In this episode Gina has a conversation with Mark Barlow about family, legacy and his journey trusting and learning the delight of obedience. Mark is a singer/songwriter and the Worship Pastor of Isla Vista Church in Santa Barbara.
Check out Mark’s music and ministry https://www.barkmarlow.com
Check out Isla Vista and the Jesus Burgers ministry https://islavistachurch.org
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Listen below to follow along: 25:00
Jesus Burgers
Gina:
I would love for you to share, for people who don’t know much about Isla Vista, you mentioned Jesus Burgers and the Jesus Burgers house. Can you share a little bit about that? It’s a remarkable ministry, but I would love for you to share what that environment’s like, and what the ministry actually is.
Mark:
It started back in 2001, Isla Vista has always had a wild history. It’s a crazy college party town that is the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara. It’s 30,000 students crammed into one square mile. That’s where we live. Back in 2001, a bunch of people got a glimpse of the heart of God for this city, which was a rare thing to find somebody who’s in touch with His heart for the city, because most of Santa Barbara has given up on Isla Vista.
It’s an unincorporated suburb of Santa Barbara that is considered to be Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s perceived as this really dark place and it’s the whole college party scene. It’s drug, sex, alcohol, date, rape, you name it. But in 2001, God put it on a bunch of Westmont students hearts to start praying for the city of Isla Vista and praying into God’s future for the city.
Then in those weekly prayer meetings, God spoke a word to one of them to have a barbecue in the park. He just said, “Give away My love.” So they just started doing a barbecue in the park. Then for the first 5-7 years, this weekly barbecue, they would say, “Here’s a burger. Jesus loves you. You don’t have to stand here and have a whole conversation if you don’t want to, but if you’re interested, we can talk about how Jesus has changed everything.”
For the first 5-7 years, the heart of the city was really closed off to the Gospel and to Jesus. Then around the 5-7 year mark, the heart of the city started opening up and then eventually they gave us the name “Jesus Burgers”. They were like, “Yeah, let’s go over to the Jesus people and get some Jesus burgers.”
Then eventually they just chopped off the front part and just called us “Jesus burgers.” So the name stuck. We’ve just been doing this weekly barbecue in our front yard, which is at a house that’s on the craziest party street of SoCal called Del Playa. On Friday nights from 10:00 PM to midnight, students are just hopping from party to party. They’re just looking for a good time.
Now since it’s been happening since 2001, there’s a reputation of trust that has been built. People can come here and know that the burgers don’t have any poison in them, and they can come and experience love, and they’re going to experience free food and just seeds being planted that are totally different than how the world has been manipulated to see Jesus and to see Christianity.
It’s this different representation, and because the reputation has been built over the past 20 years. When we do door to door ministry and say, “Hey, we’re from Jesus burgers down the street, we’re your neighbors. We just want to see if we could pray for you for anything.” More often than not, they’ll tell us, “Oh my gosh, you took care of me like last week. Please come in. Let’s talk and pray.” It’s just an open door.
I really believe Jesus is the desire of the nations. When we see Him for who He really is, our hearts just unlock. Obviously there’s those who choose to run away, who choose to close off their hearts, who choose to harden their hearts. But I really believe that Jesus is the best Pursuer of hearts and He really is the Savior. We don’t have to be the savior.
Isla Vista Worship
Mark:
It’s an honor to be a part of this movement where there’s this momentum that’s been happening for so long, and I just get to jump in and be a part of it. My position here is being the worship pastor. I cover the Isla Vista worship team, and we have 18 people who are currently a part of the team. In the history of Isla Vista Worship, there’s probably about 60 to 70 people who’ve been apart every year.
It’s a different crew, but the past couple years it’s been a lot more consistent and I’m so thankful. We spend most of our time loving and serving our city and our local church and hosting the presence of God and worship. Every once in a while we put out records and we record them on our dusty field in our storage containers.
Before the storage containers, we had a garage, and before that we had a 10 by 10 Home Depot shed. Everything that we record here is very rugged and in the dirt. But praise God, that through the music, people have found out about Jesus Burgers, and this way to love people in a very practical, unconditional way.
Jesus Burgers has now been spread all over the world, and like millions of people listen to the music that comes off of our field. There really isn’t anything fancy going on here. It’s all very small and low budget. I think our strongest point in our culture is that we’re a family. Our strength is not in our communication, or in our vision, or our direction, it’s really just the fact that we’re family and we love spending time together.
Gina:
How have you guys succeeded in maintaining that organic sound? I think especially in the last 20 – 25 years of Western Evangelical Church, supernatural movements start, and it’s amazing. Then as the momentum continues, and as we get in the age of social media, it turns into an organization, it turns into something that oftentimes departs from where it started.
I don’t mean that in a critical way, but it can lose that kind of organic spontaneity and that dependence that it was birthed out of. How do you guys fight to keep it simple? Like you said, you have this rotation, it’s a collective, it’s not this band.
You have people coming in and out and now you guys have a reputation. You probably have kids that show up saying, “I want to be on the Isla Vista Worship team and be on the next project.” How do you constantly pull it back to this place of simplicity and dependence?
Mark:
We don’t know what we’re doing! That’s the simplest way that I can put it. It really is just that we’re so dependent upon the Lord. We’re just very zoned in on our city more than we are on our music. We don’t really have a whole lot of bandwidth to build an empire, which keeps our priorities straight.
There’s little ways that we’re building left and right to make sure that Isla Vista continues in the future generations to be a creative hub on the coast where the world can listen to the music that comes out of this place and be captivated by the beauty of Jesus through the music. Whether the music is about Jesus or about love or about whatever. One of our core values is wasting time together by wasting time. No agenda, and just hanging out.
There isn’t any productivity that we’re going to link this time to, when we make space and time for that. Then also there’s our core value of the presence of God. Coming from a megachurch background myself, I’ve found such a home here in leading worship in living rooms and worshiping in garages and feeling like, “Wow, there’s something so special about a very small tight knit group of people going after the presence of God together.”
Gina:
I think we have a whole generation in the church that haven’t experienced worship outside of the worship industry, or church on Sundays with a stage. There’s a whole generation of believers that have not experienced worship in the context of just a few people in a living room doing exactly what you said, “Going after God’s presence and wanting to be aware of Him and singing and being family with Him with one another.”
That is something that I think a lot of people haven’t even really tasted of. There is something profound in that in this day and age the church is struggling to reorient themselves, and put their focus back where it should be. There’s something really sweet and powerful about that intimacy. That was another question I was going to ask you.
Check out the rest of this conversation: A Ministry of Legacy, Does God Trust Me? & Come Away With Me
Check out the Dwell Meditations
