Second in a series

Re “He Is Making a Difference in People’s Lives”

[img]2521|exact|||no_popup[/img]
Pastor Kladnik, his wife Grace and daughter Polly.

For his three separate missions to Australia as a young man with the ministry on his mind, the aggressively friendly natives of the Land Down Under were a tailored fit for his own open-faced personality. “I have always been outgoing, adventurous, a bit of a risk-taker,” says Matt Kladnik, now pastor of the Vintage Faith Foursquare Church, on the edge of Tellefson Park.

And clear-eyed, he might have added.

To better understand the revival of the Foursquare church across the way from Tilden Terrace that started in July 2012, the 37-year-old Pastor Kladnik was asked how he was called to the ministry.

What Was the Magnet?

He exhales and goes on.

“As I said, I became a Christian at 20, and then the realization hit me that maybe there was a purpose for my life greater than just making a paycheck. That led me to think, I wish I would have known this earlier.

“I remember thinking, ‘I am 20. Had I known this at 15, I might have avoided some really bad decisions. I might have avoided relationships with people who took life and energy from me.’ I was motivated to communicate these lessons to 15 year olds in the hope they might avoid five semi-miserable years that I had had.”

Pastor Kladnik was educated and trained at a bible college in Canada affiliated with a church he was working for in his native Oregon.

“At that time,” he said, “the American dollar was so strong and the Canadian dollar was so weak that I was able to go to school without taking out any loans. I worked two nights a week in the States, and then I would drive back to campus where I was living. I was able to graduate without any debt whatsoever, and that is pretty rare.”

Pastor Kladnik’s denomination, his church’s headquarters, is the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. For shorthand, Foursquare.

If that sounds remotely familiar, it may be because it was birthed in the perhaps more colorful Los Angeles of the 1920s, in the Echo Park neighborhood, by the legendary Aimee Semple McPherson.

“It never was meant to be a denomination,” says Pastor Kladnik. “It was meant to be, like, an evangelistic movement. She would make a Gospel presentation that highlighted Jesus as our savior, our healer, our baptizer, and our soon-and-coming king. That was her message. She traveled around preaching that over and over again, and it soon became known as the Foursquare Gospel.”

(To be continued)