SHEL: Dwayne Pederson was a great soul at my home church and gave outrageously to the local church and global missions. In my own life Dwayne called me while I was just starting college and was discouraged. He encouraged me to follow the call of God on my life. He died last year, but his impact on thousands and probably millions of lives through his missions support continues on. Lifelight is an extension of this – and again – not the biggest number of people this man’s generosity and heart have impacted. But certainly the most visible in SD.
Where do you invest? Can God trust you to be outrageously generous?
LifeLight moves to Worthing farm
Music fest will announce new home today
Anna Bahney
abahney@argusleader.comCANTON – One of the nation’s largest Christian music festivals is expected to announce today that it has found a new home in Lincoln County.
The LifeLight Christian music festival will relocate from 160 acres near Wild Water West to 220 acres on a farm just east of Worthing. The new site is about 20 miles south of Sioux Falls.
The Lincoln County Planning and Zoning Commission on Monday night granted the organization a permit to locate its annual festival on the Pederson family farm 21/4 miles east of Worthing during Labor Day weekend, Sept. 3-5, 2010.
The Sioux Falls-based LifeLight organization still needs to vote this morning on the new location to make it final.
“We feel like this is a permanent new home,” said Alan Greene, the CEO and co-founder of LifeLight. “Evelyn Pederson said we can use the land until Jesus comes back, so we feel good about that timeline.”
Evelyn and her husband Dwayne Pederson farmed corn and soybeans east of Worthing for many years, said their daughter Karla Lems.
“My dad passed away this time last year, November 20th. He’d done the harvesting of fields,” Lems said, “but he also had a heart for the harvest of souls.”
Lems said she and her mother talked and prayed about what they should do with the farm after her father’s passing to honor him. Hearing about LifeLight’s needs, they got in touch.
“It was a God thing,” Lems said.
A task force had been looking at other sites, and Lifelight considered moves to locations near Mitchell and Yankton since outgrowing its home for the past five years: 160 acres at Wild Water West.
After facing the possibility of losing the $12 million punch the festival planners estimate the event generates, Sioux Falls still is the primary area.
“It is in Worthing,” festival director Julie Klinger said, “but for all the people coming in from all over the country, the lodging is in Sioux Falls, and the flights.”
After the Labor Day weekend festival this year, Greene said a new location was needed because the grounds were overwhelmed by fans.
An estimated 130,000 people showed up on the last day of the three-day festival, spilling over a hill out of sight of the main performance stage. That helped persuade organizers that it was time to move.
The LifeLight festival began with a one-night concert on a church lawn in 1998 and grew to become one of the nation’s largest music festivals and one of the largest gatherings of people in South Dakota.
Concert tours, missions, student ministries and other activities also are associated with the festival and its supporters through LifeLight Communications.
Lincoln County saw an opportunity in a well-oiled event.
“The staff has been excited about it from the beginning,” said Paul Aslesen, Lincoln County director of planning and zoning. “The spotlight is going to be on Worthing, South Dakota, and that’s a growing community that needs an economic boost.”
While there will be an added burden on law enforcement and emergency management and roads near the farm will see a great deal more traffic over those three days with thousands of cars parking on the land, there was no one who stood up against the proposal at the meeting.
LifeLight staff said they met with as many of the neighbors in a one-mile radius of the site as they could contact, and none posed opposition.
The fact that the organization had such a long track record of successful events was important to some members of the planning commission such as Chuck Molstad, who said, “13 years of experience is a lot.”
“We welcome and look forward to having LifeLight in Lincoln County,” chairwoman June Nusz said. “This should be their home for a long time.”
Jay Kirschenmann contributed to this report. Anna Bahney can be reached at 331-2326.