Editor’s note: As part of Outpost’s 50th year, we are interviewing those who can speak into the history and trajectory of Outpost and our type of ministry. The following is the first of three conversations we have planned.
Dear friends,
Dan P. is a well-known member of the Outpost family. Dan was on staff for 30 years and worked in many roles, including serving as executive director for 16 years. As the longest tenured staff in Outpost history, I wanted to hear his perspective on the history of Outpost–not only his personal experience, but also the events that have shaped Outpost into what it is today.
Dan first heard of Outpost Ministries 1980 through a fellow student at Crown College. “I didn’t do anything about it because I thought, ‘Well that was for those people who really need help, and I’ve got this issue pretty well under control.’ [laughs] That was my thinking at age 21. So, I dismissed it out of hand.” Dan eventually got engaged to his girlfriend at the time. “I thought, ‘Well, I should probably deal with this issue once and for all,’ because clearly, I had not solved the problem.” He did one meeting with the director at the time. “He asked me a few probing questions, which I totally did not understand and misread, and I ran away in horror.” Dan’s fiancée later broke off their engagement. “That threw me into a tailspin emotionally because I thought [marriage] was the answer to my problems, and now the answer had blown up in my face and I had no more recourse.”
Dan was involved in various support groups before finally reaching out again in 1989. After 2 years of receiving help, Dan left Outpost in 1991. About a year after he left, one of the key volunteers, Joe, started calling him asking Dan to join Outpost staff. “I said, ‘No way, no way!’ Joe pressed and pressed. Finally, in August I thought, ‘Well, you know, maybe it’s the Holy Spirit, and I need to pay attention.’” Dan said yes, but “with much fear and trembling because I thought, ‘God might be calling me into this, and I need to say yes, but it is a scary proposition,’ because it meant public exposure. And so, I started working at Outpost on September 15, 1993.” Dan eventually became full-time staff in 1995.
Participation at Outpost back then looked quite different than it does today. “Joshua Fellowship (JF) was basically the only ministry going on besides writing the newsletter and a few public speaking events.” One of the weekly meetings every month was an open meeting, which was generally well-attended. “This meeting was open to anybody and everybody interested in our ministry, whether they had a personal connection to struggling with SSA–and mind you, the focus was definitely on same-sex attraction or homosexuality.” Meetings included worship and teachings “that were more or less related to the issue of same-sex attraction and walking in holiness despite our sinful inclinations.” Worship was implemented before Dan came on staff. “I was like, ‘Why do we need to worship? Can’t we just overcome same-sex attraction?’ I was a little slow to get it on some of these things.” Dan started attending Exodus conferences, and participants started attending regional conferences in 1993. He believed, “This is gonna be a great thing to get people involved in something above and beyond Minneapolis, because they need encouragement of meeting other people who are overcoming and are receiving strength and education and so forth…from their involvement with the other Exodus groups.”
Dan’s first 10 years on staff had its share of challenges and wins. “One of the biggest challenges was that we were part of another organization [Midwest Challenge] because of our financial instability in 1989.” Although Outpost was able to get financially stable because of Midwest Challenge, “we felt that they were occupied with different goals and purposes than we were, and they had all the control and all the money and all the everything. And we didn’t really know what was going on; we weren’t on the board, so we didn’t have information.” Midwest Challenge gave Outpost a one-month heads-up of plans to separate in August 1996, which included Dan becoming executive director of Outpost, as well as Outpost needing to move out from Midwest’s office in South Minneapolis. Midwest Challenge did provide Outpost free rent at a church in Blaine, MN, and Dan recalled how this move hindered Outpost’s effectiveness. “No public transportation, no buses; this was before Uber.” Being far outside the Twin Cities, by that time’s standards, caused Joshua Fellowship attendance to plummet.
The unexpected transition was also difficult for Dan. “It was a challenge to me personally because I wasn’t used to being an executive director, although I was trained in the ministry. That was part of the reason they wanted to hire me to begin with, because I was trained in the ministry, and I was an ordained minister. But going to seminary doesn’t make you an executive director. So I kinda was throw into the deep end of the pool and had to learn how to swim.” Dan made the decision in the summer of 1997 that Outpost needed to move back and find space “more in the center of things.” That chance came when Dan reconnected with Dave O., who he’d met during his participation in 1989. Dave was working with another Exodus-related ministry called Eagles Wings. Outpost was able to move into an office building with him in downtown Minneapolis. There was also a lot of staff turnover between 1996 and 2001. Overall, Dan said that time period was a “big, big challenge” for the ministry. Not everything was difficult, however. According to Dan, “The biggest win was moving [to Robbinsdale], because our rent [went down] and our new landlord was a practicing Catholic [who was] very pro-our ministry. That was the beginning of the prayer room. This was a period of tremendous growth for us.” CalebSpirit, under the name Men Pursuing Purity, began in the mid 2000’s. “All of a sudden, it wasn’t just Joshua Fellowship; it was Outpost Ministries. We actually had several different ministries going on with various Living Waters groups, the CalebSpirit group, and JF, and Nate O. [who joined staff in 2000] started the House of Prayer [adding a] prayer room ministry focus. I think it was this expansive growth that we experienced in the early 2000’s that really changed the focus of our ministry.”
I asked Dan if there were any early decisions that impacted Outpost’s ability to stay faithful to God’s word in the culture’s changing landscape. One of the biggest decisions came about as a result from an ad campaign Outpost did in 1996, where a commercial for the ministry was aired in late 1996, with a second commercial planned for 1997. “We got so much backlash. [The commercial] represented a huge shift in Outpost. We were all excited to do this advertising and have a public exposure. And then we realized that all I did for three months was media interviews, and it was crazy. It yanked us off-task. We [needed] to rethink what we’re doing with these ads.” This eventually led Dan, and Outpost, to no longer do secular media interviews. As he recalled, “The decision to quit doing secular media interviews was a decision based on returning our focus to what God had called us to do. We kept reiterating and reiterating…the mission of the organization as worded in the founding documents. The founding documents had three points: 1. we exist to help people overcome same-sex attraction; 2. We help the church learn how to do this work of ministry; and 3. We reach out in evangelism to this community–the LGBTQ+ community–to invite their participation in the kingdom of God. We kept coming back to that over and over and over again, which helped us focus our attention on doing the work of the ministry, rather than telling people about the work of the ministry.”
Another decision that shaped Outpost was Dan taking the board of directors through a training process in the mid-2000’s that shaped ministry operations. “It helped the board define what our organizational goals…and perspectives were, and to ensconce them in our complete operations. That really helped our focus to maintain clarity and purity in terms of biblical perspective.”
Another major transition for the ministry was the merger in 2015 between Outpost, the Well Church, and Twin Cities House of Prayer. “Historically, it was a very awkward transition. There were a lot of missteps that happened along the way, and hurt people were hurt, and hurt people hurt other people. But that impacted who Outpost is in this: it almost pulled us off-task.” Despite those challenges, Dan is grateful to see how God has continued to use Outpost.
I ended our interview by asking Dan he would want to say to encourage readers, both in where Outpost is and how Outpost is moving into the future. He wanted to express his confidence in God’s faithfulness and work through Outpost because of our ministry’s rootedness in Scripture.
“What I think is going to help Outpost move forward is to communicate the commitment that the organization has to biblical values and straightforward purpose, objectives, and outlook regarding obedience to the Scripture. The Scripture has to be our canon. If the Scripture is our canon, it’s the instrument through which we measure where we’re going; then we’ll be right on. And if we let go of our focus of Scripture, and we reinterpret it according to unbiblical perspectives, then what’s going to happen is we’re going to lose our focus on where we’re going, and we’re going to be slightly off. A one-degree change for 10 yards isn’t that significant, but one-degree change over 10,000 miles, you’re going to be way off-course. Maintaining that biblical focus and perspective regarding sexual morality as taught in the Scripture is going to be the guiding force that’s going to keep Outpost on-track.”
I told Dan how Jon M., our volunteer coordinator for Joshua Fellowship, has been reworking the JF teachings to very intentionally root it in, and be able to cite, Scripture. Dan was very pleased to hear this.
We are so grateful for Dan and many others who have gone before us and made the ministry of transformation possible. Now as we look ahead to the next 10, 20, or 50 years of what God has in store for Outpost, we invite you to continue or expand your partnership with us. We are excited to continue following God into His plans for the Body of Christ and those seeking sexual and relational wholeness!
Check the event page for links to the details on upcoming events. We would love to celebrate with you!
