Fontanelle pastor accepts call to Le Mars church

With mixed emotion, a Fontanelle faith leader announced recently that he and his family will be moving on to a new place of ministry soon.

Pastor Steven Broers, at Emmanuel Lutheran Church, announced during Sunday, July 28 worship services that Sept. 1 will be his last Sunday after serving the church for 14 years. He began there April 11, 2010, when his second-oldest son, Micah, was two weeks old.

A meal where the community can say goodbye to the Broers family will be 6 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 31 at Emmanuel Lutheran Church.

“It’s really hard to leave because we love it here. It has been a wonderful church and wonderful community. We’ve made a lot of friends and built a lot of relationships,” Broers said. “It’s hard to imagine going anywhere else, but we feel like God has been calling me to go.”

Broers will begin this fall at St. John’s American Lutheran Church in the northwest Iowa town of Le Mars. Broers looked for a church with a strong youth program, an active contemporary praise team and an opportunity where he could lead a staff and mentor other pastors.

He began interviewing at various other churches and this is the congregation that was a good fit for both parties. St. John’s looks to hire an associate pastor to work with Broers, who will be the senior pastor, sometime in the near future.

Broers, a Nebraska native, was serving in a Connecticut church before he brought his family to Fontanelle. He is ordained in the Lutheran Churches in Missions for Christ (LCMC) denomination, which is a more conservative-leaning group than the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) that his east coast church actually belonged to.

Emmanuel had made the transition to belonging to the LCMC not long before Broers came, and that was attractive to him.

There were also other aspects of Emmanuel that both drew him here and have been strong points that have kept him here for so long.

“What I loved about this place was that they have a praise team and that there was lots of involvement in the church. I thought that was really good, and if I could come, I really like to be a part of a team and have lots of people involved. It was also a lot closer to home,” Broers said.

There are numerous things that Broers will look back on fondly about his time at Emmanuel Lutheran Church. Some of these include beginning the youth ministry GROW (God Rocks on Wednesdays), going on youth trips and seeing young people get excited about their faith, hiring a youth minister in Denise Bridges, mentoring a pastoral intern in Tony Scalisi, who now serves in northern Iowa, and building relationships in the community to the point that people trust him to do their funerals, even if they’re not members of Emmanuel.

Broers said navigating the COVID-19 pandemic and being a spiritual resource following the tornado in Greenfield earlier this year are two experiences he was also grateful to be able to lead through.

Broers has served on various local boards, including the Nodaway Valley Ministerial Alliance, and has been involved in the community in many other ways while here. His wife, Kristy, taught music in the local schools for a time. Their two oldest children, Sophia and Malachi, have gone off to college. Micah enters high school this year while Stephen is 13 and Zoe 4.

“It was a lot of things that led to this pointing all in the same direction. I had applied at several different churches, but they didn’t work out, for whatever reason. If this wouldn’t have worked out, I would’ve probably just stayed here awhile,” Broers said. “I think Fontanelle is such a wonderful town. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them to check out the church because I think it’s a great place to raise a family. It’s a wonderful faith community and wonderful wider community. I’ve always felt I could work with the other churches and people were very welcoming, whether I was a part of their church or not.”