A miracle brought Steve Sorensen to Providence Christian Church.
The longtime pastor had spent much of his career ministering in the Great Plains and West, serving at churches in Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Missouri and Wyoming. But on Jan. 1, 2001, his grandson Tristan was born in Indiana with a deadly blood disease. The small child’s condition was precarious — at one point, he died and had to be resuscitated. But he lived, and two weeks later was able to go home.
Upon returning to his congregation in Laramie, Wyoming, church leaders offered him the opportunity to be closer to his grandson and family.
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“They told me, if your heart is still in Indiana because of what just happened, we will make you our interim pastor and release you,” Sorensen said. “They understood that my heart could be with my family. I thanked them for their wisdom, and that’s how I came to Providence Christian Church.”
After 48 years — including the past 18 years at Providence Christian Church — Sorensen is stepping down from the pulpit. The longtime minister officially retired following his final worship service on Aug. 9.
In a career as lengthy as his, Sorensen has too many memories to share. Even as he’s gotten older, he still has the love for ministry.
“Through it all, I’ve maintained a happy spirit. I expect things to not always go well, but I never lost the calling,” he said.
At the Bargersville home that he shares with his wife, LaVonne, Sorensen already looks at home in retirement. Sitting in the workshop he built in the backyard, the 71-year-old outlined what he planned to do over the coming years.
Together with LaVonne, who is also retired, they plan to spend more time with families, particularly their four grandchildren. Sorensen also wants to take more time to play with their two beloved dogs, Bear and Ashley. A pile of books are ready for his full attention now, as he wants to finish “hundreds” of them, he said.
“I just want to sit back now,” he said.
Despite his calling to be a minister, and subsequently giving his life to God, Sorensen had a crisis of faith as a young child. He was 5 years old in his hometown of Mason City, Iowa, when his pastor read a Bible story. The pastor mentioned that though he didn’t believe events actually happened as described in the Bible, there were moral lessons to take from it.
“At that very moment, I said the last thing in the world I’d ever be was a minister,” Sorensen said. “From that day, until the age of 8, I was an atheist.”
But Jesus continued to work through him, and as an 8-year-old, he came back to Christianity. His sister had asked him to go with her to vacation Bible school at their church. Through he didn’t want to, he agreed. During that week, his faith was rekindled.
“The pastor there, and the lay people who did the (vacation Bible school), not only showed great love, but actually believed every story they told,” he said.
In 1957, Sorensen again accepted Jesus Christ. That same year, he was called to be a minister, and he never strayed from that path. He turned around his approach to his schooling, going from an uninterested student to one of the best in his class. Sorensen graduated from high school, then attended college, earning his bachelor’s degree in ministry from Barclay College, where he was a named his class’ best student.
Following graduation, Sorensen was approached by the superintendent of the Kansas Yearly Meeting of Friends churches and offered a opportunity to preach in Friends churches while working on his graduate degree. In 1972, he was full-time pastor at Hesper Friends Church in Eudora, Kansas. That assignment lasted for two years, while Sorensen earned his master’s degree in religion from the University of Kansas.
While he worked on his doctorate at Luther Rice Seminary, he was pastor at another church, Riverton Friends Church.
Finally, with his degrees finished, he and LaVonne struck out on a massive undertaking — planting a church from scratch in his hometown of Mason City. Success would be difficult; Sorensen did the feasibility study on starting a church from scratch in the area, and found that the best church plants required 10 years or more of support.
With this plant, the Friends Church agreed to cover his salary for one year, and half of his salary the next. But the church would have to be self-supporting very quickly.
“We were going to try something that would be nearly impossible: to be self-supporting after two years,” Sorensen said. “I had four months to basically build a congregation.”
The church building was an old dairy barn that had been converted into a dance hall, restaurant and bar. With 13,500 square feet of space, much work had to be done to transition the structure to a worship space.
A great challenge was gathering the people who would truly make it a church. But quickly, a group of like-minded worshipers came together. When they first gathered in 1979 — at the local YWCA, since they could not move into the barn yet — just seven people showed up. Four of those people were Sorensen, his wife and their two children, Kris and Yvette.
Then the next week, there were 14 people who came. Week by week, the congregation grew, until the church went on to average 45 people at services each week. Eventually, Riverside Church averaged 105 worshipers.
“I was worried that first, and even the second Sunday. But God has a funny way of working,” Sorensen said. “When the world says, ‘No,’ often times God will say, ‘Yes.’”
Sorensen stayed at Riverside Church until 1988, and then transitioned along a series of different congregations over the next decade. He began a ministry with the Disciples of Christ faith in Iowa, then completed a short ministry in Oklahoma. While serving as pastor at First Christian Church in Trenton, Missouri from 1995 to 2000, he helped bridge a disagreement among older and younger leaders in the church about a potential building project.
Older members wanted install a cement parking lot at the church. Younger families thought the church should start a recreation center. The two sides had been at a stalemate for years and years when Sorensen arrived.
He offered a compromise.
“I suggested to an elder that, it takes a lot of faith to get the money to put cement in a parking lot, and it takes a lot of faith to get the money to get a recreation center. Wouldn’t you think it was take the same amount of faith to do the two things at once?” he said. “At the very next board meeting, that elder quoted what I told him, and made a motion to do the parking lot and recreation center as one project. We had a near-unanimous vote.”
Sorensen was pastor at Laramie First Christian Church in Wyoming when his grandson’s traumatic birth called him to Indiana. He started as pastor at Providence Christian Church, located just south of Bargersville, on Oct. 1, 2001.
Mike Clark was chairman of the board at the church at the time, and helped Sorensen move into the parsonage. The church had offered to pay for a moving truck to bring his belongings from Wyoming to Indiana, but Sorensen had said he could rent a truck and do it for a lot less.
That was an indication of how his ministry would unfold over his time at Providence, Clark said.
“He was always very prudent. He helped us grow financially as a church as well as spiritually,” he said.
Providence Christian Church is a historic church founded in 1838, and had been a rock for worshipers in west-central Johnson County for more than 180 years. Throughout his tenure, Sorensen helped lead a series of improvements and major projects: adding 5 acres of land, building a shelter house, a playground addition, gazebo and baseball diamond.
Under his direction, the church also grew to impact the community, both locally and globally. Providence took three mission trips to Jamaica, building four homes for residents there that were given to them mortgage-free.
“He was an incredible figure for us. Not that there weren’t issues over the years, but he always walked us through those issues together,” Clark said. “He’s very compassionate, very caring.”
He also helped those around him grow in their spirituality, and find the best ways to make an impact on the world in a positive way.
“If I tried to do anything, it was to discover the gifts and talents of other people,” Sorensen said. “You try to get people to do what they have talent to do.”
Sorensen’s own son, Kris, also followed the path towards ministry. While attending college at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, he was called to be a pastor. His father’s set the example of how to approach a congregation, something Kris Sorensen took to heart.
“I kind of had a front-row seat to watch his pastoral heart, the way he’d care for people,” said Kris Sorensen, who is lead pastor at Brookville Road Community Church in New Palestine. “I tell people that he’s really a shepherd. He really cares for people, doing home visits and hospital visits, caring for people who are grieving or discouraged. So really saw a gentle way of caring for people, and that’s helped shape my ministry as well.”
On his final worship service as pastor, the congregation at Providence Christian Church came together to celebrate Sorensen with a tribute. The service leaned heavily on his family, as well as those he had mentored in the past.
His son-in-law, Ron Oren, a pastor at First Christian Church (Disciples) in Danville, and Kris Sorensen delivered special messages during the ceremony.
“Going into it, I knew that I’d be choked up, because I love my dad and I enjoyed watching and taking part in his ministry. It was kind of like a bookend moment, so it was emotional,” Kris Sorensen said.
Sorensen’s grandchilden read prayers or played music. Clark and his wife Connie, who was also an elder and evangelism chairperson at Providence Christian Church, participated in the service as well.
The event was a fitting close to his nearly 50 years as a minister.
“It was a fabulous celebration. I was totally surprised by how it came together,” he said.
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Steve Sorensen
Home: Bargersville
Age: 70
Occupation: Retired minister, Providence Christian Church
Family: Wife LaVonne; children Kris and Yvette; grandchildren Tristan, Tiffany, Tegan and Shelby
Education: Bachelor’s degree in ministry, Barclay College; master’s degree, University of Kansas; doctorate of ministry, Luther Rice Seminary
Career:
- Hesper Friends Church, Eudora, Kansas, 1972-1974
- Riverton Friends Church, Riverton, Kansas, 1974-1979
- Riverside Church, Mason City, Iowa, 1979-1988
- Disciples of Christ, Charles City and Nora Springs, Iowa, 1988-1993
- First Christian Church, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 1993-1995
- First Christian Church, Trenton, Missouri, 1995-2000
- Laramie First Christian Church, Laramie, Wyoming, 2000-2001
- Providence Christian Church, Bargersville, 2001-2020
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