Chapter One: How River of Hope began

River of Hope Church held its first worship service on Saturday night August 28th, 2004.  However, the idea for the church began long before that.  For several years Neil Thielke had been traveling through Grand Forks, North Dakota on his way to visit the church in Argyle, Minnesota.  It was during one of these trips that the vision to plant a church in Grand Forks first began to take form in his mind.  It remained dormant though for sometime.  The plants in Fargo, Cokato, and Grafton were demanding much time and the manpower in the Truebridge-Outfitters group was stretched to its maximum.

Then in the fall of 2003 he approached Jenn and I about leading a church plant in Grand Forks.  At first, the idea took us by surprise.  We didn't feel that we were in any position to begin a church since I still had 5 semesters of school left, and Jenn had just begun teaching at Moorhead High School.  And we certainly did not think we could plant a church 75 miles north of Fargo.  Neil assured us that he didn't expect us to move there immediately, nor did he intend for us to leave the church in Fargo to start a church in Grand Forks.  So we considered the option.

We considered it for a long time, nearly four months.  It was not until the Outfitters Conferance in February, 2004, that we responded to him with a resolute "yes".  It was at this point that things began to move quickly.  That same month when my parents came up for a visit, we took a scouting trip to Grand Forks with them to explore the land.

Then we began to put together a team to assist us.  After consulting Nathan Rooney and Neil, we asked Bill Royce and Aric Gjervold if they would join us in starting the church in Grand Forks.  Bill had suspected that we would ask him, and after wrestling with God on it for a while, he agreed to lead worship for us.  Aric had no peace in his spirit about joining and so he decided to pass.

About the same time Denver and Becky Missel, from the church in Argyle heard of our plans and decided to join the team.  It was very timely for them because the church in Argyle was just closing.  Most of that church was moving over to the new work in Grafton, but they had vision to go to Grand Forks instead.  This was confirmed in their hearts when they heard of the impending church plant.

The next step came in an exploratory meeting that we held at the University of North Dakota in the Student Union.  This was held on a May evening just before finals week and was attended by several of the Outfitters.

The purpose of this meeting was to see if there was any general interest in the community, particularly among the students, to begin a new church. Unfortunately, there was a large campus celebration going on at the same time  and so only one student stopped by briefly and no one showed up from the community.  There were however, several prophetic words given that encouraged us to be persistent in finding a door into the community.

Then in July, God began to formulate a new strategy in my heart.  The idea was to rent a storefront in downtown Grand Forks that had relatively high visibility and just start holding worship services there on Saturday nights.  I ran the idea past Neil, and he said to go ahead and look into it further.  So Jenn and I stopped in Grand Forks on a Sunday afternoon on our way from Grafton to Fargo and walked all around downtown Grand Forks.  We found that many spaces were for rent and so we wrote down phone numbers for about 8 places and then continued on our way to Fargo.  After making several phone calls we found that 2 spaces were in the price range that we were looking for and so we set up appointments to visit them.  One was far superior to the other and so we signed a lease for it and made plans for our first service on August 28^th, 2004.