This past Sunday I was asked to give an hour-long presentation about the history of our community and its founder. Our church is spending an entire year focused on one of our core values: Refuge Over Rejection.

Our little Iowa community was envisioned, planned, and created by one amazing man, Hendrik Pieter Scholte. In the 1840s he was a pastor who desired to leave religious persecution in the Netherlands and create for his flock “A City of Refuge” on the Iowa prairie.

This is the story.

It is also a prompting of what this legacy means for our faith community seeking to be a “refuge” in our world today.