![Christ's Church of the Valley in Maricopa. April 17, 2026. [Elias Weiss]](https://inmaricopa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_0600-1024x768.jpeg)
To the Editor,
Faith in Maricopa is a new series to explore the spiritual life of our growing community. With each installment, I hope to examine how faith is being lived and taught through the different places of worship available here in Maricopa.
My first stop is my home church, Christ’s Church of the Valley, or CCV.
Located at 19475 N. Porter Road, behind the Circle K at Porter and Honeycutt Roads, CCV Maricopa is one of America’s three largest churches with headquarters in Peoria. It is part of a broader Arizona organization with multiple campus locations throughout the state, including the Maricopa campus, which opened in late 2024.
The lead pastor for the local campus is Kenny Rickard. He grew up in Ohio and earned a scholarship to play football at Malone University, but after a shoulder injury changed that path, he went through personal trials and worked in construction. He later became a youth pastor at Lakeview Chapel in Aurora, Ohio. In time, he and his wife, Lyssa, moved to Arizona, where he worked at two Christian churches in Gilbert before joining CCV 10 years ago as a youth pastor while raising their four children.
As a non-denominational evangelical church, CCV’s goal is to reach Arizona for Jesus. The church focuses on teaching the Bible through scripture and offers communion and baptism each week. One of its strongest points is its emphasis on community. Through life groups, members meet in one another’s homes and follow a weekly plan tied to the previous weekend’s sermon.
CCV Maricopa holds services Saturdays at 4 and 5:30 p.m. and Sundays at 9:30 and 11 a.m. The church also offers the CCV Stars soccer program, a faith-based after-school recreational league for ages 4 through 12th grade, along with Exceptional Stars for athletes age 4 and older with developmental disabilities.
With each installment of Faith in Maricopa, I hope to offer readers insight into where they can plug in and grow their faith. Please feel free to share any comments or additional information you may have on this week’s article by emailing me.
Thank you and may God richly bless you and Maricopa.
Patrick “PatMac” McCobb, Province
4 Responses
Some of the worst drivers can easily be identified by the CCV sticker on the rear window. Makes sense though, since they are evangelical. Reading the journey of some folks who left that extremist form of Christianity is quite interesting. It often reads like an escape.
Most forms of religion are meant to be methods of escape for people. It’s comforting. Well, it can be. Not for me!
Intersting that you see CCV bumper stickers everywhere. In the 3.5 years I’ve lived in Maricopa, I have experienced the worst drivers of anywhere I’ve lived including Chicago, LA, and Fayetteville, NC which I attributed to Fort Bragg bringing in people from every state who didn’t know the area. But with all the bad drivers out there, I only ever saw one CCV bumper sticker and that car was driving fine. It is apparent that you have experienced something that has caused you to lash out at Evangelicals because probably 90-95% are not extremist in any way, and every driver in America got their driver’s license through their state’s or country’s Motor Vehicle office or through a driver’s ed class. I’ve never heard of anybody getting a driver’s license from their church, of any kind. Evangelical simply means we believe in Jesus and want to share his message of life through Him with others. It’s a very wide scope. CCV focuses on teaching people how to live in a manner that expresses Jesus’s love and how to implement our faith in the way we live and love. We don’t have to be perfect, we don’t have to follow man made religious rules, we can have issues and still be accepted and loved as we try to overcome our failings. However, I know of churches that are in the “Evangelical” class, that do enforce rules in order to be accepted. CCV is not one of them. They teach Jesus and the Bible without apology. If something being teacher rises something inside you, it’s not because the church is telling you how to live, it’s God’s Holy Spirit trying to tell you that maybe this is something you should or shouldn’t be doing to enable you to live the best life you can. Yes, there may be things in your life that you experienced by a person or church that has caused you to lump us all together, but I challenge you to seek out and allow Jesus to change your life, your heart, or whatever it is you struggle with. Following in the way of Jesus will bring peace to your life, and a good church, like CCV, can help your faith to grow and your life to change in a way that brings true joy. Not the kind you get from a great vacation or obtaining an item you’ve always wanted, but a deep internal joy that exists even when life is hard.
CCV? More like, CCTV! Lol, lmao, gottem!
What a shitty joke. Don’t laugh at this.