The Portland Save A Lot would like to post a monthly article honoring a local leader in our community, and we would like to begin this journey by honoring Larry and Kathie Stoess.
They started working at the United Methodist Mission on Baird Steet in the mid 90’s. Larry was working with the teenagers and Kathie was working with the elementary age children. At that time, it was an afterschool program meeting in two shotgun houses.
In 1997 the United Methodist Church built the Portland Promise Center at 18th & Baird Street in the Portland Community. Kathie and Larry moved to Portland in 1999. They started a Sunday morning prayer meeting in 2001, then the Celebrate Recovery meeting in 2002. Celebrate Recovery still meets on Thursday evenings with an average attendance of 75 people.
In 2012 the Sunday morning prayer group moved our meeting from the Promise Center to the warehouse at 1800 Portland Ave. (the old Gans Furniture building) and officially started the Church of the Promise. The church meets every Sunday morning at 11:00 am.
In November 2015 the church started the Table Café in the Church of the Promise building. On November 15th (6:00-8:00) the Table Café will celebrate its ten-year anniversary.
In 2019 our son Ryan started Promise Housing Plus, a non-profit construction company that has a vision of helping our neighbors become homeowners and learn vocational skills for employment. People can support the work of Portland Housing Plus by having them do home renovation projects. The Church’s mission statement says: Church of the Promise is a group of ordinary people following Jesus together on a mission to love God and love our neighbors, every day.
“Our vision is for Portland to be a healing land, where the realities of Heaven become the realities of our neighborhood. All of these beautiful expressions of community were not created by me and Kathie. It was a community of friends and neighbors, who love Jesus and love Portland, who must receive the credit for these life-giving ministries. As our mission statement says, we are just a group of ordinary people, following Jesus together, on a mission to love God and love our neighbors. The credit must go to the Promise Community, and the glory goes to God; not any one individual.”
We would like to invite Larry and Kathie to stop by our store and pick up your $50.00 gift card as a small token of our immense appreciation for the contributions you have made to the Portland community.
