To celebrate our 30th anniversary, we’re telling 30 stories of God’s faithfulness in and through Fellowship North. You can read all the stories here.
Well, years ago, we were doing YoungLife and we were taking kids camping, because we knew camping was great (and it was cheap). We camped at Devil’s Den, we camped at Mt. Magazine, we camped at Petit Jean. The only problem was, it seemed like every time we went, the people that ran the camping area would say – “maybe don’t come back.”
I mean, we were camping with 70 kids.
So we began to pray for a place to camp. A place to take kids, that wouldn’t cost too much, where they could hear about Jesus. We prayed for land.
One day, I got a phone call. This was in 1979. The man on the other end said, “I hear you’re looking for land. I’d like to give you some.” So we arranged a time and went up and looked at the land, and it was beautiful. There wasn’t anything there, no buildings except a falling down shack – just lots of trees and views of the Ozark mountains. No running water, no electricity.
We took the land, and over the years countless people have cleared land, built buildings, dug trenches and ran pipes for water…almost everything that is there now was built by a volunteer who loved that place.
And that’s how God gave us Castle Bluff!
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Today’s story was told by Craig Loibner.
Craig is a pastor at Fellowship North, he’s been a part of this church since the beginning. If you’d like to hear more about what it’s been like for the past 30 years, you should really listen to this.