Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Sweet Home Assembly Pastor Craig Lunde says he can see “how a broken window in a church can tell a story.” After years of helping churches in trouble get back on their feet, he should know.
Lunde moved to Sweet Home after starting on Feb. 1 as the new pastor at Sweet Home Assembly.
This community probably has two or three pastors struggling, he said. “We pray God will bless them. We want them to know that we love them. I’ve got a passion for people… struggling and hurting. My wife and I hate human suffering of any size and any kind.”
As far as his strategy for his own church is concerned, “I want church to be happy, or I don’t want to be there,” Lunde said. “Sunday morning should be most fun, exciting experience people have all week.”
Lunde is an expository preacher with an evangelistic flair, and he loves humor, nothing silly but rather directed humor.
He is compassionate, Lunde said, while his wife, Judy, tends to work behind the scenes, with strong administrative skills.
Lunde said he particularly likes the biblical passage John 17, in which he sees themes of unity, love, joy and the future of the church.
“I read John 17 every day,” Lunde said. He said he also frequently reads the book of Ephesians and the Apostle Paul’s pastoral epistles.
He pointed to a broken window in the Assembly church building and noted how that is like human suffering, something that can be fixed through the Word of God.
“I think it’s a crime of the highest nature” that there are people with disorders and problems that need healing, counseling and help, Lunde said. He wants to open his church to the community of Sweet Home and its pastors all the time to offer classes to teach people to deal with their problems, life issues such as alcohol, drugs or helping women who have had abortions deal with the resulting guilt – any issue where people need help.
“Developing areas of help is going to be a reason for this church to exist,” Lunde said. “I want to be a person who’s visionary. I see things we could do.”
He wants to develop it with other local ministers, he said. “I’m not after building my church. I’m after building the kingdom. I’d much rather build the kingdom of God.”
Lunde enjoys hunting, fishing, playing golf, cooking and reading great books.
He has three grown children who are all “living for God,” Lunde said.
Lunde was born and raised in Seattle, his father a Norwegian of Jewish extraction, a Hasidim, an ultra-conservative spiritually correct sect. His mother was a Catholic.
“Mom and Dad didn’t want to fight, so we went to a Lutheran church (the Norwegian state church),” Lunde said. He was an altar boy.
“When I was 8 years old, God spoke to my heart, speaking to me to be a pastor, and I ran from that like a crawdad from a trap,” Lunde said.
“I received Christ as my Savior at 22 from a life of partying,” Lunde said. “At 22, I was in bad trouble drinking. God’s been very, very good to me.”
After his conversion, he started attending Philadelphia Church in Seattle, an independent, conservative pentecostal church. There, people suggested he attend Bible college. He spent five years at Seattle Bible College.
His first assignment was youth pastor at Lincoln City Assembly of God. He spent three and a half years there before going to Brooks Assembly of God.
“I worked with Bob Snope, who was the epitome of kindness,” Lunde said. “I learned a lot from him.”
In 1979, he became pastor of Knappa Assembly of God in a logging community largely surrounded by a Boise Cascade tree farm and much like Sweet Home. There, the loggers called him “sky pilot.”
“I really loved it there,” Lunde said. “I love it here.”
He stayed there through 1985 before moving to Moscow, Idaho, to start a new church, Lunde said. His church in Moscow was filled with people who were “hurt or bleeding” from other churches, something that had become “a wonderful opportunity,” and the church grew.
He stayed there until family illness forced him to resign in 1988. He moved to Salem and rested, taking two years off from the ministry.
“I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pastor any more,” Lunde said. “I didn’t know if I had any more endurance for it.”
A man called him one day and told him something terrible was going on in his church, Lunde said. The church board had met the previous Saturday and voted to call Lunde as pastor. Lunde didn’t know anything about the church at the time.
He ended up in Shady Cove, between Roseburg and Crater Lake.
“That was a phenomenal experience for our family,” Lunde said. “We saw God do some things that were fabulous.”
He followed that up after roughly four years with a stint at Snohomish Assembly of God where he saw God take the church through a tremendous healing situation and re-establish a solid financial basis, Lunde said. He was there four years before taking a two-year sabbatical. He moved to Salem to attend George Fox University and earn a master’s degree in counseling.
He then went to Valley Christian Center in Milton-Freewater, Lunde said. “They had been through a horrifying mess. We were asked to go there and help facilitate a healing process.”
At the same time, Lunde’s father-in-law was dying, and he and his wife knew it would fall to them to go back to Salem and take care of him.
They returned, and Lunde pastured Keizer Faith Center, which epitomized a church in trouble. After he went there, he organized the church’s first board meeting in five years.
He was there through October 2004 when the church merged with Crossroads Christian Fellowship.
Lunde and family went to his wife’s sister’s house in Tucson, Ariz., he said. “We rested up and soaked up some sunshine. While down there, we really couldn’t be down there forever. When you’re a pastor, every inch of your heart thinks about that life.”
Lunde had sent a resume to Sweet Home Assembly some time earlier, and Sweet Home Assembly called him in Tucson, where he had been preaching and teaching but doing no pastoral work.
Seven months later, he got a call, and “we got the opportunity to visit and we absolutely love this church. They’d been through something. They’re over the top of the hill.”
His own experience prompts concern for other churches as well as his own. Lunde and his church pray for growth and healing in every church and in the community in Sweet Home weekly.
“We pray for every church in this town Sunday,” he said. “We pray for every pastor at every church and pray people will find Christ every Sunday.”