Chapter One: Hey! You Can’t Park There!
Chuck stopped his car in front of
the little white church to drop off his family. They were new to the area and
this was their very first visit to the small Assembly of God church in Elgin,
North Dakota. When he opened the car door, the elderly custodian hollered at
him from the church door at the top of the steps, “Hey, you can’t park there!”
Chuck motioned that he was just dropping off his family and then he went to
park the car. Despite the rather gruff initial greeting, he and his wife Vicki
and their children stayed and were a tremendous blessing to the congregation. I
came to pastor the church about a year later and when he told me that story, I
commended him for his “stick-to-it-tiveness.”
My family and I went to this
small ranching and farming community directly out of Bible College in the fall
of 1981. Located in southwestern North Dakota, Elgin, with a population of
about 800, was an ideal place to become grounded in the ministry. Situated on
the rolling plains of the Dakotas about 80 miles south and west of the capital
city of Bismarck, the city of Elgin and Grant County was mostly German in
ethnicity and a wonderful place to raise a young family. One of the glimpses we
gained into their hard-working culture was a question that was asked at our
initial board interview, “What time do you get up in the morning?” To them it
was as important as what my theology was. Fortunately, I got up at 5:00 each
morning to pray, so I passed. For the people of Grant County everything was
connected to agriculture. The soil wasn’t as rich nor did they receive as much
rain as in the Red River Valley in the eastern Dakotas. Springtime brought
calving and planting, summer brought haying and hot weather, fall brought
harvest and hunting (pheasants and mule deer), and then followed winter. Not
quite as brutal as either Williston to the north or Fargo in the east, but
tough none the less.
In the spring of my senior year
in college, I sent out a number of resumes to churches in several surrounding
states. We candidated at one church in Greybull, Wyoming, and then the church
in Elgin.
The church building was actually
a small converted barn that had been moved to Elgin in the 1950’s. The
congregation had experienced revival sometime in the 1950’s but it had been
many, many years since the church had grown substantially. In fact, the
physical appearance of the church building seemed to mirror the spiritual
condition of the congregation. When we arrived, part of the church sign was
warped and bent, the carpeting on the steps to the platform had a couple of
holes in it, the Venetian blinds on the windows hadn’t been changed for a couple
of decades, and it needed to be painted in the worst way. The congregation was
mostly elderly and the nursery hadn’t really been used for a number of years
(it was actually converted to the pastor’s study). When Kay and I met with the
church board for our initial interview, a couple of questions stood out
(besides the “what time do you get up?” question). “Do you speak German?” was
one of the questions. Not too many years prior to our coming, there were two
Sunday morning services – one in English and one in German. Many of the elderly people in the area spoke
German fluently, but I did not. They
also asked my wife what type of a housekeeper she was. She had a holster for
her cordless dust buster (remember those?), so she passed that one with flying colors.
And they made one comment that seemed to be almost an incontrovertible truth, “Pastor,
don’t expect this church to grow.” You know how I responded? Me, fresh out of
Bible College, Mr. “Man-o-Faith,” replied with a resounding “…OK…” I’ll be
honest with you, I didn’t really know that churches were supposed to grow. I
was fresh out of Bible school, I was new to the Assemblies of God, I had never
served on a church staff, I was only extroverted on the inside, and I just
wanted to go somewhere to preach and feed my family.
A short time later the board
called me to come and preach a sermon, and, following that, the congregation
would vote on us. Sometime in the middle of October of 1981, one of the board
members called to say that they had voted us in. When I answered the phone at
my parent’s home outside of Moorhead, Minnesota, I remember how unemotional my
response was. And to be honest, I was a little depressed. (I later learned that
this mild depression was just a foretaste of the spiritual battle that we were
to go through the first few years in Elgin.) So we packed up our belongings in
Ellendale, North Dakota and moved to pastor the little church of about 35
people.
Our vision was not that big, but
God’s vision sure was!
During our first few months at
Elgin, the church custodian that greeted Chuck and his family so warmly said to
me one day as I was studying in my office, “Well, pretty soon us old people are
going to die and then we are just going to lock the doors.” My reaction? Well,
I pretty much agreed with him! Everywhere you looked it was discouraging. My
very first get-together with some of the guys of the church was to fence off a
piece of property on the outskirts of town for the church cemetery. If I remember
correctly, each church in Elgin had their own piece of property to lay to rest
the departed saints from their congregation!
For Elgin Assembly of God, it seemed
that more money and focus was going toward people dying than to bringing babies
into the kingdom of God.
And as far as how the singing
went during the Sunday services, a handful of times it seemed that the crickets
chirped louder than we were singing! I specifically remember stopping the song
service one Sunday to challenge the people to sing louder than the crickets
were chirping.
And in the first couple of years
the only time the church was buzzing was when the building was attacked by a
swarm of bees. It was a Saturday, I was in the church office studying and Kay
and our two young daughters had gone shopping. Toward noon the phone rang and I
picked it up. “Dan, its BEES!” The parsonage was located directly behind the
church and when Kay and the girls got home, she could hear a buzzing sound. She
said it sounded like someone driving with studded snow tires. When my wife
opened the car door, she and Amber and Courtney got out into the midst of a
honey bee swarm and ran inside the house and immediately called me. Just like a
typical macho man, I assumed my wife was overreacting a little bit and that it
was just a couple of wasps or hornets. So I went downstairs and grabbed the
bee-killer spray out of the church kitchen cupboard and valiantly went outside
to battle the bee-stly hoard. I lost – big-time – and ran into the parsonage.
There were several thousand bees on the back of the church in a huge, black
clump. A queen bee had decided to make our little barn-church her home and had
brought along a zillion of her little warriors. After a couple of hours, we got
in touch with a beekeeper who came and hosed them down and scooped them into
his hives. I went to the church to see if any of the bees had gotten inside.
They had! I slowly opened the sanctuary
doors and it honestly resembled a sound track from a horror movie. I seriously
thought we were going to have to forgo church the next day. I have had to
cancel church on account of snowstorms, but never because of a bee-storm.
To look at the situation in the
natural, everything seemed so discouraging: an old building, a warped church
sign, holes in the carpeting, a mostly older congregation, hardly any children,
a cricket choir, a community that was not growing in population, and a preacher
who was anything but charismatic. To put it bluntly – it was just plain hard
and it was just plain discouraging. Period. When I was asked at monthly pastors’
meetings how things were going, I usually dreaded the frequently asked question,
“Hey, how many did you have in attendance last Sunday?” I didn’t blame former pastors
of Elgin Assembly of God for leaving after 2-3 years. Don’t get me wrong. The
people were wonderful and it wasn’t the congregation’s fault by any means. It
was just that Satan had a grip on that little church and wouldn’t let go.
The “Pastor-don’t-expect-this-church-to-grow”
statement made at the initial board interview seemed to settle into our soul
and spirit.
But God had plans for Elgin,
Ephesians 3:20 type of plans: “Now to Him who is able to do exceeding
abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works
within us…”
Chapter Two: That’s the Little Church I Saw in My Vision!
Our very first Sunday in Elgin I
got up early to pray. Wanting to be alone, I drove our old 1963 Plymouth
Belvedere (affectionately known as the “Plymo-Limo”) outside of town to pray.
Somewhere during that prayer time, the Holy Spirit spoke these 6 simple words
to my heart, “It will be by intercessory prayer.” There was no visible angelic
visitation, no heavenly choir, no thundering voice from the heavens, and no
emotional experience. Just the gentle voice of the Spirit of the Lord speaking
directly to my heart about prayer. And I really didn’t know what the “it” was. Years
later, in the movie “Field of Dreams,” Kevin Costner wondered the same thing
when he heard a voice out in the cornfield in Iowa, “If you build it, he will
come.” Build WHAT? And WHO will come???
So that was my question: what was
the “IT” in the promise “It will be by intercessory prayer? What was the Lord wanting to accomplish in
Elgin?
One of the first things I did in
Elgin was to fix the church sign. To me, the outside of a church reflects the
life of the pastor and the congregation. Driving by a church where weeds are
growing tall in the parking lot, where the paint is peeling, and where the
shrubbery is not trimmed doesn’t speak well of a church. I worked for a large
hospital/clinic healthcare facility which has several regional clinics. A few
years back I had to visit one of those regional clinics to do some training on
our supply chain software system. The
clinic was about 100 miles away, and when I drove up, I honestly wondered if I
was at the correct place. Lots of weeds were growing in the parking lot and in
the shrubbery and I couldn’t see the sign indicating it was a healthcare
facility. When I got back I told my boss about it and then I emailed the
director of our regional facilities about how poorly this clinic represented
our company’s name. Why go to a place of business that looks like it doesn’t
care? And why attend a church that doesn’t care how the place looks?
As a rookie preacher I didn’t
know much about pastoring other than what I had learned in the classroom. I
didn’t grow up as a preacher’s kid, never served as an intern, and wasn’t on
staff of a large church to sort of learn the ropes. But at the very beginning
of my Christian life the Lord had put a passion in my heart to pray. At times
my search for a place to pray became a little comical (see the post, “A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Secret Place”). In college I served on the GAP
intercessory prayer ministry team and I was fascinated to hear missionaries and
evangelists speak about the power of prayer, of waiting upon the Lord, and
“praying through.” (“GAP” comes from Ezekiel 22:30 where it says, “I searched
for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand in the GAP before Me
for the land, so that I would not destroy it; but I found no one.”)
So each day I got up at 5:00 AM
and spent a couple of hours in prayer. Dan Rothwell, the former pastor from
Fargo First Assembly of God, said something to the effect that in the morning
you win the battle in prayer and the rest of the day is spent picking up the
spoils of war. I realized how imperative it was to pray long and hard,
especially before the Sunday services. I
could never fathom getting up in front of the people without having spent time
in prayer.
Only after I have been able to
look back on our time in Elgin did I realize the intense spiritual struggle we
were going through in that little town. You normally don’t think of a town of
about 800 people in the southwestern part of North Dakota as being a place of
concentrated Satanic resistance, but it was. I had never really suffered from
depression, but I seemed to be battling “something” that I could not put my
finger on. About 6 months into our time
in Elgin I woke up in the middle of the night out of a deep sleep, singing in
the Spirit. That had never happened before, and has never happened since. When
that happened, there was a tremendous sense of peace and joy in my heart, and
the Holy Spirit immediately spoke these simple words, “This is Satanic.” This
mild spiritual depression that I was going through did not dissipate right
away, but it helped me to know that “…our struggle was not against flesh and
blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of
this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly
places.” (Ephesians 6:12).
And it wasn’t until quite a bit
later that my wife told me how depressed she was the first few years that we
were there. I am the one that is up and down on the moodiness scale, and she
has always been the steady and cheerful one. But during that time, she seemed
to be struggling with that “low lying black cloud” also.
So those first three years we
prayed and preached and did the normal church stuff.
And plodded. I think my wife and
I are good at “plodding.” If you want to be successful in something you have to
be able to stick to it even when it’s hard.
You have to be able to keep putting one foot in front of the other, you
have to keep trudging along when everything inside of you says, “QUIT!” I think
both Kay and I had learned how to do the plodding and trudging thing from our
upbringing and through what we had gone through in the Army (we both joined the
Army together about one year after high school).
However, I want to stress a
couple of things in the middle of this story. First, I absolutely agree with
Paul in Romans 11:36, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.
To Him be the glory forever. Amen.” This revival was by the grace of God! He just
used this introverted, balding and bowlegged preacher as a vessel to flow
through. Secondly, I sometimes think the Lord looks down on a little church and
says to the angels, “You know, these people have been so awfully faithful for
so many years even when things have been so awfully dry…I think I’m going to
POUR OUT SOME RAIN ON THEM!” A lot of the credit for the revival simply needs
to go to the Elginites themselves. There were people in the little barn-church
that had the same tenacity to remain faithful during the “dry bones” tough
times. I believe God is sometimes just looking for “show-er-uppers” – people
who are faithful to come to church even when things are discouraging or the
weather is lousy or they’re feeling miserable. There were the Bauers, the
Finks, the Seidlers, the Ehrmantrauts, the Kreps, the Meyers, the Tietzs, the
Stevahns, the Siewerts, the Pigors, Molly Schaible, Violet Pidde and others.
People who were simply faithful. Sure, for the most part they didn’t expect the
church to grow, but you know what? Neither did I! But consider this – when God
asked the prophet Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37:3), he replied
by saying, “I don’t really think so!” (The Vander Ark paraphrased edition).
But somewhere during our third
year in Elgin God began speaking to my heart about revival. Three times in one
year I preached from Ezekiel chapter 37 and the “Valley of Dry Bones” passage***.
The third time I mentioned to the congregation that I wasn’t in the habit of
doing reruns, but that the Lord had something in mind for Elgin. As a pastor I
have tried to be careful about a couple of things. First, of getting up in
front of a congregation and promising that if we carry out a certain spiritual
formula or apply the latest program that’s making a buzz in the church world,
then revival will be the result. (Please don’t get me wrong – there are many
wonderful and effective programs that the Lord has given to the church. But if
they are not born and energized of the Holy Spirit, they will not be effective
in bringing true revival). Some pastor somewhere along the way wisely told me
that a lot of congregations hear the same thing from a lot of preachers that
come along, and when revival doesn’t happen, they tend to get a little skeptical.
It’s not that they don’t want revival (they desperately do), it’s just that
they have heard the same promises for so long and have seen preachers stay for
just a couple of years and then leave. Hence, they get a little jaded. They
want someone to stick it out with them and love them, even if revival doesn’t
happen. Secondly, even though I felt something stirring deep in my spirit, I
was hesitant to give a word of prophecy. It’s not that I don’t believe in the
gift of tongues and interpretation of tongues or the gift of prophecy. I do
very much so. It’s just that, again, when we stand before a congregation and
say, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘Rain is coming!’” we need to give the word out of a
tender spirit of love for the sheep, realizing the impact that our words are
having in the kingdom of God.
But the Holy Spirit was stirring
something in my heart. I remember mentioning to them somewhere in about our
third year that God was wanting to do something in Elgin. I didn’t know what,
but the Lord did. The Holy Spirit was beginning to blow upon the dry and dusty
bones of the Elginites, and He wanted us to be prepared.
The beginning breezes of the
winds of revival may not come in the fashion we have imagined. At Elgin, in the
initial stages of the revival we didn’t see signs and wonders, but nevertheless
God was moving by His Spirit. Evidence that revival is starting may simply be
that someone begins pulling the weeds or giving the place a fresh coat of paint
or just plain fixing the place up.
We took a step of faith
financially and remodeled the sanctuary. If I remember correctly, we had about $10.00
in the church checking account when we began to remodel. For sure it was less
than $100.00. And also in faith, we turned the nursery that became a classroom
that became the pastor’s office back into the nursery. A couple of young
families came into the church and became a real blessing to our congregation.
One young family in particular proved to be vital in encouraging Kay and I and
the congregation and holding our hands up in prayer. Dave and Tina Skjoldal became
youth leaders and both of them had a real passion for Jesus.
As I mentioned at the beginning
of this story, Elgin was located about 80 miles southwest of Bismarck, the
capital city. We normally went there once a month for shopping, but some people
drove there weekly. And a few people I knew drove to Bismarck for church on
Sunday. Somewhere in our third year in Elgin (it seems like a lot of “stuff”
was starting to happen in “about the third year”), a young man and his friend
stopped by the parsonage to visit with us. I was not at home but Clay and his
friend had something they needed to share and so they related an amazing story
to my wife. They had been in Bismarck at a prayer meeting and sometime during
the meeting Clay’s friend had a vision. In her vision she saw a little white
church that was covered with a dark demonic cloud. But as she looked in her vision,
she saw the glory of God begin to settle upon the little white church and the
black Satanic cloud began to dissipate. She shared the vision with Clay (and
perhaps some others). She had never seen our church before, but either later
that day or within just a couple of days of that prayer meeting, Clay and his
friend were driving through Elgin, and when she saw our little barn-church, she
suddenly exclaimed, “That’s the church I saw in my vision!”
I still get goose bumps when I
think about that story.
Chapter Three: Revival!
It was the fall of 1984. A pastor
friend from Mott, North Dakota named Carl Bauman had scheduled evangelist Verlyn
Nelson to come to their church. (Carl loved to say, “Mott’s the Spot that God
Loves a Lot”). Carl asked if our church would be interested in having Verlyn
come in the mornings (Monday through Thursday) to do some teaching about the
Holy Spirit. We thought it would be a good idea – Mott and Elgin were only 25
miles apart so the travel wouldn’t be a problem.
We met in the basement of our
little church those four mornings for a couple of hours and the attendance from
the beginning was great. Several young couples who were not a part of the
church came because they were hungry for the Holy Spirit. Verlyn had a
wonderful way of teaching on the gifts of the Spirit and the people devoured
his teaching.
That week of teaching set the
stage for what was to come.
I can’t remember why the Nelson’s
had an opening in their schedule (perhaps a church had cancelled their series
of services with him), but Verlyn asked if our church would be willing to have
him come back two weeks later. Again, everyone thought it would be great, so we
scheduled him for a Sunday through Thursday series of meetings sometime in
November of 1984.
During those services our little
church was packed. People were healed (I specifically remember one elderly
lady’s shoulder being healed), a few received the baptism in the Holy Spirit,
and everyone was encouraged! Almost overnight we had an influx of people
(mostly younger families) that stayed, supported and became faithful members of
Elgin Assembly of God. Not too many months after those revival services, in
order to accommodate the new people, we rented a house just across the street
to the south for Sunday School classrooms. When that house was no longer available,
we then rented the house across the street to the west of the church.
Now the church really was
buzzing, but not because of an invasion of honey bees. God had taken our little
church and transformed it through the power of intercessory prayer! Hebrews 11:6
says that God is “a rewarder of those that diligently seek Him.” And someone
has said that “God acts sovereignly on behalf of those who pray” – meaning that
when we faithfully seek His face, He will pour out unexpected blessings! The
church that had for so many years been dormant and stagnant was now filled with
people of all ages. The statements, “Pastor, don’t expect this church to grow,”
and, “Pretty soon us old people are gonna die and then we are just gonna lock
the doors,” had been overruled in heaven. During our time there people were
saved, a ten-year-old boy was delivered of demonic oppression, some received
the baptism in the Holy Spirit, others had their Pentecostal experience
reignited, and many were encouraged to walk closer to Jesus. Through His
wonderful mercy and grace, God decided to pour out His Spirit on the little
barn church on the plains of southwestern North Dakota.
In January of 1988 the Lord began
speaking to my heart that we were to resign the church the following May. We had no idea where the ministry would take
us to next, and when I announced our resignation to the congregation, I quoted from
Hebrews 11:8, “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place
which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not
knowing where he was going.” I remember Marcus Bakke, our district
superintendent at the time, remarking to me, “You know Dan, most guys have a
church lined up before they resign!” That was probably true, but I believe firmly
that there are times when God asks us to step out in faith.
It was a very, very hard decision
leaving the people we loved, but In July we packed up and moved to Duluth, Minnesota
to pastor a home missions church. When I finished loading the U-Haul truck and
was just getting ready to pull out, an elderly gentleman from Elgin who had
never been to any of our church services during our almost 7 years there,
pulled up behind the truck and got out to talk with me. I had been the chaplain
for the American Legion Post and had gotten to know him there. He said this
simple sentence to me as we stood behind the truck, “I just want to thank you
for what you’ve done here. You did a good job.” He had always seemed to be a little
hard and cold and had never really talked that much, but I was deeply moved by
his unpretentious words. And after all these years, I am still moved when I
think about what he said.
To the congregation’s credit,
about one year after we left the flock at Elgin, they made arrangements to move
in a larger church building from a community about 100 miles away. Not only had
the Lord given the Elginites more people, but now they also had a larger church
building as well. God is so good!
As I look back, I realize I made
many mistakes at Elgin during my rookie years of pastoring our first church. There was at least one time when I had to
apologize to the congregation for something I had said in a sermon. But I am thankful to know a God that can take
our foibles and failures and turn them around for His glory!
Conclusion:
My heart is burdened for pastors
of small churches and their congregations and I would like to close this story
by encouraging both the shepherds and the sheep of these smaller churches.
For the sheep: the Barna Group’s
research finds that almost 40 percent of US pastors have thought about quitting
full-time ministry in the past year (https://www.barna.com/research/pastors-well-being).
Because of this, let’s determine to be men and women who will lift up the hands
of pastors in intercessory prayer. Let’s
be the Aarons and the Hurs (Exodus 17:12) of the church world – and bring encouraging
words to those who watch over our souls.
Sheep – pray for your pastor!
Pray for your pastor! Don’t just talk about praying for your pastor, pray for
your pastor! And send them a note of encouragement or give him or her a call
and let them know that you appreciate them. Encouraging words can change the
course of a life! And when you are out
and about, when you pass by a church, breathe a short word of prayer for that
shepherd/shepherdess that God would bring encouragement to them.
For the shepherds: your
congregation may be in the midst of a large metropolitan city or it may be in
one of the smaller towns out on the plains of the Dakotas. God has a plan for
you and your church! Jesus desperately loves you and the people in your
congregation and the lost people out in the highways and byways of your town. I
encourage you to take some time out of your schedule (perhaps an hour each day)
to earnestly seek the face of God. Nothing is more important to you and the
life of your church then getting alone with God! When your heart determines to
do this, God will bless you in unexpected ways and give you a fresh vision.
***Ezekiel
37:1-14
37:1 The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in
the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was
full of bones,
2 And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold,
there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.
3 And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And
I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.
4 Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say
unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.
5 Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will
cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live:
6 And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh
upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live;
and ye shall know that I am the Lord.
7 So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied,
there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to
his bone.
8 And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up
upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.
9 Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy,
son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four
winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came
into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great
army.
11 Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the
whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is
lost: we are cut off for our parts.
12 Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord
God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out
of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.
13 And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened
your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves,
14 And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I
shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the Lord have
spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord.
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