Service at Sykes' a place to find inspiration, family

Gaye Sheldon holds her head high when she walks these days.

Barb Lockhart, miraculously, simply walks.

They are a couple of regulars at a fledgling Kalispell church that meets around the café tables and along the lunch counter Sunday mornings at Sykes’.

Amid the energetic teachings, enthusiastic testimonies, intense prayers and mouth-watering home cooking after the service, both women have seen their share of everyday miracles among the growing number of people drawn to Harvest Fellowship.

It’s a casual place, where folks go by names like Papa Smurf and Steve the Baptist.

Burly gray-haired men in leather biker vests display their Harvest Fellowship colors proudly and dispense hugs generously.

The unchurched and the down-and-out and those who have spent their lives in church pews join seamlessly in Sunday-morning services and Wednesday-night Bible studies.

Through it all the guy who has taken on the role of pastor, Andy Widdifield of Whitefish, just can’t help but crack a big smile.

“This is so much fun,” he said at a recent service.

To Lockhart it’s the stuff of life, important enough to bundle against a howling blizzard one Sunday last winter and be pushed in her wheelchair so as not to miss a service.

“I see this place as family,” Lockhart said, dozens of prayers and a few short weeks after she left her wheelchair behind and began walking with only the aid of a cane. “Without this support, Mom wouldn’t get her treatment” for her stage 1 cancer.

Her mom’s story is a miracle in itself, a story of the serendipitous sale of a church member’s vehicle and donation of proceeds for the exact amount needed.

Sheldon’s is a story of transformation from depression to hope, all because she believed a friend’s insistence that God loves her — “I didn’t love myself,” she said later — and joined the Harvest Fellowship family.

Taken together, these stories of miracles and transformation are what Harvest Fellowship is all about.

And when it comes down to it, it’s all because a few men and women are making themselves available to do what they believe God intends in the Flathead.

“This ain’t about us,” Steve Benson said. “I’m humbled God would work through me, work through people willing to be used to meet a need that God sees needs to be met.”

During the 1990s, Benson, a 31-year retired military man and Christian Motorcyclists Association chapter officer in Billings, held Easter services and dinners for people who’d never felt comfortable in a church pew.

About three years after his move to the Flathead with his wife in 1999, he started the tradition here. For eight years, Benson and his fellow Harvest Riders CMA chapter members used the old downtown VFW club for the annual service and community meal.

But then came the day in February 2008 that Monty Christensen got his attention.

Benson and Christensen, a Flathead author and evangelist with a Harley and a past of his own, were riding home with other friends from a prison ministry trip to Shelby. The conversation turned to the Easter service.

“God says you’ve got to get out of your box,” Christensen told him.

It was startling. Far from being boxed in, Benson had thought “we were doing real good. We got 50 or 60 (every Easter). I thought that’s what we were supposed to do.”

Just the same, he took note.

“When Monty talks in that tone, you listen,” Benson said. “I knew what he meant: Once a year — is that a ministry or is that just to make you feel good?”

So Benson talked with Wayne Hegdahl. The two of them figured they could put together a service once a month. Hegdahl would make biscuits and gravy. Others pitched in — Christian Motorcyclists Association buddies, other guys from their home churches. Each one felt a love for their home church but also felt the pull of the Holy Spirit toward this new ministry, Benson and fellow organizer Gary Scheel said.

The local VFW post made it possible when they welcomed Harvest Fellowship to use their back-room meeting space in April 2008. People started coming on the fourth Sunday of the month, only a dozen or so at first.

That fall, they started meeting twice a month. More folks started attending. When they ran out of people to give their testimonies, Benson started teaching out of the Bible. People who lived across the street from an established church but never attended one started showing up at Harvest Fellowship.

“People would come in and they would feel at home and know they weren’t going to get judged,” fellow organizer Dennis McPherson said.

“It’s love in capital letters,” Scheel said. “We preach the word straight out of the book. They come on fire and there’s joy and people chattering and there’s life in there.”

Widdifield took over the pastoral post eight or 12 months ago, but only because his own pastor at the Whitefish Foursquare church had prepared him.

“Over the years he had let me teach from time to time,” Widdifield said, acknowledging the debt each of them owes to others who have poured into their lives. “Without his mentoring and discipleship over the years, this never would have happened.”

In September last year Harvest Fellowship started meeting weekly.

By late October, a change in VFW building-usage policies left them without a meeting place. Neither Benson nor Widdifield wasted a minute worrying. Even before the Wise family arranged to reopen the recently shuttered Sykes’, they opened their doors to the Sunday church family. Harvest Fellowship never missed a beat.

“I knew that if this was God’s ministry, He would find a place,” Widdifield said.

A lot of churches track their success by the number of people attending. By that measure, Harvest Fellowship is making an impact — from its founding at the VFW with a dozen attendees, to its early days at Sykes’ of perhaps 20 or 30 people, to the 70 or 75  who have been coming the past few weeks.

But the folks at Harvest have another way of counting. They pay attention to salvations, with church members huddled in prayer over new believers, and baptisms, often carried out in borrowed stock tanks.

Those salvations and baptisms are bringing more helping hands. One Sunday, Benson had a plan for his message but felt prompted to change at the last minute to a resurrection theme. That day, a new believer named Mary Ann was saved; now she volunteers to cook the after-service meal every other week.

“That’s the way this ministry operates,” he said. “When there’s a hole, God fills it.”

At the Valentine’s Day service last month, a lot of holes seemed to be filled.

Two people accepted Christ for the first time. Sheldon shared her story of transformation, of how she walks upright, of how she is “dancing with angels around me.” Lockhart composed and sang her newfound conviction in song, “He’ll Be There.” A chorus of “Happy Birthday” and lighted candles stuffed into glazed doughnuts marked birthdays for four men. Widdifield’s message from the eighth chapter of John urged those gathered to take the time to meet with God.

“No matter where you’ve been and what you’ve done,” he encouraged them, “there is no condemnation in Christ.”

As the morning progressed, the aroma of ribs and chicken and beans wafted over the crowd. One young man walked in midway through the service, headed straight for the kitchen; he was sent out with a bag of food and lots of love. After holy communion wrapped up the service, the rest of the crowd lined up to fill their plates and share their week’s stories with each other at the community tables.

And that, the organizers say, is where the real ministry starts to happen.

As he clears away chairs and sweeps floors, Widdifield still is grinning.

“It’s just overwhelming joy every time,” he said. “They leave renewed, they have fresh hope.”

Reflecting on another day, away from Sykes’, he expanded on that.

“It’s just a ministry that God started and is changing lives through it,” Widdifield said. “That’s why it’s so much fun on Sundays, because you’re watching people change when they see people love on them on conditionally.”

To find out more, contact harvestfellowship1@gmail.com or Harvest Fellowship, P.O. Box 1560, Kalispell MT 59903.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com