Sweet home South Dakota

Five Faces?
Originally uploaded by eandjtrygg.

(By Erik)

I promised I’d write more about my trip to South Dakota when I had time. I never really have enough time to do nearly as much writing as I’d like, so let me take this time (when I should be preparing to teach Sunday school tomorrow) to tell a little bit about the good folks at the Northern Hills Church of Christ.

The congregation of about 150 members meets in a nice, newly built facility between the towns of Spearfish and Belle Fourche in western South Dakota, just a few miles from the Wyoming border. It’s the latest church to be featured in the Chronicle’s ongoing series Churches That Work. Click here to read stories from the previous Churches That Work feature on the Southern Hills Church of Christ in Dallas.

Speaking of which, I think it’s funny that we featured the Southern Hills church in May and will feature the Northern Hills church in August. That’s a total coincidence. We didn’t even know the church in South Dakota was named Northern Hills. We just thought it was the Spearfish Church of Christ.

Which is an interesting part of the story. The church was in Spearfish back in 1998 when two missionaries from Oklahoma, Ken Tackett and Jerry Savage, moved to the area. They had been looking to do domestic church planting in the Northwest, but the small congregation in Spearfish contacted them during their search and basically gave them the Macedonian call: “Come up here and help us.”

After a few years of working with the church in Spearfish, the congregation merged with a small church in Belle Fourche and built a new building on a highway between the two towns. Now it’s arguably the largest congregation of Churches of Christ in the Dakotas — North and South. Not bad for a community with a combined population of less than 20,000!

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The Spearfish area itself is a picturesque paradise (which took me by surprise, as I’m more used to the less scenic, eastern part of the state — no offense to my grandma in Sioux Falls). Thousands of tourists visit Spearfish Canyon, drive the Needles Highway and visit the “Four Faces” along with the monument-in-progress to Crazy Horse.

If you’re familiar with the trend of Californians packing up and moving to Montana, well, it doesn’t stop there. Contractors are building million-dollar homes in western South Dakota. New ones are going up everywhere. Wagons East, I guess.

Oh, and there’s a little town nearby called Sturgis. Harley Davidson enthusiasts already are showing up there. I saw plenty of bikes during my brief visit. Ken Tackett told me to take the sound of one of the bikes, multiply it by about 10,000, and you’ve pretty much got an idea of what it will sound like there in a couple of months.

Many of Spearfish’s residents lament the annual bike rally, but everybody realizes it’s the backbone of the region’s economy. Some hotels open only for the two months around the August rally and then close for the rest of the year.

Bikers aside, what impressed me most about the visit was the sincerity and honesty of the people I met. I was told that interviews would be difficult and that people in South Dakota aren’t as open or as friendly as folks “down in the South.” I disagree. The South Dakotans I met were eager to talk about what God has done in their lives. A lot of them came from religious backgrounds where they didn’t study the Bible much, and they really like the “let’s look it up and talk about it” approach taken by the missionaries.

It’s an amazing and wonderful thing to see God working in the lives of so many people, far outside the Bible Belt as we know it. The church’s energy is contagious.

Ken Tackett took the photo of me at Rushmore, by the way. I thought it turned out really neat. You’ve gotta be a local to know how to take that shot! I stayed with the Tacketts during my visit. They were great hosts. Had a blast.