Sean C. Morgan
Craig Anderson first heard about Sweet Home in church.
Anderson, a career Army officer, attended a church in Warrenton, Va., where he met a man who had grown up here, U.S. Marine Scott Leonard.
“I remember Scott was telling me his dad, (Joe Leonard) was a pastor in a small town in Oregon,” Anderson said.
After a 20-year Army career in the Medical Service Corps, primarily in administration, Anderson entered the ministry and is now serving as a pastor at Elm Street Baptist Church. He and his family moved to Sweet Home in September from Tacoma, Wash.
Anderson grew up in Marietta, Okla., graduating from high school in 1983 and earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 1987.
During college, he served in the Army Reserves for three years, going active duty after graduation and becoming an officer in the Medical Service Corps. He primarily did administrative work in the 101st as a field medical officer. Anderson said that when he joined the Army, he had wanted to fly helicopters.
Later, the Army sent him to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned a master of science degree in information systems, and then he worked in hospital administration, spending his last 10 years at Ft. Lewis, outside Tacoma, Wash., in information technology. He retired from the Madigan Army Medical Center as chief information officer and a lieutenant colonel in 2007.
Immediately after retiring, he entered the Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Miss.
“I’ve been a Christian for some time,” Anderson said. “The last two years I was in the Army, I sensed a call.”
He put it off a bit, but then decided this was what God wanted him to do, he said. He could have stayed in the Army another eight years, but he realized it was time to switch careers.
His church in Tacoma, Providence Reformed Baptist, provided him support through seminary; and then when he returned, he served, for lack of a better term, a “pastoral internship,” Anderson said. In February of last year, the elders and deacons at Providence told him his internship was coming to an end and it was time to look for a church.
He immediately began looking at existing churches and the idea of planting churches as far away as Massachusetts, but he really liked the Pacific Northwest. He had been stationed here from 1992 to 1994 the first time and was happy to return for a 10-year stint.
He received a call from a Seattle-area pastor, Don Lindblad, who provides ministry training in Cuba and visits Elm Street Baptist each year. He found out Elm Street was looking for a man to succeed Ralph Anderegg, its longtime pastor, who was looking toward retirement.
Anderson came to Sweet Home and preached three times last summer before the church called him.
Anderson said his position is different from traditional churches. His primary function is “preaching pastor.” Anderegg remains an elder and still teaches. The church also has three other elders, but they are not “vocational elders,” who are supported financially by the church.
Elm Street views “elder,” “bishop” and “pastor” as synonyms, and the five are the spiritual leaders of the church. The deacons handle more mundane, administrative duties, such as the physical facilities and the needs of the congregation.
Anderson knew Elm Street Baptist and Sweet Home were right for him from the start.
“I grew up in a small town,” he said. “I have lived in cities for 26 years. I like the small-town culture. It’s beautiful here, the mountains and the trees.”
Sweet Home is just right for him and his family, he said. “The people here are really nice to me. The people here are very kind and very generous.”
Anderson came to Sweet Home with his wife, Jennifer, and one son, Wesley, a freshman at East Linn Christian Academy. They also have a son, David, who is a first lieutenant in the Air Force, and a daughter, Anna, who attends nursing school in Tacoma.
Anderson professed saving faith in Jesus Christ during college, he said. Though he grew up in the buckle of the Bible Belt, neither of his parents were Christians; and they didn’t attend church.
All of Anderson’s friends did though, he said, but they were just like him – partying and goofing off. He had no interest in Christianity.
During college, he met people who actually read the Bible and sang hymns because they enjoyed it, Anderson said. “At first, I thought they were really weird and strange.”
He became friendly with some of them, and they prayed for him.
He went to Bible study with a girl he liked, but he spent his time there watching his watch, Anderson said. He noticed, however, that they seemed to genuinely enjoy studying the Bible.
“I hadn’t seen any younger people my age doing that,” Anderson said. Growing up, the other kids went to church because their parents made them. “They were just as worldly as I was.”
Though he started out as a typical evangelical Christian, Anderson later became interested in reformed theology, which follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice of 16th-century French theologian John Calvin and other Reformation-era theologians, and later, the English Puritans.
Anderson was introduced to the reformed tradition after he started listening to a preacher named Joe Saul on the radio in the Tacoma area, he said. The Andersons decided to attend Saul’s church, the Believers Fellowship, which turned out essentially to be a Bible church.
There Anderson met a Presbyterian man who started telling him about the “doctrines of grace” and particularly, the “reformed doctrine of predestination,” which hold that human beings are born spiritually dead in sin and essentially hostile toward God, and are only saved because God chooses to grant them new life, the ability to trust in the saving work of Jesus Christ on their behalf. Though the “doctrines of grace” were recognized well before the Calvin, his name has become attached to them.
Anderson realized that Calvinism was present in the Bible. The Andersons would look up verses, and there it was leading to the natural question: “Why don’t we believe that?”
Anderson started reading more reformed and Puritan works and transitioned into reformed theology.
It’s that pursuit of knowledge he brings to the pulpit.
“I do expository preaching,” Anderson said. “I’ll preach the text. Right now, I’m going through a series, the prologue of John’s Gospel.”
The series covers the deity of Christ, the humanity of Christ and the introducer of Christ, John the Baptist, Anderson said.
He takes a theological approach, he said. “I think being a student of the Word is very important. I like the Puritan idea of the pastor theologian.”
Too often today, pastors become embroiled in administration, he said, and that’s not where he wants to focus his attention.
“I want people to think about the Scripture,” Anderson said. “I want them to think about Christ.”