Sean C. Morgan
After going much of the year without a pastor, the Sweet Home New Hope Pentecostal Church of God welcomed Dennis Conner as its new pastor in mid-November.
The church organization is set to officially install him as pastor on Jan. 27.
“I’ve been in this 46 years, full- time,” Conner said. “I started off as a youth pastor in Roseburg, and we were quite successful.”
The program grew from eight young people to more than 100, he said.
Since then, his ministry has taken him through another three churches and two-year run as a traveling evangelist before reaching Sweet Home.
He has had many real-life experiences seeing God work in his own life as well as in others in miraculous ways, he said. “God is alive and working in wonderful ways.”
Conner pioneered a new church in Yreka, Calif., building a congregation of 70 to 80, he said. After two years there, he became pastor at a church in Hood River, serving Hood River and White Salmon, Wash.
He spent 23 years there before spending two years as a traveling evangelist, preaching in many churches on the West Coast.
He settled down in Campbell, Calif., where he was a pastor for 17 years, he said. “I don’t jump around much.”
“I just felt the Lord leading us back to the Northwest,” Conner said. “This came open, and I took it.”
Conner said that Protestant Christianity is divided into two camps with regard to miraculous spiritual gifts that occurred at Pentecost in the book of Acts in the Bible.
One he calls “cessationist,” Christians who believe in Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection, “but they don’t believe that miracles continue to happen as they did in the book of Acts. They believe the gifts of the Spirit ceased.”
He’s in the other camp.
“I know they still exist because they happen through me quite often,” Conner said. He is quick to remind that it is not about him, but about God working through him and other Christians.
He said that he specifically has what is called the “Word of Knowledge,” noting that God speaks to people through the Bible, Holy Spirit, dreams, circumstances, signs and the Word of Knowledge.
He has seen it illustrated repeatedly throughout his life, he said. He saw it clearly illustrated when he ended up going to Yreka instead of taking a much easier position with an established church and salary in Oakview, Calif.
While serving in Roseburg, where he met and married his wife, Patricia, whom he also led to the Lord, he had the opportunity to become pastor at the church in Oakview where he had rededicated his life to God after high school.
He had grown up in nearby Ventura, Calif., where he attended college.
“I really came to the Lord in a Baptist church at a young age,” he said. “In my teen years, I really sowed my wild oats.”
After high school that changed when “the Lord got a hold of me,” when he was “baptized by the Holy Spirit,” Conner said. “Since that day, I have been experiencing the supernatural (God’s power).”
God’s voice is an internal audible voice or impressions, he said. Traveling to California from Roseburg, God told him he was going to start a church – not take the church in Oakview.
Like anyone else might, he questioned whether it was God talking to him, he said.
“Is this God or not? After 45 years, I think I’ve gotten better at it – and he’s still doing miracles.”
At the time, he was thinking about Yreka, Conner said. It was not a place where he would have any support. He had no connection to it.
His wife wasn’t so sure about it either.
The Bible warns of false prophets, he said, who really speak from the imagination.
So he took a cue from Gideon in Judges 6:36-40: “So Gideon said to God, ‘If You will save Israel by my hand as You have said – look, I shall put a fleece of wool on the threshing floor; if there is dew on the fleece only, and it is dry on all the ground, then I shall know that You will save Israel by my hand, as You have said.’ And it was so. When he rose early the next morning and squeezed the fleece together, he wrung the dew out of the fleece, a bowlful of water.
“Then Gideon said to God, ‘Do not be angry with me, but let me speak just once more: Let me test, I pray, just once more with the fleece; let it now be dry only on the fleece, but on all the ground let there be dew.’ And God did so that night. It was dry on the fleece only, but there was dew on all the ground.”
He devised his own plan, he said. “If you’re going to fleece God, make it hard.”
It cannot be something like seeing a white car, he said. That’s just going to happen.
He asked God to provide a sign, he said. He and his wife were staying the night in Red Bluff, Calif., where many of his family members lived.
He planned to stop in Yreka the following day, he said. If it were really God’s voice, he asked that a man dressed in red would come up to him and say something confirming that he was supposed to go to Yreka.
He noted that red is symbolic of a stop sign or traffic light. In keeping with that theme, he asked that if God had not sent him to Yreka, a man dressed in green would say something to indicate that it was not God who spoke to Conner.
“The next morning, we got up early,” Conner said. Yreka has four exits. His father was driving, and Conner needed to stop for allergy medication. His father asked him where he would like to pull off. Conner told him the second or third exit.
His dad pulled off at the first, Conner said. “There’s a truck with a road construction crew with at least five men dressed in red hats, red coats, red pants and red boots.”
He wondered at the color of their clothing since it’s usually orange, he said. “One of them walks around the car as my dad’s driving. He knocks on the window.”
He was holding a portable red stop sign in his hand, Conner said. “He looks at me and he says, ‘Sorry, you’re going to have to stay here for a bit.'”
He asked his wife if that was good enough. She said it was. They moved to Yreka. They didn’t know anyone. They had no support, nothing.
“Where God guides, He provides,” Conner said. “We stayed there two years.”
They rented an upstairs apartment for $125 per month, and another pastor and friend, Dave Manning, who has since been a pastor in Salem for decades, left his church in Washougal, Wash and spent a year in Yreka to help him start the church.
“Dave says, we’ve got to find a place to worship,” Conner said, but there wasn’t any place in town. Driving around, they found a building near Yreka in nearby Hawkinsville. It was being used part-time by a judo instructor.
The building was privately owned on U.S. Bureau of Land Management land. On the deed, its use was restricted to the furtherance of “Pentecostal festival.”
“I didn’t know what a Pentecostal festival was,” Conner said, but he thought of festival as a cele-bration and decided it fit. “I said, how much? (A BLM official) said, “100 bucks a month.”
Now in Sweet Home, he is in a church-building mode again.
“I have no doubt we could fill this place up,” Conner said.
The second Sunday, seven people attended, Conner said. Right now, attendance is running at about 12.
As he moves forward with the church, Conner said that the most important tenant of his faith is the cross: Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection.
“The farther you get away from the cross, the less understanding you’re going to have,” he said. “By grace are ye saved – to God be the glory.”
He has some difficulty picking his favorite scriptures, but he offered one, Romans 8:28:
“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”
He also looked to Mark 16:15-17:
“And He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues.'”
“I believe in experience,” Conner said. “Do I believe every experience is of God? No.”
But signs follow those who believe, he said. “What I’m trying to say is that’s what’s happened to me.”
The Conners have two daughters, Kelly Dillard of Arizona and Tawny Conner, who lives in Spain. They have two grandchildren, Brocki and Julian.
Services are 2:30 p.m. on Sundays for now, Conner said. The time will move to 11 a.m. later. A Wednesday evening service and Sunday School will be added later.
For more information, call the church at (541) 367-7949. The church is located at 640 9th Ave.