CedarCreek Church opened its sixth and latest campus in Oregon earlier this month, and, as he walked guests through the facility at a dedication and ribbon-cutting, Luke Shortridge, the church’s executive director of campuses, admitted that he was particularly excited for the new location.

He grew up attending services and youth activities there, he explained to tour-goers who peeked into the rooms where worshipers of all ages began gathering on Sunday.

If the Oregon campus is a homecoming for Mr. Shortridge, then it is, too, for CedarCreek Church. In moving into the same church facility where their founding pastor, Lee Powell, broke away in 1995, congregants are bringing a nearly 25-year story full circle.

“It feels a little it like a God story in the making,” Lead Pastor Ben Snyder said.

WATCH: CedarCreek Church opens Oregon campus

The story of how the nondenominational community came to open at 3450 Seaman Rd., Oregon, is entwined with the story of how another faith community came to leave it. That faith community was Grace Evangelical Church when Pastor Powell left with 25 members, including the family of a young Mr. Shortridge, and it later changed its name to New Harvest Christian Church.

The relationship between the two churches hasn’t always been easy, as Sharon McQueary came to understand as she led a struggling New Harvest toward its final service last year. An emotional split had given way to a lingering sense of bitterness to some in her congregation, she said, and years of spoken and unspoken efforts to distinguish themselves from the younger church.

What started as steps toward reconciliation last year, when Pastor McQueary was preparing to close the doors on an 18,000-square-foot space whose modest membership could no longer support it, developed into an arrangement that’s mutually beneficial.

CedarCreek, which had been looking to reach out into Oregon, premiered its Oregon campus on Sunday. The previous weekend, in a nearby worship space that’s much more manageable for their smaller congregation, Fireside Church held its own dedication.

“Out of the ashes of what was New Harvest,” Pastor McQueary said, “Fireside was birthed.”

Shared history

New Harvest Christian Church counts a 75-year history in the community, albeit under several names, Pastor McQueary said. It grew particularly prominent as Church of the Open Bible, with the Rev. Weldon Davis at the helm, beginning in the 1960s. The influential pastor oversaw its move in 1971 to its long-time location on Seaman Road in Oregon.

Pastor Davis’ Bible studies there were known to draw some 300 people, Carol Perry, 71, of Oregon, recalled; his weekend attendance at least doubled that number.

“He was packing them in,” said Ms. Perry, who began attending with her family in the 1970s.

When the Rev. Davis began to look toward retirement in the ‘90s, his intention was for another well-liked pastor to succeed him in the senior leadership position: Lee Powell.

But Mr. Powell, who recalled in a recent interview that he had shared that intention, began to feel called in a different direction. His inspiration, in large part, was the same “seeker-sensitive” approach that had piqued Pastor Davis’ interest at Grace Evangelical Church.

Seeker-sensitive communities put particular effort into reaching those who aren’t already church-goers, often approaching them in a way that might look secular on the surface — think contemporary music styles, rather than traditional hymns.

Linda Rossler, 60, another longtime member of the congregation, recalled that Grace Evangelical had been in conversation with Willow Creek Community Church, the Chicago-area megachurch that’s a model of seeker-sensitivity, under Pastor Davis. There were some in the congregation in favor of moving in that seeker-sensitive direction, she said, while others preferred to retain their more traditional model.

In CedarCreek Church, Pastor Powell said he looked to Willow Creek in mission, if not necessarily in size; he handed the reigns to Pastor Snyder in 2015.

“I felt like it would have been difficult for me to make the changes that I wanted to make,” he said, reflecting on his decision to break away from Grace Evangelical in 1995. “It’s very hard to change a church. Churches get set in their ways, and I totally understand that.”

Neither Ms. Perry, Ms. Rossler, nor Paul Magdich, 59, another longtime church member, said they recalled any animosity in the split, which had the blessing of Pastor Davis. But Pastor McQueary, who was not there at the time, can see in the church’s history its significance.

“In that moment, something forever shifted at Grace Evangelical,” she said. “The church began declining at that point.”

Pastor McQueary spent two years pouring over board minutes and other church records beginning in 2014, when the church and its denomination were undergoing an audit. The goal was to find a more sustainable way to manage a $750,000 debt, the result of a sanctuary renovation in the early 2000s, and an $8,000 monthly mortgage.

The congregation had dwindled to about 50 people at that point.

These records presented 1995 as a turning point, she said, after which membership began to decline and the congregation began to run through a series of pastors, some of whom did not leave on good terms. Pastor McQueary saw less tangible effects of the split, too.

“We spent a lot of time trying not to be somebody else. That somebody else was CedarCreek,” she said. “It was the heartbeat, the undertone that nobody even realized they were doing until we sit down and look at the choices that we’re making and why we’re making them.”

The church began renting about half of its 33,000-square-foot facility to British Petroleum around 2015, which took some financial pressure off the congregation. But when it became clear that leadership had no other option, financially, than to simply shut its doors, Pastor McQueary was resolute:

“If it’s going to die, and it’s going to die on my watch, then it’s going to die well,” she recalled telling her congregation. “And dying well means we die in repentance.”

To Pastor McQueary, that meant literally calling up a series of individuals, including former pastors, to apologize on behalf of the congregation. On her list: Lee Powell and Ben Snyder.

If there was any bitterness on the part of New Harvest, it wasn’t felt by CedarCreek, they said; each said they were surprised by her call. But for Pastor Snyder, who, like Pastor McQueary, was not even around when the split happened, it also presented an opportunity.

What did Pastor McQueary mean that her church was dying? Pastor Snyder recalled asking her.

Then he floated an idea: “I said, if this is not helpful, I’m not interested. But ... we have been interested in being in Oregon,” he recalled; if the space were to meet their specifications for a new campus, “could we explore the conversation?”

That conversation, of course, proved fruitful. Pastor McQueary recalls it as the moment that “a beautiful story began to be written”: On the day that New Harvest Christian Church intended to shut its doors for good, she said, it signed a purchase agreement with CedarCreek Church.

New beginnings

Today Campus Pastor Andy Rectenwald leads services at CedarCreek’s Oregon Campus at 9 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. Sundays. Less than two miles away, Pastor McQueary begins services at 10 a.m. at Fireside Church, 3140 Dustin Rd., Oregon, a new community that the pastor said draws from the best of New Harvest Christian Church.

The congregation meets in a former dental office, a 1,700-square-feet space that’s a fraction of just its former sanctuary and a much better fit for a group of about 50. With a dramatically lower mortgage, too, they can donate to the local, regional, and international causes that they couldn’t to the same extent when they were struggling to simply keep their lights on.

Fireside was able to purchase and renovate the space, in part, with the help of an insurance check that came in after a freak wind storm tore down a bell tower on their former property last year – a literal act of God, as identified by their insurance company.

A relationship that began with a phone call last year is expected to continue in shared ministry, with Fireside and CedarCreek each committed to working with and alongside each other in Oregon, Pastor McQueary and Pastor Snyder said. CedarCreek representatives attended the dedication at Fireside Church, and Pastor McQueary helped cut the ribbon at the Oregon campus – a visible nod to a shared history and future that Pastor Powell, for his part, thinks his late mentor would approve.

“That’s Weldon [Davis’] dream coming true,” he said, “now, rather than 10 or 15 years ago.”

Contact Nicki Gorny at ngorny@theblade.com or 419-724-6133.

First Published September 14, 2018, 6:00 p.m.