What Hope Is
Webster’s Dictionary defines hope as “a wish or desire accompanied by confident expectation of its fulfillment.” At Hope Lutheran Church, we confidently await the fulfillment of God’s will and continually renew our lives through the love of Jesus Christ. We also believe our faith in Jesus lights the way for a world transformed by God’s grace.
What Hope Does
We are committed to the well-being of our church, our neighborhood, the metro area and the world. Most of all, we are committed to God and to serving God’s people in all we do. We gather to worship God and celebrate God’s presence among us each Sunday. We also reach out to our neighborhood by hosting and participating in a number of activities, including:
- Vacation Bible School
- Outdoor Worship and Picnic
- “Music on the Blacktop” Block Party
- White Bear Avenue Parade
      White Bear Avenue Parade - Hope's Float!
Click on the thumbnail below to enlarge the image.
Hope is also an active member of ISAIAH, a faith-based organization uniting local congregations to help transform our community by addressing social, economic and racial issues
Hope is a church where “everybody knows your name,” seeking to create a safer, stronger neighborhood where everybody knows your name.
The Historical Roots of Hope Lutheran Church
Hope Church was born out a vision for church growth at Grace Lutheran Church which was a couple of miles to the south on White Bear Avenue. They envisioned a potentially growing church community for those who lived in the Hayden Heights neighborhood. In 1921, Hayden Heights was a sparsely populated but growing residential community that consisted of open fields, dirt roads and scattered new post-WWI homes. A few Model T’s rumbled down the road. The new homeowners in the area were mostly second and third generation descendants of German and Scandinavian emigrants.
So in 1921, leaders of the Buffalo Synod met in Lake Elmo together with the leaders of Grace Lutheran Church and plans were set to raise money, buy land and erect a modest church building for worship. In 1922 the church was started and was named Hope English Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Buffalo Synod. The Buffalo Synod was named after the area in upstate New York where Prussian emigrants came together in the early 1800’s to form their church in America. Hope has the word English placed in its name because it was to be an English language church and not German speaking as was usually the case among early Buffalo Synod churches. Around 1930 Hope became part of the old American Lutheran Church (ALC) which split off from the Buffalo Synod to better reflect a broader American national spirit (This is not the Norwegian heritage ALC that merged to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ((ELCA)) in the 1980’s). Then, sometime around the late 1950’s Hope did join the ALC and in the late 1980’s joined the merged ELCA.
In its early years, the church struggled with membership and finances to survive but continued to grow throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s. By the late 1950’s, the Sunday School was bursting at its seams and so a classroom building was constructed on Ivy for the needed additional space and the program was expanded into classes off site in the Roosevelt community off Maryland Avenue. Hope held three services each Sunday and reached into the lives of many hundreds of people during that time. I’m told there were 500 children in Sunday School and 100 volunteer teachers and support people at the time.
Today those Sunday School children themselves have grandchildren. These young people have grown up and migrated to the suburbs and now for the most part no longer feed the membership rolls of Hope Church as had been the case in the past. Meanwhile a few other churches have grown to absorb some of our neighbors. Today, those churches and we work to be centers for community and to be places to tell the story of Jesus.
The mission field for Hope Church continues and the opportunity to be the servant church in our neighborhood is greater than ever. We are surrounded with a delightful mix of cultural ethnicity from which we can learn and appreciate. So today our mission field is open as we think anew about how we approach being the servant church to our neighbors and to how we express Christ in our lives. We welcome each of you to be part of Hope’s community; that we may be part of one another – and be the Servant Church. Thanks be to God.
— Larry Cowan, Evangelism Chair
|
