BETTER THAN HEARSAY - It Isnt Hearsay If Its Gospel

PRATTSVILLE - It’s hard to know if beliefs have everything or nothing to do with what will happen at an upcoming Prattsville planning board meeting.

Pastor Dewitt Olmstead is expected to start the approval process on a new home for his Discover Life Church which on the surface is sort of ho-hum, unless you consider how things got to this point.

There is no reason to think the project won’t go through, putting the building on land next to the town park, near the intersection of routes 23 and 23A.

Which is also ho-hum unless you consider that the land became the center of controversy, three years ago, when national chain Dollar General was trying to set up shop in the exact same spot.

A 6-month moratorium was put in place by the town, ostensibly to rewrite local planning rules, although it slowed down the megastore and is arguably the reason they packed their bags and left.

Which is where this gets interesting, or as a friend of mine suggests, where the situation is intangibly transformed from idle gossip to maybe gospel.

Smack dab in the middle of public hearings on Dollar General pursuing its own planning board approval process, Pastor Olmstead appeared, declaring - and I quote - “God wants a church built there.

“This isn’t me trying to kill Dollar General. It will fall on its own if it’s meant to be. I’m not speaking from one side or the other. I’m merely proclaiming what the Lord has been speaking all along,” Pastor Olmstead said.

A stunned silence fell over the meeting hall that night and it’s possible some folks rolled their eyes and wrote off the reverend as a zealot.

Other folks might have fully believed the reverend was right. Either way, Dollar General is history and if all goes well with the site plan review, ground could conceivably be broken on the new church this year.

The view from here, where facts are the determining factor, is that this makes for a much-more-interesting-than-usual Prattsville tale.

If you are wondering where Pastor Olmstead stands on the matter, wonder no longer. “I have no doubt. I definitely have a confidence in what the Lord spoke,” he said in a phone interview earlier this week.

Pastor Olmstead says the whole thing is a sequence of spiritual events starting six years ago that, at the outset, had him feeling doubtful.

The pastor describes it all as receiving what he calls, “You Will statements from the Lord,” further explaining that, “my wife and I had built our dream house,” in western New York.

“As I was moving there, the Lord spoke, saying, ‘You Will live here,’ which was a totally different spot than our dream house. I’ll be honest with you. My response was ‘no, I won’t.’

“But the Scripture talks about praying without ceasing, and the third time the Lord spoke there was a surrender that floods the heart.”

As it turned out, Pastor Olmstead says he and his wife did indeed settle in a house precisely where the Lord first spoke to him, concluding that the experience was, “God training me to hear his voice.”
A similar chain of otherwise inexplicable events resulted in the reverend’s family moving to Prattsville. “The Lord told me, ‘You Will pastor,’ but I definitely had no concept it would be in Prattsville,” he says

“I had never been here. I came here because I was invited to speak at the Huntersfield Christian Training Center,” on the outskirts of town.

“This is where it gets really weird,” Pastor Olmstead says, noting he visited the former Methodist Church on Main Street in Prattsville.

Unbeknownst to him at the time, that building would later become home base for his Discover Life Church which has now been outgrown, prompting the creation of a new center.

“I’d never been to the Methodist church before,” Pastor Olmstead recalls. “I walked inside and this is what the Lord said to me.

“He said, ‘this is not where your church will be,’ It made no sense. I wasn’t a pastor here yet, and I know this may sound odd, but I also knew it was the Lord’s voice. I was learning to listen to it. I backpacked it.”

So when Dollar General came to town, the pastor says that, while deep in prayer, he’d already been told what the Man Upstairs had in mind for the property the chain store wanted. It was never a fair fight.

Dollar General had a contract for an option to buy the property but amid the moratorium and increasing public resistance to their presence, the human paperwork went the way of the wind.

“I’m speaking from watching this whole thing play out,” Pastor Olmstead said, back then. “I had the vision of a church there.”

Fast forwarding to now, the pastor says, “people like me get labeled. We’re just watching the Lord do this. His dreams are bigger than ours.”

The preliminary site plan will be presented to the planning board in early February, and then the hard part comes…making the dream reality…finding the money to build.

Or maybe it will be easy breezy. “We know that what the Lord wants to do, building the church there, is downright impossible on a financial level,” Pastor Olmstead says. “But it is already unreal, what has come.”