Storyline Summer 2018

Road Trip
FOLLOWING GOD’S STORYLINE
WRITTEN BY ERIK FREIBURGER
Growing up as a little boy my mother would read
to me from my children’s Bible and I would be
enamoured with the heroes of the Old Testament
while praying for the wisdom of Solomon and the strength
of Samson. As an adult I’ve come to recognize that life is not
always so full of glitz and glamour. In fact, the past year I’ve
felt less like the heroes in those stories and more like the
Ruths who have lost everything or the Rahabs left surrounded
by the rubble of a fallen empire and the ruins of life.
It’s here that First Alliance Church found me and
took me in as one of their own. And like those in my
childhood stories who were taken in by the people of God, I
find myself asking the questions: Who are these people and
where do they come from? Who is this God that they serve?
Taking up the adventurous call, I set out on a sort of FAC
Road Trip, following God’s Storyline as He has led the people
of FAC through the shared stories of long-time members
and the movements of its gathering places in the city. The
hope … to catch a glimpse of some of God’s amazing works
and revelations
through these
amazing people,
recognize and
acknowledge
some of the
greater struggles and failures they’ve faced, and embrace the
callings of where God may be calling FAC into the future of His
mission and Kingdom.
Sitting with Ken Humphries and Pat Worsley in the vast foyer
of today’s FAC, I was ecstatically inspired as Ken told the story
of his Mennonite parents being drawn into the small house
church community started by Gordon Skitch with a little less
than half a dozen people in a home just off the downtown
core on 13 th Avenue and 12 th Street in 1939. Just 80 years
ago the vision for FAC started with a handful of
dreamers who, despite the lack of approval from
the Alliance’s head office in New York, embraced
the Kingdom call to be a people here in the city of
Calgary.
A few years later, Ken remembers them moving into a building
off of 13 th Avenue and 8 th Street in 1941 (pictured left). While
trying to reach out to the military service men during the war,
he recalls digging the basement of the church using pick axes
and shovels, and hauling out the dirt and rocks with buckets and
their hands. It was through their tough work and these practical