New Wisconsin Faith Community Takes Shape

Sept. 30, 2008 – The recently established Fond du Lac Christian Fellowship traces its roots to three couples ministering through a divorce-care program.

“We want to establish an understanding that church isn’t just a place to attend, it’s a center for life,” explains Kevin Edlefson, who is starting the new Christian Reformed Home Missions-funded church in Fond du Lac, Wisc. 

“We want faith to connect with people’s whole lives, to spill out in service. We already see it happening on a daily basis. God is faithful.”

Edlefson and his wife, Amy, formed the foundation of this new faith community by connecting with some “very broken” divorced people over the past year. Along the way, they started a Saturday night Bible study, and the community began to take shape. Through the Saturday Bible study, they say, they have begun laying a solid biblical foundation for the church.

Kevin Edlefson says the small launch team will be “diving into the Word and listening to God tell us his plan and purpose.” Later in October, the Edlefsons and the launch team will be attending FirstSteps, a church planting retreat at the Green Lake Conference Center in Green Lake, Wisconsin.

Kevin Edlefson’s call to begin a new and different church community goes back to his days at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, where he participated in campus ministry. “Some amazing things were happening in Hope’s campus ministries,” he explains. “It really drew me in and moved me along.”

A summer discipleship program, a mission trip to India, and an internship with a chaplain staff moved him further down the road toward ministry. Then, a Reformed Church in America congregation in Kalamazoo, Michigan, hired him as the Director of Creative Ministries and Spiritual Formation, providing what he says was “an extraordinary opportunity to explore my sense of call.”

That exploration helped him tune in to the call to plant a church community in Fond du Lac. “We had offers and options, places we thought might be a better ‘fit’ for us, but Fond du Lac was always on the back burner, simmering away,” he says. “God was persistent, and eventually we saw what he’d seen for us all along.”

-Ben Van Houten, Christian Reformed Home Missions