On first meeting, Jim Burgen presents as an open book.

In fact, there is a book. “No More Dragons,” in which the charismatic leader of Lafayette’s Flatirons Community Church — one of the fastest-growing churches in America — put his life’s journey down in an economical 238 pages.

From his needs for ADHD medication, to his wife Robin’s wrenching battles with bipolar disorder, his days of getting “wasted” as a lost, broken and alienated “preacher’s kid” ultimately reclaimed by Jesus, it’s all in his memoir.

But you can skip the book, and go straight to the Cliffs Notes — his tattoos. The message “Si vis pacem para bellum” — Latin for “If you want peace, prepare for war” — is on one forearm.

On the other is “Molon labe” — Greek for “come and take them” — an expression of defiance dating to the Battle of Thermopylae during the second Persian invasion of Greece and its vastly outnumbered army of King Leonidas of Sparta.

Glancing down at his tattoos, Burgen said, “Second Amendment people say that all the time. But I put this together and go … if you want things to be as they should be with God, that’s going to take hard work, because I’m not going to hand it over to you.”

His left shoulder’s ornamentation represents the great awakening of his life — his “un-dragoning.” It’s a vivid depiction of a story from C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia,” in which a boy who has acquired monstrous characteristics is ripped free from his prison of scales by the talking lion Aslan, representing Jesus Christ.

Recounting the first time he heard that tale while sitting in a student campus ministry at East Tennessee State University, Burgen saw himself as that boy. He recalled, “I stopped breathing. Because I knew I had become some kind of nothing close to who I was supposed to be. And so that was my turning point of walking back toward God.”

That trek has taken him a considerable distance.

Burgen decodes his ink for a visitor while sitting at a conference table deep within the massive Flatirons complex, occupying 162,000 square feet on South Boulder Road in Lafayette. It’s the flagship campus of an evangelical church that in 2015 was ranked as the 14th-fastest growing church in America by Outreach magazine.

At 54, Burgen is a world-class talker who has words the way hurricanes have raindrops. They come at you fast. And there’s always more on the way.

“My character, my marriage, my family, my faith, all the things that are important to me, they don’t come easy,” said the Erie resident who also has a mountain retreat near Allenspark. “They’re hard and it’s constant and they’re under attack all the time. But I’m not going to put up a white flag and say yeah, just give them away.

“I’m not going to lay down my marriage. I’m not going to lay down my faith, I’m not going to lay down Biblical authority because it’s easier, or because I have the feeling of less criticism or something like that. I’m just not going to do that. I’m going to fight for the things that are really, really important. And by fight, I mean, stand firm.”

‘Who cares what my opinion is?’

And there have been fights, since Burgen came to Flatirons in 2006, snagged by a headhunter from his post at Southland Christian Church in Lexington, Ky.

Prior to that, Burgen had been at another one of the nation’s largest parishes, Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Ky.

There have been fights over social values, after Burgen and another church leader came out in 2013 in opposition to same-sex marriage.

There have also been battles over good-neighbor credentials, involving issues ranging from traffic congestion related to Flatiron’s weekend services, to its treatment of businesses at the nearby Lafayette Marketplace, which it has purchased for new offices it plans to open in November.

A married father of two with four grandchildren, whose leisure pursuits include bow hunting and staring down great white sharks off Mexico’s Isla Guadalupe — albeit in a cage — Burgen is happy to revisit such skirmishes unprompted.

“I believe there are seven references to homosexuality in the Bible. All of it is prohibited,” he said. “And there’s like 13,000 references to marriage and heterosexual protection, things like that. I’ve said this from the front: My life would be a lot easier if somebody could find me a verse that goes, ‘You understand that (homosexuality) is OK, and here’s the verse.'”

In an interview May 5 on Colorado Public Radio, Flatirons teaching pastor Scott Nickell called homosexuality a sin. Burgen, when later asked about Nickell’s comment, concurred. But he added, “I’d modify that. I’d say, ‘homosexual behavior.’

“People say, ‘So what’s your opinion on it?’ Who cares what my opinion is on it? Biblical authority is the No. 1 value around here. So we adjust ourselves to it, rather than ask the Bible to adjust to how we feel. Because, who cares what my opinion is? There has to be a higher authority than my opinion.”

For the sizable LGBT community on Colorado’s Front Range and its many allies, that’s not good enough.

“There are so many people in our community who no longer have the support of, or connection with, a church because of that hateful rhetoric,” said Mardi Moore, executive director of Out Boulder, an LGBT advocacy group. “We don’t fit. We don’t belong. They say terrible things about us.

“This has long-term damaging effects because of who he is and the pulpit that he has. That voice carries. People get misinformation. He has construed the Bible into his own little direction and fiefdom, and is really not talking about Christian values.”

As for the business side, the Lafayette Marketplace does not earn a mention in the Bible, although Leviticus 19:18 could be relevant with its counsel to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

There is persistent concern in Lafayette that — as exemplified in tensions between businesses displaced from the shopping plaza — Burgen’s church puts its interests ahead of the city in which it has become so prominent.

“I do think that they could be a better neighbor,” said Lafayette resident and freelance journalist Vicky Uhland. “That’s not their goal. To me, their goal is to bring as many people as possible into the church. And if a secondary goal could be to be better neighbors, then they would do that.

“When they talk about Flatirons Community Church,” Uhland said, “the ‘community’ is the church. It’s not Lafayette.”

Through their perennial charitable support of Sister Carmen Community Center, the nearby Alicia Sanchez International Elementary School and other local partners — estimated in 2015 to be $760,000 — Flatirons officials consider their good neighbor credentials to be more than solid.

“I love our partnership with this city; I really, really do,” Burgen said. “I understand that on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings we tax the streets pretty hard. And so we try to give back in other ways, to make sure that we are partnering well.”

Pastor as celebrity

Stepping into the church for a service on a recent Sunday is to experience religious ceremony of a scale and style far outside anything suggested in the Bible.

Blue and purple spotlights dress the stage on which an 11-member rock band opens with two songs, the performance enhanced by a smoke machine and a chest-thumping volume produced by the dial seemingly stuck north of 11. Most of the 4,000 seats for the day’s first service are filled. The congregation tilts young.

A pause for a prayer — led by the lead guitarist — and another song, and then comes the balance of the service — which is Burgen talking, and talking and, for more than 40 minutes, talking still more.

On this Sunday, however, it’s Burgen’s image on a screen rivaling a stadium Jumbotron, because he is coming to the audience streamed live from Flatirons’s Genesee campus. This is in keeping with the month’s theme he’s calling “The Other Side,” approaching ceremony from “the other side of the way we always do things.”

Sporting jeans, a checked Western-style shirt and one hand often shoved casually in a pocket as he embroiders his message in frequent expressive gestures with the other hand, Burgen could be delivering a TED talk to a particularly focused group of dot.com conferees.

He preaches at a cadence that leaves the hands of a sign-language interpreter working at near-blur pace to keep up.

“Up on the stage he may look like he’s this really confident guy,” said Michel Hendricks, pastor of spiritual formation at Flatirons, and a close personal friend. “But he’s really a very tender, kind and gentle guy. He has really a good sense of humor. We laugh a lot.

“I think people who have heard of Jim Burgen but have never come to Flatirons, maybe all they know is a few articles in newspapers they have read — which is probably not a good indication of who he is.

“You get a better idea of who he is by seeing him live. … The Jim Burgen I drive up to the mountains with is the same Jim Burgen I see up on stage. That’s one of the things I love about him.”

The message on a recent Sunday was from Luke 10:30-37, the parable of the Good Samaritan, which Burgen says conveys the mandate to “give grace and mercy to anyone God puts in your path.”

Enforcing that message, he tells the congregation, there are bowls of Band-aids at the back of the hall, for people to pick up as they leave. Also at the rear are self-serve bread and grape juice, for communion-on-the-go. Once a month, the congregation celebrates communion together.

Through the tightly programmed one-hour experience, while Burgen puts his interpretation of the Bible’s teachings front and center, there’s no questioning that Burgen claims a significant share of the spotlight.

“I think that it’s helpful to think about this in relation to the rise of celebrity culture,” said Jeffrey Mahan, who is the Ralph E. and Norma E. Peck Chair in Religion & Public Communication at Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

“It’s the idea of the pastor as celebrity. And their (parishioners’) ability to have at least the illusion of this relationship to this celebrity pastor in one of these churches is part of the appeal” for megachurches. “The bigger they get, the more it confirms you picked the right place, because this guy’s really a celebrity.”

Admiration of peers

Burgen is highly regarded not just by members of his congregation, but by his peers in the faith community.

Matt Carlson, senior pastor at Boulder Valley Christian Church, heads up the Boulder County Ministry Leaders Prayer Gathering — an informal association of local pastors and ministers that meets monthly — and voices great respect for Burgen and his church.

It was through the ministers’ prayer group that $48,000 was raised and donated to First Presbyterian Church of Boulder in January to help facilitate that church’s desire to align with a new denomination. Burgen and others from Flatirons Community Church contributed to that gift and joined in presenting it.

“He likes to champion the churches in this area. He’s not just about his own organization and church,” said Carlson, who also recalled that Burgen showed up unannounced three years ago to help celebrate — and lead a prayer — when Carlson was made senior pastor at his own parish.

Carlson said criticisms of Burgen and Flatirons are sparked inevitably by the mere fact of its success and size -— it boasts about 17,000 members in average weekly attendance, spread across its Lafayette, Genesee and downtown Denver campuses.

“There are those, even in the Christian community, who see the growth and don’t know Jim and just wonder whether he’s trying to take members from other churches and build one big church,” Carlson said. “That’s not his intention at all. What he did with First Pres, and what he did with me, much more represents his heart and belief in the unity of churches in this area. And, his desire to build bridges.”

The Rev. Erik Hanson, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Boulder, does not claim any personal friendship with Burgen — beyond having gratitude for the $48,000 gift in which Flatirons participated — but respects what he sees of Burgen’s ministry.

“I really admire the ministry of Flatirons, and of Jim’s teaching and preaching,” said Hanson. “I can only imagine the complexity of trying to lead, and pastor, a church of that size and scope of people and staff and resources. It’s a hard and challenging thing, the kinds of things that people assume about you become increasingly complex, the bigger that you get.”

Paula Williams, a transgender Lyons-based pastoral counselor and church consultant, preached at numerous megachurches in previous years — when she was still Paul Williams — and has been familiar with Burgen for a considerable time. In 2001, she briefly shared a church stage with Burgen at Southeast Christian Church in Kentucky, shortly after the terrorist attacks in September of that year.

Subsequently, before Burgen came to Flatirons, Burgen interviewed for a position at the Orchard Group, a New York church-planting group of which Williams was then CEO.

“We chose not to pursue him at our organization, and I don’t know whether he was interested in working with us further,” Williams said. “But we chose not to pursue him further. The reason I had at the time was that I did not think that his theological positions were a match for what we needed in New York City. He may not have been interested in pursuing with us, either. I know that after our meeting, we chose not to pursue him, because of his fairly conservative theological views.”

Burgen acknowledges having dined with Williams in New York during a “season of seeing what was next,” but said that Orchard Group was something he chose not to pursue.

“Coming to Colorado worked out pretty well,” he noted.

Williams, meanwhile, was fired from Orchard after 35 years there — just one week after she came out as transgender in 2013.

Williams also has tracked Burgen’s progress now that they are both in Boulder County. Williams was among those who counseled Melissa Chapman, the transgender Boulder woman who said last year she was barred by Burgen from participating in women’s activities at Flatirons.

She said the theological arguments advanced by Burgen for his stance on Chapman were “very poorly formed,” without “a theological leg to stand on” and reflect a more general weakness.

“As someone who has preached in megachurches, I would say he works hard on creating his messages. There’s hours and hours put into them, he’s engaging, he’s practical and he’s not theologically deep,” she said, a quality that she believes probably helps his popularity.

“The people who attend megachurches are people who like clear boundaries, and like answers. And he gives them boundaries and answers — with a theological certainty that is mysterious to me.”

Burgen, in an interview, brought up the Chapman episode himself — yet said he would not discuss it publicly, citing a “standing invitation for her to come back into my office and talk to me.”

But he nevertheless also noted that Chapman is welcome as a member of the church. He said his reluctance to promise — as she had requested — that he would preside at her wedding, should that day come, was simply because he would never promise his availability to anyone at some hypothetical date possibly years into the future.

And, as for Chapman’s request to attend a Flatirons-sponsored women’s retreat, he recalled, “I said, ‘I don’t know, this is all new territory for me and we’re both going to make mistakes along the way. But let’s just be patient.'”

On hearing Williams’ critique, he simply said, “Williams and I see and interpret Scripture differently on this issue.”

Global reach?

Patience is not what’s being preached at the corporate level at Flatirons Community Church.

Instead, with its membership swelled by thousands of the “lost and broken people” — invoked in seemingly every other utterance by Burgen and fellow church leaders — Flatirons is eyeing a fourth campus, replete with a school, to be situated in the Interstate 25 corridor between Lafayette and Longmont.

“Right now the working name is Flatirons Academy. But classical Christian education is the model,” Burgen said.

“What we’ll build out is not (what you would see) initially. It will be in phases. So what I see is that we build an auditorium with education space that doubles as kids’ ministry area and school area, and then as the school goes, then we expand that,” he said. “There’s 30,000 homes going up between here and Longmont, in that corridor along there. It would be a mixture of live teaching and video teaching streamed in, things like that.”

The goal, Burgen said, is “to make it available, at a very affordable cost to anyone in the world who would want to stream the teaching in.”

Also, the fourth Flatirons campus might not be the last in Colorado.

In an email, Burgen said that planned facility “is just one consideration as we continue to see where several future campuses might be planted up and down the Front Range as well as expanding our online presence to a broader audience as well.”

But it’s not a megachurch — according to some, at least.

“Megachurch suggests a stereotype, that it is a dummied-down, watered-down version of Christianity,” said Gene Binder, lead pastor at Cornerstone Boulder, a church blending both Christian and Judaic traditions. “In Flatirons church, that’s not the case. They fall into the ‘megachurch’ in terms of being big. But they are not a dummied-down church.”

Burgen shuns the word as well, for its being evocative of “the trappings of corporate, and all that weird stuff that you see on TV, Rolls Royces,” and more.

He admitted, however, “This is more than I ever thought it would be in the first place. So what’s our strategic goal for 10 years from now? I don’t know. We don’t have a marketing plan. Our seventh value is, ‘come and see.’ Make up your own mind.”

Sitting in a building forged from the remnants of a vacated Walmart and Albertson’s grocery, Burgen linked its form to its ultimate fruition.

“I always said I want to build a building that looks like REI and Home Depot had a baby, because, you know, most churches you come in and it’s like, ‘Don’t spill, don’t run, be quiet.’ People come in here and there’s a tattoo wall out there in the lobby. It’s because where I came from in Kentucky, you had to roll your sleeves down over your tattoos.

“This is a reused, repurposed building, and I’m a reused, repurposed man.”

He said the bottom-line mission — what Burgen calls the Flatirons DNA — will always be caring about lost and broken people.

To carry that out, Burgen said, “I made myself available.

“But I would say that I am here for a season. Someone was here before me. And someone will be here after me.”

Charlie Brennan: 303-473-1327, brennanc@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/chasbrennan