New Life Christian Fellowship · Grand Rapids, Michigan

New Life Remembers

Forty-five years a church and forty years on Knapp Street, told one year at a time, by the people who were there.

1981became a congregation
1986first Sunday on Knapp
2026one September, both anniversaries

Read straight down the line and you have the whole story in short. Open More detail under any year for the fuller account.

Where we do not know something, we say so. The copper boxes are blanks we are hoping you can fill.

Add what you remember. Under each year there is a place to send in your own memory, and a photo if you have one. It goes to Pastor Jon first and appears here once he has read it, signed with the name you give.

Our roots: a camp and a village church

1930Minnesota and Somerset

A prayer camp and a village church

New Life did not begin in Grand Rapids. In 1930 a literature professor named Glenn Clark held the first Camp Farthest Out at a lake in Minnesota, a week of prayer and singing that drew ordinary Protestant families toward a living expectation of the Holy Spirit, and the Michigan camp met every summer at Alma College. Across the ocean, in the Somerset village of Chard, Sid and Mill Purse were gathering a church that became one of the best-known charismatic congregations in England. Neither of these happened here. Both of them are why New Life is what it is.

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Clark had spent a holiday on an island off the Maine coast that the locals called the island farthest out, and the phrase became the camp. Camps Farthest Out drew mainline Protestants, Presbyterians especially, toward charismatic renewal, and it was at the Michigan camp at Alma that Bob and Pat Steere's involvement took root.

South Chard's founders were Uncle Sid and Aunty Mill to everyone who knew them. Among those who found their way there was a healing evangelist named Harry Greenwood, who travelled to India, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and who moved to the Manor House at Chard in 1964. Lonnie Shields calls him "a prophet before it was profitable." Also at Chard was a pastor named Andrew Jordan, who will matter a great deal further down this page.

Our roots: the orchard on Michigan Street

1971February 25

Bob and Pat Steere buy an orchard

Bob and Pat Steere were Presbyterians who came home from Camps Farthest Out with a Bible study in their living room, and the study grew them right out of their church. So they sold their house and bought about twenty acres on Michigan Street NE, an apple orchard gone wild with a burned farmhouse on it, and rebuilt the house themselves. On February 25, 1971 they filed papers with the State of Michigan for a ministry called Faith Teaching Mission. Those papers have never lapsed. New Life Christian Fellowship is still, legally, the corporation they started that winter, under a new name.

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Bob had flown as an Army Air Corps test pilot in the Second World War and ran a business in Grand Rapids after it. That June the IRS recognized Faith Teaching Mission as a charity, and the same recognition still stands. Bob also led the Grand Rapids chapter of the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship.

For most of a decade the orchard was the whole ministry: prayer meetings during the week, Bible studies, and by 1976 a Sunday morning service. Bob and Pat began talking about planting a church, and they knew a young couple in Phoenix who might help. The orchard itself was formally deeded to the mission in January 1979.

Bob developed leukaemia some years after leaving Grand Rapids and came home, where he died in 1991. Pat lived until 2019. Between them they gave this church its land, its charter and its first ten years, and nothing that came afterward would have existed without them.

1977February 15

Lonnie and Diane come from Phoenix

On February 15, 1977, Lonnie and Diane Shields arrived from Phoenix to help plant a church. Pat Steere was Diane's mother, so they were moving toward family as well as toward a work. The offer was six hundred dollars a month, made in faith, and nobody could live on it, so Lonnie drove a forklift downtown, then learned to hang drywall from Rick Hendrickson, then took to the road preaching, until at last the church could pay him. Dave Beebe served as the first assistant pastor alongside them.

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The forklift was in a warehouse downtown, since torn down. When that work ended, Lois Hendrickson mentioned that her husband Rick, a drywall finisher, needed help hanging board. Lonnie told him he knew nothing about drywall. Rick said he could teach him, so long as he was not afraid of hard work. For years after that, whenever the Shields ran short, the phone would ring and it would be Rick with a house to hang. Once, when they were in real trouble, he called with two.

Lonnie and Diane's brother Bill led worship at the Camps Farthest Out week at Alma every summer, Lonnie at the piano. Through that camp came invitations to speak in other churches, and there was a year Lonnie was on the road ninety days. Barb Beebe was the one who drove Diane to her doctor's appointments when Diane could not drive herself. That is the kind of detail most church histories leave out, and it is the kind of thing a church is actually made of.

1979Autumn

Ten days at South Chard

In the autumn of 1979 Lonnie and Diane flew to England for ten days at South Chard. Diane had learned she was pregnant with Elizabeth about a week before they left and arrived with a suitcase of clothes that no longer fit. Lonnie has always said the release he found there was not one dramatic word spoken over him but the whole ten days. Harry Greenwood set the seal on it by speaking over Lonnie that he was released, and that word was the confirmation.

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The whole experience of being at Chard was a freeing experience. It brought me a sense of: okay, I'm free. We're free to leave Faith Teaching Mission now.Lonnie Shields

Lonnie calls Greenwood "a prophet before it was profitable." When a man like that speaks release over you, it settles the question of whether the freedom you feel is from the Lord. The word had done its work before they left England.

1980 to 1981

Where New Life was born

Faith Teaching Mission was never intended to be a church; Bob Steere had set it up deliberately as a private teaching foundation, and for a decade he built it faithfully as exactly that. So what Lonnie came home from Chard free to do was not to take over Bob's work and run it differently, but to plant a church, which was a genuinely new thing, and a church is not what the organization on Michigan Street was. Early in 1980 Lonnie offered his resignation, saying they wanted the same end, Jesus glorified, but that the means were completely different; Bob would not accept it and offered a six-month trial instead. When that ran its course, both men called the one man they both trusted, Andrew Jordan of South Chard, and he flew from England twice to sit between them. What was asked of Bob, who had given a decade and his own home to that orchard, was a real cost, and he is the one who paid it; what came out of it was not his work taken over but a new one born from it.

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Andrew Jordan had been a German soldier, taken prisoner and held in England, and in the camp he met Jesus. When the war ended he was allowed to stay, which almost never happened. He became a Baptist pastor, and when he was baptized in the Holy Spirit his church let him go, which is how he found South Chard. He was a pastor to his bones. He had been at Lonnie and Diane's wedding, and their daughter is Elizabeth Joy because his daughter was Elizabeth and his wife was Joy.

In the farmhouse on Michigan Street the elders, Mike Bloom and Bob Imhoff among them, sat in the kitchen with Bob. Lonnie waited alone in the front bedroom. Andrew walked back and forth between the two rooms for hours; Lonnie calls it shuttle diplomacy. Across town Diane stood in the living room of the raised ranch they had just moved into, six weeks after a C-section, boxes piled high because she was not allowed to lift, with a newborn and a boy not yet two, wondering whether they would be unpacking or moving away.

They reached an agreement: Lonnie would be the pastor, the elders would be the elders, and Bob would be an elder emeritus, there to consult but not to lead. There was no ceremony. Andrew flew home. Within weeks the arrangement had come apart, they called him again, and he crossed the Atlantic a second time for a church that was not his. This time the elders said that if Lonnie left, they would go with him, and Bob understood that his season on Michigan Street was over.

New Life exists in part because a former prisoner of war got on two aeroplanes for a church that was not his.

New Life begins

1981September

The month we became a church

In the late summer of 1981 Bob and Pat moved north to Pentwater, where they opened a bed-and-breakfast and began a teaching ministry of their own. Lonnie rented the truck, loaded it, drove it up the lakeshore, unloaded it and drove it back; he moved his own in-laws out with his own hands. And for the first time, the congregation on Michigan Street was simply itself. That is why September 1981 is our anniversary, and why Lonnie Shields is New Life's founding pastor: not the charter, which belongs to Faith Teaching Mission, and not the building, which was still five years off, but the month this congregation stood on its own feet. Everything before it is our roots; this is where our history begins.

Fill in the blank: were you here in the autumn of 1981? Do you remember the Steeres' move north, or the first Sundays after it? Tell us what that season felt like.

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His influence being removed was a very freeing thing. That was a very pivotal time, when they finally moved to Pentwater and we were free.Lonnie Shields

Lonnie had been the pastor in practice before then, and most people knew it. What changed in September 1981 was that the congregation became responsible for itself. Asked whether the first of September could stand as the day to commemorate, Lonnie said it could, and so it does: 2026 is the forty-fifth year, and 2031 will be the fiftieth.

1981 to 1982

A new name, a new footing, a new voice

A congregation that had just become itself needed three things. Faith Teaching Mission became New Life. The corporation Bob had set up as a private foundation, because he never meant it to be a church, was rebuilt as a church. And Lonnie took fifteen minutes a day on WYGR, the Christian radio station whose call letters stood for Wyoming and Grand Rapids, so that this city would hear the new church in its own pastor's voice. Then came a fourth thing: the church had to leave the orchard itself.

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The first written use of the new name that anyone has found is on a June 1984 deed, where the buyer is listed under both names at once, Faith Teaching Mission and New Life Christian Fellowship. The church was going by New Life more than a year before the state recorded it.

1982 to 1986

Out of the orchard, into a gym

A young church with a new name needed a new place to become it, because as long as New Life met in that farmhouse it would be Faith Teaching Mission with a different sign out front. So the congregation left the orchard and moved into the gymnasium at Beckwith Elementary School on Leonard Street. Every Sunday for about four years this church set up the sound system, the chairs and the piano, and took it all down again, and the whole time it was working toward ground of its own. The orchard was sold in 1984, the land on Knapp Street was bought in 1985, and in May 1986 the shovels went in.

Fill in the blank: did you haul chairs at Beckwith, or run the sound? Which year did the gym start? If there is a photo of a Sunday in that gym anywhere, we would love the picture.

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Lonnie looked hard for a venue first. He asked the congregation at Ahavas Israel whether a church might use their beautiful building on Sundays, since they worshiped on Saturdays, but the High Holy Days made it impossible, and the school gym turned out to be the answer.

The school let them store the sound equipment. Diane still pictures Lonnie at the piano with their little boy David running up to grab his father's leg mid-song. If you have ever wondered whether this church knows how to work, the answer is that it met in a school gym and hauled itself in and out every Sunday for four years.

In September 1984 the orchard was sold to a Reformed congregation, which worships there still, and the church rented an office half a mile down Michigan Street.

1985April, August, October

Raw ground on Knapp Street

They had wanted to find a building they could simply move into, and there was nothing to buy. In 1985 the church bought two pieces of raw ground on Knapp Street NE from a man named Kenneth Lodden, in the spring and again in the autumn, about fourteen acres in all. On August 1 of that year the State of Michigan recorded the corporation's new name: New Life Christian Fellowship of Grand Rapids.

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The restated papers made the corporation a church rather than a foundation, with Rev. Lonnie D. Shields as its resident agent. The two parcels together are the campus the church sits on now.

2777 Knapp Street NE

1986May 13 to September

Ground broken in May, first service in September

Ground was broken on May 13, 1986. The first service at 2777 Knapp Street NE was held that September, four months later, which tells you something about how the people of this church go at a job. The construction loan was paid off in under three years. Forty years on, this is the building we are still in.

Fill in the blank: were you at the first service on Knapp? What do you remember? Who set up the chairs? Send us a photo.

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The county recorded the start of construction that May, and the loan that built the sanctuary was cleared in June 1989. A congregation that once hauled a piano in and out of a school gym has had a home of its own on Knapp Street for forty years this month.

1997 to 2000

Adding on

An addition went up in 1997, and a commercial kitchen and more room followed in 1999. This building was designed from the start to house a school, and built to the code a school requires; in 2000 North Hills Classical Academy came onto the property, and later put an addition of four classrooms on the building. The building has been added to and rebuilt around more than once. The ground has not moved.

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The second round of building began in July 1999. A school was part of the vision for this building before the first shovel went in, which is why the county still lists the structures the way it does; North Hills' four classrooms came afterward, as an addition to what New Life had already built.

Sending

About 1996

Vicki Conrad brings her daughter

Around 1996 a woman named Vicki Conrad started bringing her teenage daughter Stacy to New Life. Stacy was in high school. She has been part of this church every year since, which is now most of her life, and a great deal followed from it.

Fill in the blank: were you around in the mid-nineties? Do you remember the year Vicki and Stacy first came, or who welcomed them at the door? Who else came in that season?

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Vicki brought this church its next generation of leadership without knowing it. Stacy grew up in these pews, and the man she would marry was, at the time, serving teenagers in Colorado with no idea which church in Michigan had sent them.

Late 1990s

The trip that came back

The church heard Fred Markert of Youth With A Mission speak, and it did what a church is supposed to do with a stirring like that: it sent a group of its own teenagers to YWAM's Mission Adventures in Colorado. Stacy was on that trip. Serving out there was a young man named Jon Hazeltine. Two years later she went back for a Discipleship Training School, and the rest is the kind of thing that happens when a church sends people out.

Fill in the blank: were you on the Colorado trip? What year was it, and how did you get out there? If you still have a picture from Mission Adventures, send it to us.

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Most churches never see the return on what they send. The seed goes into the ground and the harvest comes up in somebody else's field, which is fine, and is how it usually works. This church can point at its return. It sent its teenagers to Colorado and got back a woman who grew up in its pews and the man who leads it today.

1999

Mexico

In 1999 the youth group went to Mexico with YWAM, the first of this church's trips out of the country. Africa and Haiti would follow in the years to come.

Fill in the blank: did you go to Mexico in 1999? Where did the team serve, and what happened there? We would love a photo.

1990s to early 2000s

Two churches sent out, and a detour

A church that had once been a plant began to plant. Rick Chapin was sent out from New Life and planted Eagle's Nest Church on Leonard Street NW, which calls itself a place of refuge on the West Side of Grand Rapids for thirty-plus years, is still on its corner today, and has a Chapin pastoring there to this day. Dick Teft went out in 2001 to start Honey Creek. In the early 2000s Chad Seeber served as associate pastor, and New Life put its emphasis where a great many West Michigan churches were putting theirs, on the seeker-sensitive model, because that was where churches were growing. The church's own membership class calls those years a detour from our roots, and good people did faithful work in them.

Fill in the blank: were you part of Eagle's Nest when it began, or did you go out with Rick Chapin to start it? What year was that, and who went?

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Troubling reports had come back about the revival at the Toronto Airport church, and on the strength of them New Life kept its distance. Meanwhile the seeker-sensitive movement was where the growth appeared to be, so the church leaned that way, along with a great many congregations doing their honest best in the same decade. The next chapter is about how New Life came back to the thing it had been made for in the first place.

A place of refuge on the West Side of Grand Rapids for 30 plus years.Eagle's Nest Church, 540 Leonard Street NW, describing itself

New Life is marking forty-five years. A church it sent out has been going for more than thirty of them, on its own corner, with the founding family's name still over the door. That is the sending story proving itself over decades, and it belongs beside the Colorado trip and the Jesus Culture night.

2002

Jon and Stacy

Jon and Stacy Hazeltine married in 2002, and Jon came to New Life and never left. His first job in Grand Rapids was driving a forklift at Gordon Foods, and his second was hanging drywall: the same two jobs, in the same order, as the pastor he would one day succeed. He was the youth pastor first, then the worship leader, then an associate pastor. Tom and Vicki Conrad are Stacy's parents, and Jon's in-laws.

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There was a stretch, early on, when Jon and Stacy were planning to go back to YWAM, not so much for the mission as for the place they associated with the strongest presence of the Lord they had known. What changed that was what came next in this church's story.

The turn

2005

A plane to Redding, California

Lonnie was not looking for Bethel; reports out of the Toronto Blessing had put him off, and he had kept New Life at a distance. Then he read Bill Johnson's first book, When Heaven Invades Earth, and in 2005 he got on a plane to Redding to see the place for himself, guarded, hoping to find a revival without some of the excess he had seen in other revivals. On his way out the door he grabbed a second book off his own shelf for the flight, Quenching the Spirit by William DeArteaga, and it took him apart: every revival has had foolishness attached to it, because foolishness follows people and people are where revival happens, and there has never been a clean version. He repented in his seat before the plane landed, got to Bethel and, in his own words, got blasted. Then he came home, stood in front of this congregation, repented out loud, and said that New Life would never miss a move of God again.

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DeArteaga's book is a history of what the church has done to its own revivals. Its argument is that the critics who have stood outside each one and pointed at the mess have been the same critics in every century, and then it defends the Toronto Blessing by name and sets it beside the strange manifestations Jonathan Edwards defended in the Great Awakening. Lonnie had opened it hoping to find a tidier revival than Toronto. He was reading the case against his own position.

We would never miss a move of God again.Lonnie Shields, from the front, 2005

It takes a particular kind of man to change his mind in front of the people he leads. That sentence turned the church back toward the thing it was born out of, and everything in the twenty years since runs on it. The partnership with Bethel came out of it and shaped the next two decades.

2006

Bill Johnson comes at New Life's invitation

Kris Vallotton held a conference here in 2006. Bill Johnson of Redding came at New Life's invitation that same year; New Life only needed a bigger room. Jon Hazeltine, the youth pastor by then, came to that meeting a skeptic and sat beside a young man named Matt from the youth group who had an ankle brace, and the doctors had said there was nothing to be done about it. Told to put a hand on it and say "in Jesus' name, be healed," he did, with no faith to speak of, and the young man stood on the foot, hopped on it, and never wore the brace again.

Fill in the blank: were you at the Vineyard the night Bill Johnson came, or at Kris Vallotton's conference in 2006? What do you remember of those nights? Did you see something healed?

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The meeting was held at the Vineyard, which opened its doors for it.

Jon's own account is that he was contributing nothing to the environment, faith-wise, and that when the young man hopped on the foot he told him to hop on it again. That was the night he stopped being a skeptic: "okay, I'm in."

2006 onward

Prophetic ministry takes root

New Life did not only host prophetic ministry; it taught it, for well over a decade. A Prophetic Prayer Team was praying over people by the autumn of 2006. In 2007 the church wrote down its Guidelines for Prophetic Ministry at New Life and opened a School of Prophetic Ministry that met weekly. A Prophetic Training Manual followed. This is what "we would never miss a move of God again" looked like on an ordinary weeknight: a pipeline, not a guest list.

Fill in the blank: were you on the Prophetic Prayer Team, or did you sit in the School of Prophetic Ministry in 2007? Who taught it, and what stayed with you? If your handouts or your manual are still in a drawer, we would love to see them.

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The prayer team's handout is dated October 29, 2006, barely a year after Lonnie stood in front of the congregation and repented. The written guidelines and the weekly school came the next year. A church that had confessed to standing at the edge of a move of God was, within eighteen months, training its own people to hear and to speak.

Every visiting prophet on this page spoke to a congregation that had been taught what to do with a word. That is not an accident either.

Over many years

Who was handed the microphone

You can tell a great deal about a church by who it invites to share, and New Life handed the microphone to prophets at a time when a good many churches would not have opened the door. Two different men named Bill Johnson run through this story: Bill Johnson of Redding, the Bethel pastor and author, and "Florida" Bill Johnson, a prophet from Florida with no connection to Bethel, whose connection to New Life goes back well before the first visit anyone can put a date on, in November 2007, and who returned again and again over the years and has been the most influential outside voice this church has had. Ian Andrews and Bob Hazlett both ministered here more than once; Bob Hazlett spoke a word over the church itself on October 20, 2010, and it was written down and kept. People in this church still remember the words they were given. Georgian Banov came several times with his particular brand of joy.

Fill in the blank: were you there when Florida Bill Johnson gave his word over New Life? The recording is long gone, so what you remember is the only copy left. What did he say, and what year was it? And if you kept a word of your own from him, Ian Andrews or Georgian Banov on paper, tell us the year on it.

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For a long stretch Florida Bill sat in the small circle of outside leaders that New Life's pastors asked to speak into the life of the church. When someone here says "Florida Bill," that is who they mean. His word over the church was on cassette, and the cassettes are gone. By January 2011 someone here was already hunting for that recording and asking around for the year. Nobody could answer then either.

Bob Hazlett was back in October 2011, and said then that he had spoken over Jon from the first time he came, which means 2010 was not his first visit. The word he gave over the church in October 2010 was transcribed and is still kept.

One of Florida Bill's words was for Jon. He had just led worship and was called out of the crowd; he stood up to receive the word and was told, no, stay there, stay there. Then: that is the word. Stay here. He did.

2007

Treasure hunts at Meijer

Todd Bentley ministered here in 2007. Kevin Dedmon's book The Ultimate Treasure Hunt turned prophetic evangelism into a list of clues and a trip to the store, and by that spring the youth group was walking into Meijer on Wednesday nights with clue sheets in hand. Dedmon himself would not arrive for another four years. The same year the youth group, then called ZOE, went to Atlanta for a Jesus Culture conference and came home on fire. Among those pursuing the Holy Spirit in that season were Tory and Allie, close friends of Jon and Stacy and the same age, who attended a ministry school around 2007 and were part of many of the guest visits that came through in those years.

Fill in the blank: did Banning Liebscher come to New Life, maybe alongside Kris Vallotton or Bill Johnson in 2006 or 2007? Were you there that night? Tell us what you remember.

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One greeter in a wheelchair who had said no to prayer twice said yes to the teenagers. After Atlanta the youth wrote Banning Liebscher a letter promising to "beg, plead, pray, fast, cajole and subtly bribe" his team for thirty days until they agreed to come to the Great Lakes. Whether Banning himself stood on the platform at New Life afterward, perhaps alongside Kris Vallotton or Bill Johnson when they came, is one of the things this page is asking about.

2008 to 2015

The visitors kept coming

Doug Addison taught the church to hear God in dreams in 2008. In 2011 Banning Liebscher and the Jesus Culture team held their first stadium event, in Chicago; it was a wild success, and New Life got to be part of it, there at the very start of something. That same year Bob Hazlett came back, and Kevin Dedmon finally arrived with his team from Bethel, four years after the youth group had started running his treasure hunts without him. James Maloney spoke here in May 2013, Danny Silk held a conference in 2014, and Steve Backlund came in 2015. Every one of them found a church that already knew what to do when the Holy Spirit showed up, because it had been doing it, in a farmhouse and a gym and a building on Knapp Street, since before most of them were in ministry.

Fill in the blank: were you in Chicago in 2011 for Jesus Culture's first stadium event? Who went from New Life, and what do you remember of it? Send us a photo.

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Not one of those names arrived by accident. Somebody in this church went and found them, made the case, and paid for it.

Out and at home

2010

Africa

A team went to Africa in 2010, the second continent this church has sent its own people to. The sending that began with the youth trip to Mexico had become part of who New Life is.

Fill in the blank: were you on the team to Africa in 2010? Where did you go, and what did you do there? Send us a photo.

2012

A year of building and of trouble

The lobby was renovated, the Living Room opened, and the core values were painted and hung where everyone walks past them on the way in. That same year Lonnie and Diane were both in a serious car wreck. Both spent the next two years in recovery, and both still live with health issues from it today, Diane in particular. The church walked through it with them, and Jon Hazeltine stepped in as interim senior pastor. During Lonnie's recovery the church launched Firelight Services, where pastors from other churches came to share on Monday nights, and through 2013 it was growing.

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The interim ran from 2012 to 2014. It was a season that opened in a hospital and ended in an installation service, and a great many people in this church held it together in between. The next entry is about what Lonnie did in the middle of it.

2013 to 2014Sunday, July 27, 2014

Lonnie passes the torch

Lonnie led New Life for more than thirty years. Handing on a church you built is among the hardest things ministry asks of anyone, and he did it. The season it took was hard, and there is no honest telling of this without saying that New Life came very close to not making it. On Sunday, July 27, 2014, Lonnie passed the torch, and the congregation installed Jon Hazeltine as its senior pastor.

Fill in the blank: were you here through 2013 and 2014? What do you remember of that season, and of the Sunday Jon was installed? If you have a photo from that day, we would love to see it.

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Lonnie has given this church more than thirty years, and the wreck took two of them back. The recovery was long, and it asked more of him than he has ever let on. While he was away, the church kept going. It grew.

Coming back to something you built and finding it has gone on without you is one of the hardest things ministry asks of anyone. Handing it on is harder still. Lonnie did both, and this entry should be read as the choice he made, not as something that happened to him.

A dispute arose over Lonnie's leadership, serious enough that the church asked two members of its Apostolic Council, Bill Johnson of Florida and Garner Tullis, to come and settle it. They flew in. They met with the board, they met with Lonnie, and they met with Jon. They did not impose a settlement. They affirmed Lonnie, released things as they stood, gave direction to the board, and asked the church to trust God and to trust its pastor. Then they went home.

After they left, it came apart. The board did not survive that season. Good people left. A worship leader went out to plant a church of their own. The congregation shrank, and the budget with it. Firelight Services, the Monday-night gatherings that had begun during Lonnie's recovery, were shut down in 2014. Nobody who lived through it would tell you they came out of it without regret, and nobody who left is a villain in this story; they gave this church years of their lives, and many of them are still our neighbors.

Jon offered to resign. The church could not afford him after so many people had gone, and he told Lonnie he did not want to be the reason New Life came apart. He went home expecting to be let go, and told Stacy, "I'll see you when I'm unemployed." A week later Lonnie called and asked him to take the torch. He said that when Jon offered to resign, he had heard a man who loved the church, and that he had always meant to hand it on. He was not willing to let a car accident be the thing that decided when.

In 1980 a pastor crossed the Atlantic twice so that New Life could be born in peace; in 2014 two more men got on planes for it. That is how this church has met its hardest seasons: it calls the people it trusts, and they come. Jon was ordained here the same year he was installed, and a new set of leaders came in alongside him, Tory among them. After Lonnie's decades in the pulpit, the church was now led by the man who had once served a group of New Life teenagers in Colorado without knowing which church had sent them.

2015 to 2024

The house on Elmwood

A church that means what it says needs somewhere to put people. In 2015 New Life bought a house on Elmwood Street NE as an outpost in the city, and the interns lived there. Tory, one of the leaders who came in alongside Jon in 2014, led the internship program for a year and a half. The house was sold in 2024, its work done.

Fill in the blank: did you live in the Elmwood house, or serve as an intern? What year did the program start, who was in that first group, and what did Tory's year and a half of leading it look like from the inside? Tell us your story.

2016

Haiti

The first New Life team went to Haiti in 2016. Mexico, Africa, Haiti: three continents from a church that once could not pay its pastor.

Fill in the blank: were you on that first team to Haiti? Who went with you, and what did you find there? Send us a photo.

2018

The Mast house next door

In 2018 the church bought the house beside the campus on Leffingwell Avenue NE, the Mast house, so called for the family who sold it. The campus that began as fourteen acres of raw ground now reached to the next lot.

This September

2026September

One September, two anniversaries

September 1981 is when this congregation became a church. September 1986 is when it walked into this building. Forty-five years and forty, in the same month, which means from here on we only have to remember one. There will be a service about the building, its history and where it goes next, then a picnic on the lawn and an ice cream truck. Someone else will set up the chairs this time.

Now

What Diane noticed

Set end to end, it is a long way from an apple orchard: a charter from 1971, a congregation from 1981, a building from 1986, two churches planted, teams sent to three continents, a school on the property, houses opened, and a very long list of people who set up chairs. But the thing that was handed down is not any of that. Diane Shields put her finger on it recently, laid up after surgery and listening to more preaching than most people hear in a year, struck by how few churches have gone all the way in with the Holy Spirit.

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When you're in the middle of it you think it's just not a big deal, everybody believes this, because it's so obvious. How could people not walk this way with the Lord? And then you get out of it and you find out, there just aren't all that many. I thought we were at least in the mainstream.Diane Shields

We were not in the mainstream. We still are not. That is the inheritance. It came down from a prayer camp at a Minnesota lake, through a village in Somerset, into an orchard on Michigan Street, across a school gymnasium, and into this building on Knapp Street, in the hands of people who did not think they were doing anything unusual. It was nearly set down once, and a pastor picked it back up on an aeroplane and told everybody what he had done. That is worth remembering too.