Today we’d like to introduce you to Kris Sauter.
Kris, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My story begins in the town of Carlton, Minnesota, which I have long referred to as the center of all culture and beautiful things in the world. At first glance, Carlton matches my own early disposition. It feels forgettable, like something you have seen a hundred times before. But if you linger, if you dig just a little deeper, something good and beautiful reveals itself. That is why I love my hometown.
Growing up in a small town means getting used to people talking trash about where you are from. “Well, you know, that’s just Carlton math,” they would say. Or they would laugh and ask, “Does anything good even come from Carlton?” I always thought the answer was obvious. Yeah. A lot of good shit comes from Carlton. This right here. Me. You. Us. There is a quiet radiance that lives in small towns, and that radiance, along with grit and love, shaped who I became.
I grew up in a large family. My dad was a teacher in town, which I loved, but it came with an unintended consequence. Adults rarely talked to me unless I was in trouble or looking for my dad. I became “Denny’s kid,” or simply “hey you.” By junior high, I had come to a painful realization. I really wanted to talk to girls, and girls really did not want to talk to me. That was the conundrum.
One day my friend Mike said, “I heard there are Christian girls who will talk to boys because they’re nice.” I immediately responded, “I want to go to there.” That sentence led us to a small, fundamental, conservative evangelical church called Tabernacle. The name told you everything you needed to know.
And yet, it was there that I fell in love with who God was and what community could be.
The first night I walked in, the youth pastor, Phil, saw me and walked straight over. He looked me in the eyes and said, “Hi, I’m Phil.” I turned around, assuming there must be an adult behind me, because adults did not notice me or talk to me. When I realized he was talking to me, I felt something shift. I can still remember the sensation of being seen. That moment transformed me.
It was just one guy doing his job. Being kind. Noticing an awkward, too tall kid with a bad haircut. But that simple act of attention made me feel like I finally belonged. And in that moment, I discovered my vocation. I wanted to be a pastor because I wanted to create that same sense of belonging, connection, and believability for others.
In that youth group I met some of my best friends, and eventually my best friend of all, my wife. I learned where Phil went to Bible college and decided that was where I would go. This news landed differently in my parents’ ears. One was excited. The other went to my youth pastor and tried to convince him to talk me out of it. Pastors, after all, did not make much money. Now, as a parent myself, I understand. My dad just wanted the best for me.
I showed up at North Central University with no idea that it was a Pentecostal charismatic college. People kept calling it an NAG school, which I assumed was an accreditation acronym. I did not realize it meant Assemblies of God. If you know anything about the Assemblies of God, you know it is deeply charismatic. People ran around yelling at the devil and jumping for Jesus. I remember thinking, I am genuinely happy for you, but that is not for me.
Those were some of my first moments of learning discernment. What do I carry with me. What do I set down. What belongs to my becoming.
Right out of college, my wife Nick and I got married and moved to a small town in Wisconsin to serve as youth pastors. We had two incredible months, followed by twelve of the hardest months of our lives. It was there we saw behind the veil of church power and toxicity. The senior pastor was deeply insecure and power hungry. Any perceived authority was treated as a threat.
We were accused of summoning rebellious spirits and ghouls because we wore jeans to Sunday service. Eventually, we were publicly yelled at in front of students for how we led our team. We quit.
In that season, we reached out to other pastors, desperate to know if this experience was normal. We told them plainly that if this was what pastoral ministry looked like, God could have the church back. We wanted nothing to do with power, ego, and an abusive form of masculinity dressed up as leadership.
That search led us to the Vineyard.
We told Vineyard pastors our story. When we said, “If this is what being a pastor is like, we want nothing to do with it,” they said, “We think you’re going to fit really well here.” They hired us as student ministry pastors. The church was around two hundred people. Over the years, it grew to more than two thousand.
In the Vineyard, I began to evolve. Questions were celebrated. Curiosity was welcomed. Belonging was expansive. I was ordained there. We raised our kids. We built lifelong friendships. It all felt progressive.
What I did not realize at the time was that I never looked under the hood. The same toxic patriarchy, white Christian nationalism, and obsession with power were still there. They were just better dressed. More polished. More skilled at redirecting your attention away from uncomfortable truths.
In 2013, my wife and I were asked to become the lead pastors of that Vineyard church. We said yes, reluctantly. Who turns down the lead role at a large church. About thirteen months into the transition, the lead pastor pulled us aside minutes before preaching. In six or seven minutes, he told us God had shown him he was supposed to stay another ten years. He apologized, but he had to obey God.
Just like that, the future we were handed was taken back.
We felt grief and pain, but also a strange sense of relief. Years later, we found language for it. These leaders were miserable people. On stage they were magnetic, visionary, and inspiring. Off stage they were bullies, manipulators, liars, and deeply power driven. That relief whispered something true. Maybe we cannot tell a better story. Maybe we can live one.
That conviction led us to plant a new faith community in Cloquet, Minnesota. We hosted what churches call a large lunch, renting a high school auditorium. We became a mobile church, setting up and tearing down every week. On our first Sunday, deer hunting opener in November 2015, we had no idea if anyone would show up.
From day one, hundreds did.
It was there that I finally became honest with myself about what I believed. For years, as an associate pastor, my beliefs did not matter. The lead pastor’s beliefs were the church’s beliefs. Now, my wife and I began asking questions. We began deconstructing our faith.
Deconstruction is like unpacking a suitcase you have carried for decades. Inside are beliefs, values, ethics, and truths handed to you by others. You take each item out and ask, do I believe this, or am I carrying it because someone told me I had to.
We questioned hell. Could a loving God create it. We questioned the Bible. Did we really believe it was meant to be read as literal history. Did God flood the earth and kill entire families. We questioned sexuality. Did we truly believe there were two categories of humanity, one sacred and one tolerated, and that queer people simply needed to try harder.
It was beautiful. And terrifying. Because clarity demanded honesty, not only about what we believed, but about what we were inviting others into.
Four years later, we sat down with Vineyard leaders and asked a simple question. The Vineyard claimed to be a radical middle, a place where everyone gets to play. They had once been pioneers in ordaining women. Could there be room for people like us. People who love Jesus, take the Bible seriously, and believe queer people are made in the image of God.
The answer was no.
We were met with scorn, yelling, and insults. Told we were not smart enough to make these decisions. Given an ultimatum. Repent. Pretend this conversation never happened. Or leave.
After fifteen years of loyalty, sixty hour weeks, defending their leadership, we were forced out. Not for misconduct. Not for violating policy. But for asking questions.
We became what is now Neighborhood Church.
Neighborhood Church is a wildly progressive Christian community where the real you is never a threat. We believe in a good and beautiful life, not just someday, but now. It is here that I got sober. Fell in love again with spirituality and ultimate reality. Returned to seminary. And learned that the questions we were asking were not new.
People have been wrestling with belonging, sacredness, inclusion, and resistance to empire and power for thousands of years.
We are simply brave enough to keep asking.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Not smooth. And not chaotic either. It has been more like walking on uneven ground with long stretches where the path looks clear, and then sudden moments where the earth gives way and you realize you are being asked to trust your footing all over again.
There were seasons where things flowed. Where community formed, where leadership felt aligned, where the work felt honest and alive. And those seasons mattered. They were not illusions. They were real gifts. But they were never the whole story.
Most of the difficulty did not come from doubt or from questioning God. It came from naming what no longer aligned and choosing not to lie about it. Liberation rarely feels smooth because it requires truth telling, and truth telling almost always disrupts systems that depend on silence, compliance, or fear. The roughest terrain was not theological. It was relational. It was the cost of disappointing people I loved, challenging institutions that had given me belonging, and letting go of identities that once kept me safe.
I also had to learn that resistance does not always announce itself as harm. Sometimes it shows up as praise that keeps you manageable, or success that asks you not to ask certain questions. Walking away from that kind of comfort can feel harder than surviving open conflict.
So no, it has not been smooth. But it has been faithful. And it has been honest. The road has been shaped by grief and joy, loss and clarity, sobriety and love. And while I would never describe it as easy, I would say this without hesitation. It has been worth it. Because smoothness was never the goal. Freedom was.
To the last question about where I live.
What I love about Duluth is its sisu. That deep, almost defiant determination to endure, adapt, and keep showing up. This city knows how to survive hard winters, economic shifts, and long stretches of being overlooked, and it does so with a quiet strength that feels honest rather than performative. That resilience lives in the people. The Twin Ports hold a fiercely creative and genuinely liberal spirit, one that is not polished or precious, but hard earned. People here make art, build community, and imagine better futures not because it is trendy, but because it is necessary.
I love the wildness of this place. Waterfalls tucked into neighborhoods. Trails that open up into sweeping hillside views of Lake Superior. You can stand in something ancient and untamed, then be in a bookstore or a really good coffee shop ten minutes later, having a conversation that changes how you see the world. Duluth refuses to separate nature from culture, or grit from beauty, and that integration feels deeply spiritual to me.
What I struggle with is that the same resilience that keeps Duluth alive can also make it resistant to change. Sisu can harden into stubbornness. There are moments when the city clings to familiar stories even when those stories no longer serve everyone who lives here. Progress can feel slow, not because people do not care, but because survival has taught them to be cautious.
Still, I would rather live in a place that wrestles honestly with its limitations than one that pretends it has none. Duluth is not trying to be something else. It is becoming itself in real time. And that kind of becoming, messy and unfinished, is exactly where I want to be.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
We’re wildly progressive, Christian space. Progressive meaning that whatever God is, that there is so much more to be known, experniced. We are open to new ways of thinking, belonging when we learn there are better ways of belonging. Historically the church has been slow to change. Like slavery, believing women have equal rights to men or that queer people are made in the image of God! We’re also a pluralistic community, meaning that what ever we call God is just a name we give to something that can never be named. There are infinite ways to know and experience God, so why would we make an audacious claim that our version of Christianity, or faith itself, is the one and true way. No thank you. We’re much more interested in moving with love and helping people live good and beautiful lives. What we want people to know is that the real you is never a threat to a good and beautiful life. Many of us have deconstructed our faith and are reconstructing our faiths. There is no hoops you have to jump through in order to get the best of God, or this community. We are much more interested in helping people flourish.
What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
My story begins in the town of Carlton, Minnesota, which I have long referred to as the center of all culture and beautiful things in the world. At first glance, Carlton matches my own early disposition. It feels forgettable, like something you have seen a hundred times before. But if you linger, if you dig just a little deeper, something good and beautiful reveals itself. That is why I love my hometown.
Growing up in a small town means getting used to people talking trash about where you are from. “Well, you know, that’s just Carlton math,” they would say. Or they would laugh and ask, “Does anything good even come from Carlton?” I always thought the answer was obvious. Yeah. A lot of good shit comes from Carlton. This right here. Me. You. Us. There is a quiet radiance that lives in small towns, and that radiance, along with grit and love, shaped who I became.
I grew up in a large family. My dad was a teacher in town, which I loved, but it came with an unintended consequence. Adults rarely talked to me unless I was in trouble or looking for my dad. I became “Denny’s kid,” or simply “hey you.” By junior high, I had come to a painful realization. I really wanted to talk to girls, and girls really did not want to talk to me. That was the conundrum.
One day my friend Mike said, “I heard there are Christian girls who will talk to boys because they’re nice.” I immediately responded, “I want to go to there.” That sentence led us to a small, fundamental, conservative evangelical church the word tabernacle in it’s name, which told you everything you needed to know about this church.
And yet, it was there that I fell in love with who God was and what community could be.
The first night I walked in, the youth pastor, Phil, saw me and walked straight over. He looked me in the eyes and said, “Hi, I’m Phil.” I turned around, assuming there must be an adult behind me, because adults did not notice me or talk to me. When I realized he was talking to me, I felt something shift. I can still remember the sensation of being seen. That moment transformed me.
It was just one guy doing his job. Being kind. Noticing an awkward, too tall kid with a bad haircut. But that simple act of attention made me feel like I finally belonged. And in that moment, I discovered my vocation. I wanted to be a pastor because I wanted to create that same sense of belonging, connection, and believability for others.
In that youth group I met some of my best friends, and eventually my best friend of all, my wife. I learned where Phil went to Bible college and decided that was where I would go. This news landed differently in my parents’ ears. One was excited. The other went to my youth pastor and tried to convince him to talk me out of it. Pastors, after all, did not make much money. Now, as a parent myself, I understand. My dad just wanted the best for me.
I arrived at North Central University without knowing it was a Pentecostal charismatic college. People kept calling it an AG school, which I assumed was some kind of accreditation shorthand. I did not yet know it meant Assemblies of God. And if you know anything about the Assemblies of God, you know it is deeply charismatic.
People shouted at the devil. They jumped and danced for Jesus. For some, it was freedom. For me, it felt hauntingly familiar.
I had come from that world. I knew its intensity, its emotional volatility, the way spiritual enthusiasm could tip into pressure and performance. There were moments in my past where that wildness had not felt life giving but traumatic. So I was not standing in judgment. I was standing in recognition. And recognition, when it carries pain, is rarely comforting.
What unsettled me most was not the behavior itself, but the realization that I had landed in a new place that looked suspiciously like the old ones I thought I had left behind. I remember thinking, I am genuinely glad this works for you. And I also know it does not work for me.
At the time, I did not yet have language for discernment or deconstruction. What I was learning instead was differentiation. I was slowly separating older versions of myself from the person I was becoming. I was noticing which spiritual instincts were rooted in fear, performance, or survival, and which ones still felt honest and alive. It was less about choosing what to believe and more about noticing what no longer fit.
That season was not about clarity. It was about contrast. And in the tension between the two, I began to understand that growth is not always about discovering something new. Sometimes it is about realizing you cannot go back to who you were, even when the room looks familiar.
Right out of college, my wife Nikki and I got married and moved to a small town in Wisconsin to serve as youth pastors. We had two incredible months, followed by twelve of the hardest months of our lives. It was there we saw behind the veil of church power and toxicity. The senior pastor was deeply insecure and power hungry. Any perceived authority was treated as a threat.
We were accused of summoning ghouls and labeled as rebels because we wore jeans to Sunday service. Eventually, we were publicly yelled at in front of students for how we led our team and we couldn’t do it anymore…we quit.
In that season, we reached out to other pastors, desperate to know if this experience was normal. We told them plainly that if this was what pastoral ministry looked like, God could have the church back. We wanted nothing to do with power, ego, and an abusive form of masculinity dressed up as leadership and sacredness.
That search eventually led us to small denomination called the Vineyard.
We told some Vineyard pastors our story. When we said, “If this is what being a pastor is like, we want nothing to do with it,” t and hey replied, “We think you’re going to fit really well here.” They hired us as student ministry pastors and for the early part, it was great. The church was around two hundred people and over the years, it grew to more than two thousand.
It was here that I began to evolve in my understanding of what God could be. Questions were celebrated and curiosity was welcomed, as long as it didn’t rock the boat. Belonging was felt expansive. I was ordained there. We raised our kids. We built lifelong friendships. It all felt progressive, until it didn’t.
What I did not realize at the time was that I never really looked under the hood of the Vineyard movement. The same toxic patriarchy, white Christian nationalism, and obsession with power were still there. They were just better dressed, more polished and much more skilled at redirecting your attention away from uncomfortable truths. It’s what power does when it wishes to retain power over anything else.
In 2013, my wife and I were asked to become the lead pastors of that Vineyard church. We said yes, reluctantly. Who turns down the lead role at a large church? About thirteen months into the transitional period behind the scenes, the lead pastor pulled us aside minutes before preaching. In six or seven minutes, he told us God had shown him he was supposed to stay another ten years. He apologized, but he had to obey God.
Just like that, the future we were handed was taken back.
We felt grief and pain, but also a strange sense of relief. Years later, we found language for it. These leaders were miserable people. On stage they were magnetic, visionary, and inspiring. Off stage they were bullies, manipulators, liars, and deeply power driven. That relief whispered something true. Maybe we can not only tell a better story, but maybe we can live one as well.
That conviction led us to plant a new faith community in Cloquet, Minnesota. We became a mobile church, setting up and tearing down every week at the local high school. On our first Sunday, deer hunting opener in November 2015, we had no idea if anyone would show up. I still remember fifteen minutes before service started, and there were a handful of people there that were not there to set up. I thought, “well, it was a good run, we gave it a go…” and tons of folks turned out.
It was there that I finally became honest with myself about what I believed. For years, as an associate pastor, my beliefs never really came centered, because we were to told to center the lead pastor’s beliefs. Now, my wife and I had space and time to honestly asking questions and process who we are and what kind of church do we really want to lead? We couldn’t verbalize then, but we began deconstructing our faith.
Deconstruction is like unpacking a suitcase you have carried for decades. Inside are beliefs, values, ethics, and truths handed to you by others. You take each item out and ask, do I believe this, or am I carrying it because someone told me I had to.
I questioned the concept of hell and how could a loving God create it a place of torture? We questioned the Bible. Did we really believe it was meant to be read as literal history? Did God flood the earth and commit genocide? We questioned the beliefs handed to us at an young age about gender and sexuality. Did we truly believe that the best solution was to “love the sinner and hate the sin?” How can you possibly use the word love about something you say you hate? It lead to an infinite amount of conversations where we cried, laughed and dreamed of what could be…could we really believe in a God this good?
It was beautiful and terrifying because clarity demanded honesty, not only about what we believed, but about what we were inviting others into. Where I ended up was that I deeply love Jesus and that wherever love was present, there was God. I could believe in a God that was filled with joy, inclusion and belonging. I could invite people into a good and beautiful life where the real them was never a threat to God or themselves. It felt liberating to step into a space where love could lead.
Four years later, we sat down with Vineyard leaders and asked a simple question. The Vineyard claimed to be a a place where everyone gets to play. They had once been pioneers in ordaining women, claiming that we were using harmful interpretations of scripture, and maybe there’s better ways to think about those passages? With this in mind, could there be room for people like us? People who love Jesus, take the Bible seriously, and believe queer people are made in the image of God.
The answer was quick and to the point…no.
We were met with scorn, yelling, insults and told we were not smart enough to make these decisions. We were given an ultimatum at their dinner table. Repent, pretend this conversation never happened, or leave. We had to choose to lie, betray our ethics or leave the movement where we deeply loved.
After fifteen years of loyalty, sixty hour weeks, defending the Vineyard’s leadership, we were forced out. Not for misconduct. Not for violating policy. But for being honest and asking questions. For these questions we were forced out.
Several weeks later, we became what is now Neighborhood Church.
Neighborhood is a wildly progressive Christian community where the real you is never a threat. We believe in a good and beautiful life, not just someday in the far off future, but now, in this life, in this breath. It is here that I got sober. I fell in love again with spirituality and what we call ultimate reality. I returned to seminary and learned that the questions we were asking were not new. People have been wrestling with belonging, sacredness, inclusion, and resistance to empire and power for thousands of years. We were not unique, special or alone. We were surrounded by host of saints that embodied these questions for centuries and were brave enough to keep asking and encouraging others to do the same. What a rich history and benevolent future that we belong to! At Neighborhood, we are an inclusive, Christ-centered church committed to allyship and anti-racism work as our practice of liberation theology.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://neighborhood.love
- Instagram: @neighborhoodchurchmn
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NeighborhoodChurchMN
Image Credits
I will email you my pics, they’re on a differnet platform
