JOHNSTOWN – Pastor Bruce Webb welcomed his flock on Friday night with the same unbridled joy and enthusiasm he effused for 22 years as the co-founder of Discovery Fellowship Church in Fort Collins.
Only the church has changed.
On this night, Webb will stop by all 90 tables at the Candlelight Dinner Playhouse in Johnstown, about 40 miles north of Denver. He’ll briefly commune with every one of the 300 or so people who have gathered to have their souls filled with food and the gospel according to Peter.
No, not the apostle. Peter Barsocchini, writer of the family friendly “High School Musical.”
Pastor Bruce Webb meets and greets the more than 300 gathered to attend “High School Musical” at Candlelight Dinner Playhouse on Friday, Sept. 6.
Here, Pastor Bruce’s sermon is on the power of live theater. And if he’s good, he might just plant a seed or two in the good soil of people’s minds about the value of a season subscription.
And he is good. Just ask his boss, who is also his daughter and first-born child, Candlelight Director of Sales and Marketing Jalyn Webb.
“You wouldn’t believe how many tickets he has sold,” she said with an adoring smile.
That’s because Pastor Bruce is not selling them a ticket, she added. “He’s selling them an experience.”
And that’s what got him the job as Candlelight’s Season Ticket Sales Assistant – not the bloodline, his daughter insists. That’s also what makes this hot-shot, 77-year-old new kid the best Season Ticket Sales Assistant Candlelight has ever had at least since Jalyn Webb became its Managing Director in 2015.
OK, so maybe the bloodline had a little something to do with it.
The hippie bank dude
Pastor Webb did not much believe in God until he was 27 years old. Before then, the Kentucky-born hippie was a touring rock ’n roll pianist whose cover band, called Next Exit, once opened for Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band around the time of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Emphasis on “once.” The band broke up immediately afterward, leading Webb to stints in Beaumont, Texas, with awesomely monikered outfits like Pieces of Ate and the LSD-inspired Energy Sugar.
Webb had followed his dad into the Army, spent six years in the reserves and started college at Cameron University in Lawton, Okla., where he worked as a lifeguard. (“You were actually the basket guy!” his wife, Lynda, clarifies. “OK, I was working in the basket room,” Bruce concedes.)
“… Then she walked in.”
She – Lynda – was a local high-school senior. He asked if he could help find her clothes in the back.
“And they fell in love,” Jalyn said of her future parents.
Later one night at a club in Oklahoma, Bruce got up and played some piano at a random open-mic night. Afterward, one of the guys in the house band told Bruce, “We just fired the saxophone player, and we are hiring you.” Never mind that Bruce didn’t play the sax. Piano-for-sax made for a good-enough tradeoff. The band played top-40 hits like “Whiter Shade of Pale” and “You Keep Me Hanging On” (the Vanilla Fudge version). Some nights, they would just play Beatles albums from start to finish.
Bruce was working at an after-hours gig in Beaumont in 1968 when he asked for two days off from the club – one to fly to Aurora and another to marry Lynda on a Monday at the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, where her father was now a retired fire chief.
It was around that time, Bruce realized, “This band thing was not the life.”
Jalyn clarifies, the way only a daughter can: “My mom told him: ‘I’m tired of you living in a van, and eating ketchup soup, and you need a real job, and we’re having a baby.’ Me!”
He did get a real job – as a banker. But not just any banker.
“I didn’t own a suit, a tie or a dress shirt,” Bruce said. “I had nothing but hippie band clothes. People said to me, ‘Man, I never had a banker who looked like you,’ because I had long hair, bell-bottom pants and big platform shoes.”
Some of the Webb family, from left: Lynda, Jalyn and Bruce at Candlelight Dinner Playhouse in Johnstown.
In 1974, when the young family was ping-ponging between Aurora and Kentucky, Lynda was dragging Bruce to Montview Evangelical Free Church near Fitzsimmons. She was a believer, and she, well … believed he was, too.
He was – just not yet. That came after a literal come-to-Jesus moment with Pastor Jim Olson. “I realized that I was sinful, that I had to change my life, and that I needed a savior,” Bruce said. He took months of Bible study and wrote it all down along the way: “Jesus said it in his word. I believe it in my heart. That settles it forever.” He included the settlement date: April 19, 1974.
That started Webb on a personal and professional journey that led him in 1978 to Minneapolis, where he joined a nondenominational church consulting business that raises funds for building new churches, schools, sanctuaries, playgrounds and such. Bruce was a natural salesman.
“I like to say that God loves a cheerful giver – but he’ll even take money from a grouch,” he said with a laugh.
By 1986, Bruce was traveling constantly, but he wanted his family, now numbering five highly musical kids, to have a sense of residential permanence. So the peripatetic family moved to Fort Collins. Jalyn was 14 and just starting high school.
“I was not in favor,” she says flatly. Bruce says of his first-born prodigy: “She started singing when she was 2 … but she started talking back when she was 1.”
Still, she’s made the most of it. She developed the kind of belt with her voice that Joe Frazier would have wanted for his right arm. Life at the Webb house then was filled with hootenannies, family gatherings, singing and more singing. Bruce even had cards printed up advertising the Von Webb Family Singers.
Charlotte Campbell, left, as Patsy Cline and Jalyn Webb as her friend, Louise, in Candlelight Dinner Playhouse’s “Always, Patsy Cline,” opening Sept. 19 in Johnstown. The is the fourth time Webb has played Louise, including this photo from the now-closed Midtown Arts Center in Fort Collins.
Jalyn graduated from the University of Northern Colorado’s prestigious theater program and has since become a 30-year mainstay in theaters from Denver to the Wyoming border. Like her father, she’s also developed an uncanny sense for business, sales and customer service, which comes in handy at both Candlelight and her Divabee youth performing academy. She’s also launching a new theater company called Beehive Productions, which will debut with “The Rocky Horror Show” from Oct. 1-31 at the Denver Improv.
“I saw a lot of integrity and determination in my father, and I saw a lot of him keeping his word to people,” she said. “I think those are qualities I have exhibited my whole life, and I got them by watching him.”
Jalyn Webb, left, director of sales and marketing at Candlelight Dinner Playhouse, will star in “Always, Patsy Cline,” opening Sept. 19 in Johnstown. Bruce Webb, right will help shoulder the load for the customer-experience team while his daughter plays double duty. Photo taken Sept. 6, 2024.
Still, it would be a waste for Candlelight not to include Jalyn’s voice on the dinner menu. She starred as Grizabella in last year’s “Cats,” as the Narrator in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” and she will be playing Louise for the fourth time when Candlelight revisits “Always, Patsy Cline” from Sept. 19-Nov. 10.
In 1999, Bruce Webb joined Dallas-based RSI Church Solutions, America’s largest company devoted solely to fundraising for Christian capital projects. His job was called “church planting,” and one of the churches he planted in 2002 was Discovery Fellowship in Fort Collins. By 2007, he was asked to be both its worship pastor and outreach coordinator. Lynda was the church’s administrative assistant.
That is, until Dec. 31, 2023, when church elders informed Bruce and Lynda their jobs were being eliminated. Yes, the same church that Bruce started.
“They said we were overstaffed,” is all Bruce Webb is legally allowed to say.
‘They know not what they do …’
The way Mark Elsdon sees it, 100,000 churches in America are presently in danger of closing because of dwindling worship numbers. He’s an author and Presbyterian minister who just edited a new collection of essays titled “Gone for Good?”
Bruce says he bears no ill will toward the church. His son, Nathan, remains on staff as Communications Pastor. He insists the cutthroat move did not shake his faith. Why?
“Because we learned long ago to put our faith in God, not people,” he said.
Still, even at 77, Bruce needed to work. And Jalyn, who can more openly opine, “I don’t think we take care of our elderly people in the way that they deserve,” her father’s sudden availability was an opportunity for her. One given a gentle push by her mother.
“She called me a few months after and said, ‘Do you have a job for your dad?’ And I said, ‘Actually, I think maybe I do.’”
At a time when most performing arts organizations are struggling to get back to pre-pandemic attendance figures, Candlelight has reported remarkable numbers by staging its consistently family friendly musicals and concerts like three upcoming nights featuring the music of Johnny and June Carter Cash. Jalyn believes her vigilant commitment to greeting subscribers and first-timers alike at every show has had a little something to do with that.
“It’s a sales tactic – absolutely,” she said. But it’s also just good manners. And creating relationships built to last for years.
“I am telling you, sometimes people get mad at me if I don’t make it by to talk to them,” she said.
But she can’t talk to everyone at every show. So in June, she offered her dad a job doing what comes as natural to him as breathing: Chatting people up.
“I welcome people,” Bruce said. “I want to make them feel at home. I joke around with them. I ask them questions about their lives. I’ll ask folks, ‘How did you find out about us?’ and when they say ‘Jalyn,’ I tell them, ‘She’s my daughter.’ Oh, they love that!”
Bruce just didn’t want this to be a pity hire, he said. No problem there, Jalyn responded.
“I don’t think I will have trouble firing my dad if he’s terrible,” she said. But he’s not. He works three hours per shift, three nights a week, and he’s turning his gift of gab into about 30 new season-ticket subscribers every weekend.
The inscription on the water bottle proudly announces “Bruce “Jalyn’s Dad” Webb.” Photo taken Sept. 6, 2024.
Jalyn thinks she’s tapped into something that’s gone by the wayside in how we conduct our everyday American businesses.
“I think that if you’re not doing something like this, you’re making a big mistake,” she said of activating our elderly population I the work force. It’s also a good way for a daughter to keep an aging parent engaged.
“I think if my dad just sat at home during these years, he would wither away,” she said. “He needs to talk to people. And I think there are a lot of people who need to talk to him.”
Pastor Bruce wouldn’t trade this gig for anything.
“It’s church at its best,” he said.
