Scott Swanson
Brian Hotrum has the Evangelical Church in his blood.
Hotrum, who has pastored the Sweet Home Evangelical Church for four years, is the son of an Evangelical pastor and the great-grandson of another.
Hotrum, 45, is the author of two books on the history of the denomination, the second of which, “The Pacific Conference Story: The History of the Evangelical Church in Oregon and Washington,” was released last week.
“I am not unbiased in my love for the Evangelical Church,” Hotrum states in the preface to the book.
Though Hotrum grew up in Spokane and Portland, his family has strong ties to east Linn County, he said.
In 1990 his father, Ron, began pastoring the Sodaville congregation, which had just constructed a new facility. Brian Hotrum was in college by then, but his younger brothers attended East Linn Christian Academy and the family started establishing roots in the community. Ron Hotrum stayed in the Lebanon area, where he has been involved in nursing home ministry “for a long time,” his son said, and attends the Sweet Home Evangelical Church.
They weren’t the first family members in the area, though. Hotrum’s great-grandfather on his paternal grandmother’s side was Archie Cleveland, who was an Evangelical pastor before moving to the Sweet Home area, where he served as a principal and teacher in local schools, including Liberty and Central Linn.
“All the old-timers know him,” Hotrum said of Cleveland, who died in 1994. “I hadn’t lived in Sweet Home, but I knew a lot about Sweet Home when I came here. It created a lot of goodwill when I came.”
Hotrum attended Hillcrest Christian College in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada and later earned a master’s degree from Bakke Graduate University in Seattle, which is how he began writing church history.
His first pastorate, 18 years ago, was at the Lebanon Evangelical Church, where he served from 1996-2003. He later ministered in Eugene, where his wife left him, leading to a “series of chaotic events.”
He taught for a while at Vennard College in Iowa and reconnected with a college friend from Canada who had been recently widowed. He and Donalyn married in 2010 and moved to Sweet Home with her two daughters.
His foray into Evangelical history began with Hotrum’s master’s thesis. He took on the task of writing what became his first book, “The Evangelical Story,” which was a “user-friendly history” for people involved in the churches.
He researched and interviewed old-timers in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the church had its original roots.
The Evangelical church is an off-shoot of the old Evangelical United Brethren, a movement closely associated with the early Methodist evangelists and circuit riders who ministered in the early frontier.
The early Brethren were almost exclusively German and essentially, Hotrum said, were German Methodists under a different name.
“It started out as a German Methodist church,” he said. “They still spoke German a lot up till World War I. When I went to college in Canada in the late 1980s, the church had an early service in German. The whole organizational structure came from the Methodist church.”
In the late 1960s, the Evangelical United Brethren church merged with the United Methodist church, but many churches, particularly in the Northwest where congregations had existed for some 150 years, balked, Hotrum said.
“The Evangelicals did not want to do that. Out here in Oregon, they started the Evangelical Church. The Evangelicals have stayed a lot more conservative. We really left that main-line formalism. We said, ‘We’re kind of tired of this.’”
The new conference was founded in 1968 at Jennings Lodge, a campground that had been purchased by the Evangelicals several years earlier and which was a hub of Northwest church activity. Later, Jennings Lodge housed students attending the nearby Western Evangelical Seminary for a number of decades.
“It was one of those landmark times,” Hotrum said of the church leaders’ decision to strike out on their own.
He said he and many other Evangelical members have warm feelings for Jennings Lodge, which he said is being sold this year.
“We’ve held camps and retreats there since they bought it 110 years ago,” he said. “That really was a center of Evangelical ministry in Oregon and Washington.”
Hotrum’s second book includes a foreword by John Sills, who pastored the Sweet Home Evangelical Church before he retired, and is dedicated to the memory of William and Mary Bauman, longtime members of the Sweet Home church.
Hotrum said he doesn’t expect big things from the book, but is simply telling the “stories of many people who pressed deeply into God as part of the ministry of the Pacific Conference.”
“It’s just a small denomination so it’s not going to be a best-seller,” he said. “But people enjoyed the first one.”