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Home » About Us » History
In the Fall of 1977, a church-planting team from Ames, Iowa moved
into town to start a college church on the campus of Michigan State
University. The idea was to start a church using homes and university
classrooms for facilities, and pour energy and resources into people.
The two leaders, Dave Bovenmyer and Larry Clemente, desired to help
college students come into a relationship with God through Jesus
Christ, and then to disciple them in their Christian walk. They
came armed with vision and motivation from Christ's Great Commission
(Matt.28:19-20), a deep desire to please God with all their hearts,
and a trained, volunteer team with ready and willing attitudes.
This team of twelve individuals (three couples and six singles)
located near the university, and began to reach out on and near
the campus. They were joined initially with a small group of students
who had become believers over the previous months. (During these
summer months, a sister GCAC church from Columbus, Ohio had spent
much time in outreach, as a part of a summer training program in
East Lansing.) So from these small beginnings, God put together
the original “flock” that would later become Riverview.
From the beginnings, the leadership of the church had two key desires.
First, their goal was to train pastoral staff through an apprenticeship-training
program within the church. In doing so, they were following the
Biblical pattern of the church found in the Book of Acts. Here the
example of the first century church was to train up leadership through
applying scriptural principles to everyday life, while building
solid Christian character qualities. Leaders were then appointed
as pastors in the local church, after it was evident that they had
achieved the character described in 1 Tim. 3, and Titus 1.
Second, their goal was to send out those pastors to start other
churches in other campuses and cities in the U.S. and the world.
Since then, leaders have been “raised up” and sent out to Mt. Pleasant,
Ann Arbor, Novi, Kalamazoo, Ypsilanti, West Lafayette (Indiana),
Chicago (Illinois), State College (Pennsylvania), Columbus (Ohio),
and the Washington D.C. area. Also, many short-term and long-term
mission workers have been, or are presently, out in the field. Countries
include Canada, Venezuela, Honduras, Germany, Russia, the Ukraine,
and China.
Over the years, as church members graduated and entered the marketplace,
the church grew and added couples, young families, and high school
students to its ranks. Even though times and people have changed,
our goals remain the same, in obedience to Christ’s Great Commission.
Our desire for the future is built on the legacy and blessing of
our past: that the Lord will continue to cause our church to grow
both in spiritual maturity and in number, as we continue to “press
on” winning unbelievers to Christ, building believers spiritually
in the church, training leaders into maturity, and sending workers
into the harvest fields for Christ. May God bless us as we sense
the urgency to endeavor “to work while it is still day, for night
is coming when no man can work”.
