Our History

In 1989 a young Pentecostal pastor named Jerry McQuay received a phone call from a pastor friend in Tinley Park, IL, who informed him of his intention to leave the church he had founded 12 years earlier, and of his desire for Jerry to be his successor. Two weeks later Jerry & Chris came to visit that church, and soon after were chosen to lead the fifty or so folks who made up the First Apostolic Church in Tinley Park.

Unfortunately, over the next nine months it became apparent that the little church was still not growing – as Jerry sometimes says, “it wasn’t doing a bit better under me than it had under it’s founder”. As he grew increasingly dissatisfied at the thought of so many unreached people in Chicagoland, he decided on an ambitious plan to ‘re-launch’ the church under a new name and a new location, in order to maximize the opportunity of a telemarketing and direct mail campaign called “The Phone’s For You!”.

At their annual business meeting in January of 1990, the congregation agreed, and Christian Life Center had its beginning in the first few weeks of 1990, with Pastors Jerry & Chris McQuay and a team of volunteers from the First Apostolic Church of Tinley Park. Together they made over 14,000 phone calls and sent out 10,000 pieces of mail in a two-month telemarketing and direct mail campaign to launch a new church in the south suburbs.

On March 25, 1990, a grand total of 147 people gathered for the opening service at the Tinley Park High School. It wasn’t pretty, and we didn’t know what we were getting into, but it finally gave us some hungry prospects with which to work.
As those prospects stabilized into a congregation of about 90 people, we launched our first building project at 183rd Street and Ridgeland Avenue, which was completed in November 1991 (it now serves as our children’s facility).

Soon afterwards in 2002, we opened an offsite daycare, Discovery Learning Center, to serve young families in the south suburbs. After only two years of its operation, at the encouragement of our Board of Directors, we launched our second building project (now our youth facility), which included a larger auditorium so the daycare could be housed on campus, after remodeling the original building. Bishop Joseph Garlington dedicated that facility in April 1995, on his first visit to Tinley Park. (It would be 12 years later before he became our pastor’s pastor).

It was there in that second auditorium that CLC really began to grow, especially after adding Steve and Shae Wasmundt to our staff as Worship Pastors in 1996. By 1999, attendance was up to 400 and we were completely out of space, so we purchased additional property at the corner of 183rd Street and began plans for the current sanctuary, which was completed in April 2001. By the time we moved in, attendance was at 600, and within two years, we had reached 1200 in attendance.

Since relocating didn’t seem financially feasible, we began exploring other options to continue growing and reaching more people, and eventually settled on the multi-site concept, which fit the vision that Pastor had stated from the very beginning back at the high school: that to reach an area as vast as Chicagoland would require us to get into the communities where people lived, rather than trying to build one massive mega-church in Tinley Park.

For at least a couple of years, every time Jerry and Chris drove up Rt. 59 north of Joliet, they were impressed by all the new housing developments and said, “Somebody needs to come out here and build a church!” Finally, after saying that for the third or fourth time, Jerry thought, “maybe that somebody is us!”

So in 2006, we recruited about 100 members from the Tinley Park campus, led by our long-time Youth Pastors, Dan and Pat Johnson, to open our second campus in Shorewood, IL. After a direct mail marketing campaign, over 330 people attended our opening services there in February, 2007.

Later that same year, we acquired our third campus, when Pastor John Nordstrom, Sr. approached us about assuming responsibility for the former Christian Tabernacle in South Bend, Indiana after his planned retirement. It’s somewhat ironic that back in the early 90’s our pastors had attended several meetings at Christian Tabernacle with like-minded members of their denomination, and those meetings gave them the courage to walk away from their original faith family and the only ministry they had ever known, in order to pursue what they felt God was calling them to do. Now, 15 years later, that church was becoming a part of our church! Our dedicated volunteers there completed a major makeover of their facility, and after a direct-mail campaign, we launched that new campus in March of 2008, with 300 in attendance on opening day under the leadership of Campus Pastors Chris and Amber Payne, who were succeeded in 2009 by Doug and Shanna Neal.

We acquired two more campuses in 2009 – first, when Pastors Eric and Kristen Stone asked to become a part of our ministry, bringing with them their pioneering work in Lisle, IL at Chicagoland Church. To date, about 45 CLCers from Shorewood and Tinley Park have joined their launch team, and we anticipate a grand re-opening in Lisle in September 2010.

The second campus added in 2009 is also our first international campus, as Pastors Herley and Nelly Montes came under our pastor’s covering, bringing with them the Household of Faith in Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines. They have a thriving work there, with even more youth and college-aged students in their Regeneration ministry than adult members in the main church, which makes the future of HOF-CLC extremely bright!

God’s faithfulness to us at each step of the way these past 20 years gives us the confidence to begin dreaming and planning for our sixth campus (fifth in the USA), which we hope to launch in 2011, as we continue walking out the prophetic word about “twelve spokes coming out from the central place”.

In fact, we are still dreaming of a larger facility for the Tinley Park campus, to include a training center that will enable us to continue sending out workers – not only in Chicagoland, but even to the Nations. Surely only God knows what the future holds for CLC, as Jeremiah 29:11 declares, “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”