Reader: What is your favorite subject on which to preach?

Pastor Mike Alcorn: Grace…. At Calvary, it was all done. So you put your faith in Jesus’s finished work and the grace flows. It’s awesome. God so loves us and is enthralled with all of us. Not because of what we do, but because he loves us. Period. That’s grace.

SDR: What is your main concern as a member of the clergy?

PA: I’m concerned that Christians don’t get what has happened to them. They have been endued with the power of the Holy Spirit and most of us live like regular people who go to church, instead of God-inhabited people who can change the world….We believe the Bible’s true, that God wrote it, and that Jesus died and was resurrected, but we don’t believe the part about us — that we have changed dramatically, our past has died and now everything is from God. So, we live and act like ordinary people. “You act like mere men,” St. Paul said. That was his biggest insult. Not bad men — good, moral people, but we’re living so far below the privilege of what God sacrificed his son so that we can be in heaven with him.

SDR: Why non-denominational?

PA: As a church, we didn’t have to agree or disagree with anyone’s doctrine. We could just let God take us where he wants us to go, and we’ve been on the move ever since. When you’re with a denomination, you have to agree with what that denomination believes. In the Bible there are no denominations.

SDR: What’s the mission of your church?

PA: Our mission is to bring God’s love full blast into people’s lives. Most people think that we were raised up to see love as very conditional on our behavior. That’s not God. He just loves us. He can’t help himself. When people find that out, they come to peace; they get comfortable in their communication with him.

SDR: Where is the strangest place you’ve found God?

PA: On Logan and Market Streets, at about 2:30 a.m. after I let some people off after a prayer meeting. I was sitting at a light, it was a warm night, and I had all my windows down in my car. I didn’t have my doors locked. I was sitting there thinking, Wow, this is peace! I have no concern — no concern at all. Nothing by any means can hurt me; God’s with me all the time. That was it. Sitting there at the light with no concern….

SDR: Where do you go when you die?

PA: People who choose Jesus go to heaven; people who don’t choose Jesus, don’t go to heaven. According to the word, they go to hell — which is so sad. People don’t go to hell for sin; they go for not choosing to trade their record with Jesus’s record. He’s paid for it. He paid for every sin from Adam all the way to the last person on the Earth. All sin has been paid for and is out of the way. But you have to choose him to be your champion, your Lord.