Scott Swanson
Sweet Home’s been heavy on Jim Corley’s mind for years – nearly 20, in fact.
So now, at age 78, he’s in a position to really do something about it.
Corley has been interim pastor at the Sweet Home Evangelical Church since his predecessor, Brian Hotrum, stepped down earlier this fall to become superintendent of the denomination’s Pacific Conference.
This isn’t new territory for Corley, though. In fact, Sweet Home is simply where he has wanted to return, he said. But getting here involved a lengthy process with some unusual twists.
Corley’s association with the community began in 1968 when he married a local girl, Lynetta McLain, in the Crawfordsville church (now Crawfordsville Community Chapel), whom he met while studying at Simpson Bible College, then located in San Francisco.
“We’ve been in Oregon, because of her roots,” he said. “In 1971 we lived on Brush Creek Road.”
He was the “volunteer youth guy” at the Crawfordsville church, selling life insurance and then working at Permaneer wood products firm, when then-Crawfordsville Pastor Paul Poe convinced him to go to seminary.
“Even though the youth thing was thriving with me doing it, Paul pushed me out the door to seminary three times,” Corley said.
“He said, ‘You ought to go to seminary,’ and I said, ‘I don’t want to go back to school.'”
He did, however, winding up at the Western Evangelical Seminary in Portland, connected with the denomination in which he now is ministering.
Corley was raised in Southern California “in a poor, drinking-class family,” he said. After high school, an industrial accident put him in a hospital.
“I said, ‘God, if you’re trying to get my attention, I’m listening,'” he recalled.
But that, too, was a process.
He ended up at Simpson after, following his discharge from the hospital, he went to church and met some young men who were attending the college and returning for the spring semester in January. “Why don’t you go with us?” they asked.
So Corley applied, made the trip north with his new acquaintances and was accepted “on academic probation because of my stellar academic record in high school.”
Simpson being a Christian college, he’d checked the box on the application that asked whether he was a Christian. But Corley said he started having doubts about the reality of his faith.
“I started going to school with all those dedicated Christians, and I thought, ‘If these people are Christians, I don’t think I’m one,'” he recalled.
He finished the semester and returned home, not planning to go back. But during the summer, he was truly converted.
“When it was time to go back to school,” he said, “I went.”
But here he was now, headed to seminary, and Poe arranged a position for him at the Canby Alliance Church, which was then a member of the same Christian Missionary Alliance denomination as the Crawfordsville church. In Canby, Corley served as a youth pastor and then as associate pastor.
Ever witty, he asked the interviewers in Canby, “CMA, isn’t that like acne spelled sideways?” Corley recalled, laughing. “One of the guys responded, ‘CMA stands for Christ Might Approve.’ I said, ‘Yes, exactly.’”
Most of Corley’s ministry experience has been in communities similar in size to Sweet Home.
After five years in Canby, he moved to Chehalis, Wash., where he stayed seven years.
“I managed to split that church within three years and I told the district superintendent, ‘I’ve made a mess of this. I want to leave,’ and he said, ‘Sure, you can leave as soon as you fix it.’
“Every church has people who are new and the people who have been there a while, the pioneers versus the settlers. I tended to marginalize the pioneers and they didn’t like it.”
He did move on, to Dayton, Ohio, where he served 11 years, eventually as executive pastor.
The Corleys had reached the point where they wanted to return to the West and an opportunity arose in Tucson, Ariz., with “two churches that were not doing well and had merged,” he said. “The opportunity to start something new sounded inviting,” he said. “We were ready to move and we prayed that God was guiding us. In retrospect, I think he was, but it was painful.”
They spent 11 years in Tucson.
In 2006, the Corleys moved to Brownsville to take care of Lynetta’s father after the death of her mother.
During that period they got involved in an organization called International Teams, traveling to Russia where they served as non-residential missionaries, training local church leaders and doing work with Central Asian Muslims.
“I got very involved in Muslim outreach,” Corley said, noting that there are “millions” of Central Asian Muslims in Russia.
“On Ramadan, you see 100,000 Muslim men in the street in Moscow, bowing down. People were shocked.”
The outreach effort involved inviting evangelical churches to minister to their Muslim neighbors through social and cultural outreach, he said.
Over the years Corley had also started writing for Christian magazines and had published three books, the first called “Shadowing Jesus,” followed by a children’s story, “Hurley, the Redneck Shepherd.”
“My grandparents were from the Ozarks. So it seemed like a good idea” to tell the story of a shepherd with a mullet and a Southern drawl. “It was fun.”
After moving to the area, he taught at Eugene Bible College and he’s currently co-teaching an online course, “Writing for Publication,” with prolific author Joel Comiskey.
Shortly after serving as an interim pastor at River of Life Fellowship in Sweet Home, some six years ago the Corleys decided to purchase a “fixer-upper” in Sweet Home, where both their daughters live.
The Corleys have four children, oldest son Lance, who lives in Kenosha, Wis., and is a team leader with New Generations, an organization that aims to plant churches in places where there is little or no Christian presence; daughter Lagea Mull, who is executive director of Sweet Home Chamber of Commerce, daughter Susan Coleman, who is a member of the Sweet Home City Council and works as an executive assistant for BiblicalTraining.org, a nonprofit online organization that provides seminary-level training for Christian leaders and laypeople; and Jason, who lives in Chandler, Ariz., and serves as director of operations for New Generations.
They have 16 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
“So of all the things the Bible tells us to do, we can confidently check off ‘be fruitful,’” Corley joked.
The Corleys had purchased a home “dirt cheap” in the Phoenix area and had been summering in Sweet Home, while spending the rest of the year in Arizona.
But despite that development, Jim Corley said he had a longstanding lingering “impression” that they needed to move to Sweet Home permanently.
Quoting the Lord’s Prayer in the Bible (Matthew 6:9-13), he said, “I’ve been praying all those summers, and in between, that the kingdom of heaven would come to Sweet Home. I pray that God’s will would be done in Sweet Home as it is in heaven.”
Getting here was an unusual process, he said.
As early as 2006, while in Tucson, he experienced a recurring “thought in my head that was not my own, which was, ‘Step in the river and I will open the way.’ It was so bizarre that I wrote it down.”
Weeks later, he was at a family gathering in Brownsville where a “shirttail relative” related how he was “so glad God told me to sell my farm equipment, because the price of our crops just plummeted. Otherwise, I’d be broke.’”
That got Corley’s attention.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. How did God tell you? Was it a friend? Your wife? Was it skywriting? Was it a neon sign on the side of a chartreuse ’57 Chevy, or was it a thought in your head you knew wasn’t your own?’”
The relative responded that it was the latter.
They got together later, Corley said, and in the course of that conversation his relative said, “Before I go, Jim, I just feel like I need to tell you something. I don’t know what it means, and I don’t know if it means anything to you, but I believe God’s telling me to tell you to step in the river and taste.”
“When he said, ‘step in the river,’ all the little hairs on my neck stood up because I had thought I might be slipping,” Corley recalled. “I had told nobody – my wife, or anybody. So this happened. This was coming out of the blue.”
Three weeks later he was with his son Lance and related the story.
“My oldest son’s eyes got big as saucers and he said, ‘Dad, I just got back from a conference in Toronto and the theme of the conference was “Step in the River.”’”
A few weeks later, Corleyheard another of those thoughts: “Quit your job and sell your house.”
“I’m like, ‘God, I love my house,’” he said. “‘I’ve been working for years to get the yard just the way I want it. I really like it. I love what I’m doing at the church. And I don’t wanna. I’m happy here. If I tell Lynetta that, she’ll think I’m crazy.’”
But the thought kept returning. So finally he told his wife.
“She did think I was crazy.”
While all this was happening, he said, they were in Sweet Home, preparing to winter in Tucson. Two days before they were scheduled to depart, early in the fall, he heard from Brian Hotrum.
“He said, ‘Hey, I’ve just been promoted to district superintendent. We need an interim (pastor). It’ll be kinda like a glorified pulpit supply. They need you to preach on Sunday and be at the office one day a week. Would you consider it?’
“And I’m like, ‘Oh, this feels like God’s fingerprints are all over that. So yes.’” “So here I am. ‘Somebody asked me, how long are you going to be doing this?’ And I said, ‘How long is the rope?’”
Having lived in the area for a while, Corley said he sees challenges in the community that he’d like to address.
One is the homeless situation.
“I’m just stunned that, with the number of Christians in this town, that the problem is where it’s at.”
Another is Sweet Home’s “self-perception,” he said.
“The rest of the county may think of Sweet Home as a logging town and a tough place, and why would you want to live there? I’ve heard that kind of talk. But I’m hearing it more often here in Sweet Home; it’s more like what my grandpa would call a ‘hangdog attitude.’
“I’ve had people ask me why I would want to live here. It’s a beautiful place and I think God wants to do stuff here.”