In a parking lot in Ames, Iowa, a young man sat in his car for thirty minutes just to find a spot. He wasn’t waiting for a concert or a game – he was waiting to get into church. Cornerstone had grown so fast that the wait had become part of the ritual, and he didn’t mind. Something was pulling him in, the same thing pulling thousands of others his age through those doors. Pastor Mark Vance had a name for it: hunger.
“That demographic, 18 to 25, is wildly open to Christianity and the gospel,” he said. “They’re curious. They’re asking questions.”
-Pastor Mark Vance
They were the generation everyone had written off as lost to screens and cynicism. Yet here they were, driving forty, fifty, sixty minutes across dying rural counties to sit in a room and hear about grace. In a world of deepfakes and endless noise, they were starving for something solid – something true. And an hour east, in the little town of West Union, a father of nine named Shane Rothlisberger baptized three people on his own front lawn and finally admitted what was happening: this wasn’t a Bible study anymore. It was a church being born.
It’s a beautiful, messy, organic thing, Rothlisberger said – a bunch of people with a ton of baggage, in need of the grace Jesus provides in abundance. That’s the whole story, really. Not polished, not impressive by the world’s measure. Just the good news doing what it has always done: finding the curious, the searching, the wildly open, and calling them home.
Cross Commission Ministries 