For one confused moment on a Friday night in 1992, a crowd of young people on Tempe’s Mill Avenue thought they had found allies. A band of demonstrators was moving up the strip carrying signs and shouting, and in the week the Los Angeles riots were in every headline, the crowd assumed they knew exactly what the chanting was about. They yelled their approval as they approached. Then they got close enough to hear the actual words, and the comprehension that followed, the Mesa/Tempe Tribune reported, was almost comic. These were Mill Avenue street preachers from The Door Christian Fellowship, and the sinners they had come to confront were the same college students and teenagers who had just cheered them on by mistake.
Mill Avenue street preachers, loud enough to be mistaken for a riot
The scene that Phil Boas described for the Tribune captures the whole dispute in miniature. From a distance, angry voices and raised signs read as protest, and a crowd primed by a week of news out of Los Angeles filled in the rest, shouting support for Rodney King and against the LAPD before they were close enough to hear otherwise. What they were actually walking toward was hellfire preaching aimed at Mill Avenue’s Friday-night crowd, not the police. One preacher’s cry over the noise, urging the crowd to “let Jesus come in and set you free,” was the moment the mistake became clear. The targets did not take it as an invitation.
A First Amendment fight, not a public-order footnote
By 1992 this had stopped being a matter of annoyed pedestrians and become a legal contest. Groups of up to fifty lay preachers from The Door’s Tempe congregation had made the strip a regular weekend stage, and Tempe police, weighing free speech against public annoyance, had cited four of them that year for disorderly conduct. The preachers were preparing to fight the citations as unconstitutional, represented by Phoenix attorney Doug Drury on behalf of the Rutherford Institute, a Virginia-based legal foundation devoted to First Amendment and religious-liberty cases nationally. Drury argued the citations singled out unamplified speech in a strip that tolerated live bands at full volume without complaint, a comparison meant to frame the church’s preaching as ordinary noise being punished for its content rather than its volume. Some church members suspected exactly that, that enforcement was falling on them because of what they were saying, not how loudly they were saying it.
The complaints from Mill
The annoyance was real enough that it generated its own paper trail. An outdoor espresso counter worker told police she could not hear customers’ orders over the preaching, and separately that the sermons offended her as a member of another faith, in a spot she could not simply leave to escape the noise. One preacher, Robert Dodd, drew a citation specifically for the volume of his warning that the unsaved were headed for hell, a message police did not dispute on its content but flagged for its decibel level. The distinction the department tried to hold, punishing volume while leaving the message alone, is a narrower and more defensible line than simply banning preaching outright, whatever the preachers themselves suspected about the department’s real motive.
What The Door preached, and why Mill
The Door was, by 1992, well established as an evangelical network founded in the mid-1970s in Prescott, with members conspicuously clean-cut and outspoken against abortion, premarital sex, and alcohol and tobacco. Its theology on Mill Avenue reduced to two convictions: that believers are commanded to carry the gospel to the world, per the Great Commission’s charge to “go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15), and that salvation comes by grace alone, urgently enough to be worth pressing on total strangers. Members reasoned, in effect, that a nightlife strip full of people least receptive to that message was precisely where the message was most needed. It is the same logic of the captive audience that shows up again and again in this record, whether the crowd is a Friday-night bar strip or a family parade route.
Police caught in the middle
Tempe’s approach, at least as its city attorney described it, tried to thread a genuine needle: give wide latitude to loud, unwelcome speech and intervene only when volume crossed a real threshold, while officers were under strict instruction never to police the content of what was being preached. That is, on its face, close to the constitutionally correct posture, content-neutral enforcement aimed at a narrow, articulable harm rather than the speech itself. Whether it was applied that evenly in practice, given the church members’ suspicion of selective enforcement, is exactly the question Drury’s case was built to test.
Why the Mill Avenue dispute still matters
Read next to the Prescott schools lawsuit from earlier that same year, the Mill Avenue street preachers gave the network its second Arizona First Amendment fight in 1992 alone, this time with a national religious-liberty group rather than a local attorney carrying the case. And read next to the opposite use of the same news event that spring, a Potter’s House pastor in Seattle invoking the Rodney King verdict to justify a graphic parade display, the Mill Avenue story shows how detached the message could become from its audience. A crowd cheering what it thought was solidarity, then recoiling from what it actually heard, is a fair image for the wider pattern this site documents: a church convinced its confrontations are exactly what a hostile world needs, delivered to people who never asked to be confronted at all.
Sources and further reading
- Phil Boas, “Free-speech rights come into question,” The Mesa/Tempe Tribune, June 21, 1992; archived in the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On the same year’s other First Amendment fight, see the Potter’s House Prescott schools lawsuit, 1992
- On the same spring’s other invocation of the Rodney King verdict, see the Potter’s House Ballard parade scandal, 1992
