True North Church settling into new home

FARGO — Before its recent resurrection, the building abutting I-94 that houses the new True North Church served as the corporate call center for PepsiCo, the multinational company known for its carbonated cola and corn chips.

Though still receiving calls there, the building has less fizz and more faith, with communication coming from God into the hearts of his people.

“I stood in the back on Good Friday, and I wept, realizing, ‘What a beautiful thing that God has done in restoring something that was vacant, and bringing new life to it',” said the Rev. Mike Hull, lead pastor of the non-denominational evangelical community.

“That’s what he does for us — with dreams that are dead, broken relationships and addictions — he restores those things,” Hull continued. “To know that generations will be healed here as they come to know Jesus’ saving hope was overwhelming.”

The team looked at 54 different possibilities for either new builds or existing structures, finally settling on the property at 4314 20th Ave. S.

“In our hearts, we wondered, ‘How can we utilize what is already built?’” Hull said. “We knew that God is in the restoration of things.”

The team initially struggled to envision how the building — with its 9-foot drop ceilings and 191 cubicles — could become a church. Without contract help, more than 150 volunteers from the community banded together to pull old carpet and cubicles, Hull said, calling it “a labor of love.”

An announcement of the building’s purchase, at $3.7 million, was made on Facebook in May 2024. Less than a year later, on April 20, Resurrection Sunday, the church opened its resurrected doors.

“We just wanted a spot where we could land and not have to load trailers every Sunday,” Hull said. “What a gift to say, ‘This is ours; this is what God has given us.’ There’s a unity every time people are working together, and this has been a real rallying point for our church.”

Whitney Isaacson, 24, started attending True North at its former location at Amber Valley Parkway in 2022, a year after it was formed. A native of Hawley, Minn., she became part of a vibrant non-denominational community while in college in Mankato, Minn.

After relocating to Fargo for work, Isaacson began “church hopping” to find a similar welcoming church home. When she visited True North, it resonated with her soul, she said, and soon, she became a youth leader.

“I’ve been doing that for two years now,” Isaacson said, noting that mentoring her small group of middle-school girls has been reciprocal. “I’m watching them grow, and I’m growing with them.”

About 70 kids attend groups there weekly, she said, but the new space will allow them to add more “invite nights” when they can bring friends. With studies showing 50 to 80 percent of youth leave their faith after high school, Isaacson added, “I believe that serving the youth is so important — to build that foundation of faith.”

In its first week of operation, the church’s head count came in at nearly 1,500, Isaacson said, exceeding a typical church-plant startup. “Most don’t beat 1,000 attendees in their first couple years, or ever,” she added, noting, “You can just feel how the presence of God has washed over this building,” with the message that it’s time to move forward in earnest with the mission.

JC Schwartz, one of the original four founding members of True North, serves as its outreach and serving director, and said despite her focus being beyond church walls, she’s found the new space helpful.

“Having a place to land for everybody is very settling, I think; just having a home base that people can come to, but where we can send out from,” she said. “That’s really what sets me on fire.”

Schwartz said the vision cast by Hull was that of a church “where we would be family, sitting on each other’s couches, in each other’s homes, and really knowing each other,” noting, “It’s not just about Sunday — and that was what I’d been chasing, really, for years.”

Schwartz left a decade-long job assisting people with special needs to join the small True North staff, which had begun forming during their days worshiping with the Prairie Heights community.

Hull said Prairie Heights was a key place for receiving mentorship before branching off. “I moved to Fargo in September 2017 to join Prairie Heights Church to learn how to plant churches,” he said. Before then, he was discerning whether to step out of ministry to become a physician’s assistant.

Prayer led him and his wife, Kristen, a native of Valley City, North Dakota, to relocate to Fargo from Kansas with their young son, Judah. “It’s wild now to see (Kristen’s) high school friends come to our church. What a cool thing to come full circle,” Hull said, and, 20 years after meeting the Rev. Stephen Abbott, in college, “to be raising our families here together.”

Earlier, Hull played a key role in restoring an old Walmart into a church back in Kansas. “I’d been down that road a little bit,” he said, noting that their executive pastor, the Rev. Brandin Melton, had also previously led several major church-restoration efforts.

Abbott, discipleship pastor, said True North began “with a dream in our hearts” about 17 or 18 years ago, when he and Hull served together at a church in Kansas.

“We worked hand in hand together,” he said, and around 2009, they began formulating a new vision to address some of the issues they were seeing in the church. “We prayed, obviously, but not in specifics.”

In their discernment, "family" became a key word, he said, but since many families are broken, that word doesn’t always have a positive connotation.

“To us, if a family is healthy and whole, that can be the greatest adventure in life," Abbott said. "And we want to be that kind of family — not just from an organizational standpoint or logistics.”

The aim is to “create a lot of social space for people,” he said, fostering healthy friendships that allow for spiritual growth. “We start with relationship — with God and with each other.”

They also embrace the idea of “zero-depth entry,” which means being able to walk into a church with little formation. “Every step gets deeper, but you don’t have to feel like you need to jump in off the high dive the first time you get into the pool,” Abbott said. “We want people to feel a genuine sense of a soothing of their soul’s desire.”

True North was asked to head up this year’s City Serve effort, a ministry which started in Minot in 2021, with Schwartz leading in gathering church communities across the state to engage in a weeklong service initiative June 2 to 7. Interested individuals or groups can sign up at https://www.cityservend.org./ The deadline to receive a T-shirt is today, May 11.

City Serve was formed around the idea of unity and believing a bigger impact can be made when we join efforts, Schwartz said, offering people “an opportunity to mobilize,” engaging in service that could extend beyond the designated timeframe. “Ideally, people will find places within the city where they’ve found their passion, and can continue to bless others.”

Abbott said the community’s willingness to trust that, by putting down a footprint, God would fill it, and now seeing that happen, has encouraged them to know God will show up on the other end. “Now, we’re finding another gear (in the race),” he said, “saying, ‘I’m here for it! Let’s go!’”