Holden Village: Serving God in the Wilderness

By Carol (Lund) Hinderlie

It was 1968 – the summer before my freshman year at Cal Lu. I remember exactly where I sat in Beta lounge when I first heard about Holden Village. It was a Leadership Training week for high school youth. That morning, a church group had burned their workbooks on the patio to protest the “irrelevance” of the curriculum. I was vaguely embarrassed by such shenanigans, and burning books of any sort seemed like a bad idea – yet I also held these kids and their self-proclaimed radical action in a kind of conflicted awe.

“You’d like Holden,” a pastor/chaperon told me when I confessed these thoughts. This was a place, he told me, where the Gospel lived by controversy and where conversation, creativity and wrestling with radical ideas were at the center of community life. Immediately I began plotting how I could take a summer away from paid work to volunteer there.

Two years later the journey began: a Greyhound to central Washington, a boat trip up Lake Chelan, then an old school bus ride up mountain switchbacks to the former mining town, now a retreat center. And almost 40 years later, the journey continues! My husband, Paul, our friend Tom Ahlstrom, and I now serve as directors of Holden Village (www.holdenvillage. org), a ministry that welcomes all people into the wilderness to be called, equipped and sent by God.

Note: My dad, Jerry Lund, was on the original CLEF board. After he and my mom, Maryann, took us kids to the future CLU site, I never considered another college. My siblings – Nancy ’75, Janet ’77, Paul ’81, Mark ’83 and Karen ’86 – came too, maintaining a continuous presence of Lunds for 19 years.

To listen to a homily given by Carol in Samuelson Chapel on Dec. 3, visit the University Ministry Web site at www.callutheran.edu/university_ministries