This article appeared in the Minnesota Christian Chronicle on December 7, 2002

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Over 40 Years Later, Lowell Lundstrom is Still Preaching the Gospel Message

By Julie Saffrin

Over 40 Years Later, Lundstrom Is Still Preaching The Gospel Message

Celebration Church's country Christmas extravaganza takes Senior Pastor Lowell Lundstrom back to his roots near Sisseton, South Dakota, to the town of Peever. "As a young boy I walked my father's farm fields on Sunday mornings and saw the good people going to church. I would look up at the heavens and say, 'Oh God, I wish I could know you.'"

A seed was planted a year later when Lundstrom was given a maroon Gideon Bible in a one-room schoolhouse when he was ten. "I went home and felt like I had a piece of God in my hands," he says.

Later his grandmother gave him a storybook about Jesus. "I read how He died for my sins," Lundstrom says. "I cried so hard my folks came into the room and asked what was wrong, because none of our family was saved." Lundstrom cried himself to sleep that night. "It was the Lord touching my heart."

When Lundstrom was in the seventh grade he got into an argument with an eighth grade girl. "She told me all the things she could do and I told her all the things I could do." The girl told him she crocheted. Lundstrom, not wanting to be outdone, made up a lie and told her he played the guitar. "The girl told me, 'I'm coming over on Saturday night to hear you play.'"

Lundstrom practiced all week to learn "Goodnight, Irene." Saturday night came and he was ready. The girl never showed up. But learning the guitar changed Lundstrom's life. "It was so much fun, I just kept on."

Lundstrom formed a band at age 13; using Grand Ole Opry legends like Hank Snow, Faron Young, and Marty Robbins for role models. At the age of 15 he won a talent contest. With his good looks, charming humor, and musical ability, he beat the competition, one of which was a young woman named Connie Brown.

He formed another band, the Rhythm-airs, inviting Connie to join them once she learned the guitar, which he taught her to play, and the rock-a-billy band became popular on the prairie. The two soon became a couple. "On my second date with Connie I told her it was my goal to be either a number one country entertainer or a minister. I wasn't even a Christian. Where that came from I don't know."

One night he came home from a church meeting. "My father said my face shined like a 200-watt light bulb," Lundstrom says. The elder Lundstrom wanted to pin down his son about his faith. Lundstrom said, "Dad, I don't know anything about the Bible because we never read it. Here's what we'll do. You ask me any question you want and I'll open up the Bible and the answer will be there."

His father's first question was, "How do you know there is a God?" Lundstrom opened the Bible and it said, "The fool has said in his heart there is no God." For an hour the questions continued and scripture answers were revealed to Lundstrom and his father. Within two weeks, his parents and two brothers, Larry and Leon, were converted.

Lundstrom and Brown married in June 1957 and together started Bible school that fall at Trinity Bible College in Ellendale, North Dakota. Lundstrom finished his degree at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, where Jim Bakker was a classmate.

Upon graduation, the newlyweds purchased a Nash Rambler and began their ministry, a blend of music and sermons, traveling to churches across the country, often sleeping in their car between meetings. "We didn't have enough money to buy birdseed for a cuckoo clock," Lundstrom says in My Home, the Highway, by Connie Lundstrom. They recorded an album, the first of 62, in 1961.

Lundstrom's brother, Larry, joined them and they became the Lundstrom Trio, traveling four to six months at a time, salt-of-the-earth people, winning souls for Christ.

A Baptist minister in Mitchell, South Dakota donated the $60 necessary to get the group on the airwaves. "Message for America" eventually landed on KXEL, a 50,000-watt station in Waterloo, Iowa. This became the start of a network of 150 stations across the U.S. and Canada that broadcast the weekly program.

As the Lundstrom ministry grew, so did the family. Larry married and the brothers' families were immersed in the ministry. The Lundstroms preached 300 nights a year.

"We went to over a thousand churches in ten years," Lundstrom says. "Then we spent another 30 years in auditoriums and arenas with cooperative crusades like the Billy-Graham type. Throughout the week we'd have crowds of 35,000 to 45,000 people."

His daughter Londa says, "When Dad said, 'I think the Lord would have me start a church one day,' we kids were like, 'we know you're nuts and losing your mind.' But he would just, every now and then, bring it up and, now, well, here we are!"

Celebration Church is situated on 23 acres with 1,200 in weekly attendance, all headed by a man who once roamed the fields on Sunday mornings.

"The night Lowell and I got saved," Connie writes in her book, "[Lowell's] first words were 'Wait till everyone hears about this!' Telling all people about Jesus has been his all-consuming, burning desire ever since. Every waking hour is spent with that goal and purpose in mind."

The buses may be sold off and the tent pegs driven into the hillside of Lakeville, but the humble highwayman, who logged a million miles on the road as a traveling evangelist, is still a hound for Heaven. Even the church bulletin states year-to-date salvations: 442 and counting. A half million is not enough. Lundstrom wants to double that figure.

From a booth in the renovated kitchen area of Celebration Church, Lundstrom looks out at I-35's concrete pavement, a place he called home for 40 years. "We will do anything we can to help more folks find the Lord."

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