Unanticipated Impact

Ilene Sanders was just days old when she first attended Beaverton Christian Church in Oregon. Her mother was a founding member, and Ilene was highly involved throughout her youth.

Then in high school, she met Bob.

“On our third date, I told him, ‘You can come to my house for dinner on Sunday if you come to church with me first,’” she recalled.

And that’s how Ilene’s husband, Bob, became a Christian. He was baptized at Beaverton and began participating in the church. Years later, Bob served as a student minister at Beaverton while he was in college.

“He came home from there saying, ‘I think I want to be a minister.’ And then he was in ministry for 60 years.”—Ilene Sanders

“Our youth group entered a contest put on by the Christian Standard to get the most new kids coming to youth group,” Ilene said. “Bob took his car out and picked up kids all over the place, and we became one of the fastest growing youth groups in the United States.”

Bob won a trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the national convention put on by the interdenominational Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor.

“He sat at the table with Billy Graham,” Ilene said. “He came home from there saying, ‘I think I want to be a minister.’ And then he was in ministry for 60 years.”

New Life in Ministry

Bob was tenacious and passionate from the beginning, but Ilene fondly remarks that he was not a particularly gifted speaker at first.

“Preaching was all very new to him. I always called him a country bumpkin. His English was very poor,” Ilene laughed. “So I would sit and listen to his sermons and take notes of all the mistakes he made. Then I’d wait until after dinner on Sunday to hit him with his corrections.”

Committed to his new path as a minister, Bob started attending school at Puget Sound College of the Bible—which, at the time, was so small it met out of a church office in West Seattle.

“Bob was the first full-time student of Puget Sound College of the Bible, and my grandson was in the last graduating class before it closed,” Ilene said. “That’s always been a precious thing to me.”

 

Image above: Bob (left) and Ilene (right) 

 

While Bob was convinced he wanted to be a minister, by his final week at the Bible college, he and Ilene still did not know where God was calling them to serve.

“The week that Bob was graduating, he was coming down the stairs of the college, and the president was in his office,” Ilene recalled. “He called Bob in and said, ‘I was just writing to these people in Grande Prairie to tell them I didn’t have anybody to suggest for their ministry—would you be interested?’”

When Bob got home late that night, he asked Ilene, “How would you like to go to Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada?”

“I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth,” she said. “But I won’t promise I’ll stay there!”

Ministry Across the Border

Ilene was pregnant, and Alberta was more than 12 hours away if they drove. Instead of having her cram into the car with all their belongings, Bob drove and Ilene flew alone into Canada. Despite living so close, neither of them had ever set foot across the northern U.S. border.

“What I have trusted in and invested in is accomplishing exactly what I wanted it to accomplish.”—Ilene Sanders

With a new baby on the way, Ilene was not left to fend for herself.

“I was met by the folks there that became our dear, loving family.”

Bob served as a pastor in Grande Prairie for five years, and they had three children there. Throughout that time, their home church in Oregon never forgot them.

“Beaverton was our main support there,” Ilene said. “We wrote a monthly letter to them, and they read it to the congregation and then took an offering for us. We never knew how much we were going to get. But my husband knew how to live on a little money.”

Investment Gets Personal

Over the course of Bob’s 60 years of ministry, he and Ilene planted a church in Beaverton, continuing the tradition Ilene’s mother began. Somerset Christian Church was established in 1971, and the church is still meeting today.

Ilene recently revisited her memories of their time in Beaverton when she encountered our story about Beaverton’s relationship with Willamette Christian Church. As a CDF investor, she was amazed to learn that her first church—a church that had invested in her ministry—had benefited from her investment.

She has invested with CDF for years and believed in the mission, but here Ilene was face to face with a personal picture of what her investment was doing for churches.

“It’s very satisfying,” she said. “What I have trusted in and invested in is accomplishing exactly what I wanted it to accomplish.”

When you invest with CDF, you are not just growing the financial resources God has given you—you are leaving a legacy that lasts.