As we celebrate our 20^th Anniversary, we wanted to share the history of the center. This is part one of the history submitted by the original founder, Linda Samaritoni. We serve a great and awesome God and He has had His hand on this ministry since the beginning As we look back on where God has brought us from, we can look forward with great expectancy to where He is leading us tomorrow…

Birth of HC Pregnancy Care Center

Let me start at the beginning, before the Henry County Pregnancy Care Center was even a sparkle of thought in my mind. The year was 1983. I was the mom of an infant son, my third. Up in the middle of the night, nursing this bundle of joy, I turned on the television for a little company. Some late, late talk show was interviewing the director of a new ministry, the Crisis Pregnancy Center, which had just started up in Indianapolis. Obviously, this organization was NOT pro-abortion, and I had dabbled in the pro-life movement for several months, looking for somewhere to serve that would fit with my mom-at-home lifestyle. Now wide awake, I kept rocking my baby and watched the rest of the show.

In a very short time, I was making the drive from Knightstown to the west side of Indy once a week to help out with clerical duties in the CPC office. I didn't know it, but I was watching and learning how such an office functioned over the next year. During that year the Lord brought pregnant, hurting, and scared teenagers into my life: my first opportunities to counsel, and their opportunity to hear that God loves them, and He can bring beauty out of ashes.

In the spring of 1985, I felt the Lord was leading me to help start a similar ministry in Henry County. Naturally, I went to my pastor.

“We need a crisis pregnancy ministry in this area. Do you think our church can start one?” I was hoping some older lady in the church with plenty of organizational experience would jump at the chance to serve the Lord!

Pastor McDonald smiled at me and said, “I agree such a ministry is needed. Go for it!”

I just stared at him. Me? How could I undertake something so major?

He continued. “We'll give you the list of churches and addresses in the ministerial association so you can contact everyone in the county.”

I left his office with an address list of about 200 churches. Step one: compose a letter to those churches. My church would help with a bulk mailing.

From that initial mailing, about twenty churches responded. Not a terrific testimony for the Church as a whole, but God does mighty works with the small and weak (just ask Gideon). I was encouraged that there would be a step two: create a board of directors. By reaching a contact at several of the churches, possible names were presented as candidates for the board.

Virtually every person that I called, asking him or her to consider joining this venture, said yes! The mighty work of God!

Not only that, Mary Peterson, wife of the pastor at the Missionary Alliance Church, called me to offer a room in their home as the office for the ministry. It had its own entrance and could be shut off from the rest of their home. So we had a board, we had an office, and we had about a half dozen women from those responsive churches ready to train as counselors. If memory serves correctly, those ladies were Mary Brown, Terri Hamilton, Amy Kinnaird, Mary Peterson, Vicki Taylor, and Sherri Wells.

Starting out as “We Care Crisis Pregnancy Service,” a similar organization to CPC’s but tailored toward smaller communities, the counselors and I learned together via training tapes and practicing on each other—very similar to what CPC was doing at that time. I spent the summer writing up Articles of Incorporation with the help of a businessman at my church, Dave Burns. Donations started to trickle in, we set up a budget for rent, phone, pregnancy test, etc., and we hoped money would continue to arrive on a regular basis.

We opened our doors in August of 1985 in that little bitty home office on North 14^th Street. While most of our clients were single or married and in their twenties, we did have contact with several teens. One of my first clients stands out in memory. She was exactly the type of person crisis pregnancy centers want to help: sixteen, from a dysfunctional home, ambivalent about abortion. God has a lot of lessons for me as he used “Maggie” in my life, and I hope she also learned about Him through me.

Maggie came from a broken home, had been molested by more than one male relative, and had what I would call a cult influence in her church. She was pregnant, the baby would be biracial, and neither her mother nor her church would stand the “shame” of that. Mom was pushing abortion. Maggie loved her boyfriend and wanted the baby, but she wanted to please her mother as well. We were able to talk for at least an hour on God's love, the baby's humanity, scriptures, and possible ways to broach the subject with her mother. She left the office planning to have the baby.

That evening an extremely irate mother called me. Not only did she let me know that counseling her daughter was none of my business, she was adamant that Maggie would have the abortion. Throughout the ordeal of that conversation, the Holy Spirit covered me in a warm blanket of peace. Always I gave a soft answer, and slowly her wrath cooled to a low simmer. Again, I was able to share scripture, and believe it or not, she gave me scriptures which gave her the right to “negate” Maggie's vow of giving birth to this child. I could only pray for Maggie to be strong under the influence of such a hard heart.

Maggie met with me once more and followed up with several phone calls trying to hold on to her own values, but in the end she caved to her mother's wishes and had the abortion. She said life at home had become too unbearable, and she did not want to leave home. After the abortion, she continued to call me for consolation and advice in her life. At least once every few months she was in for another pregnancy test. They were always negative. Her mom had forced her to break up with the African American boyfriend and she now dated a very abusive man who had her mother's blessing. At no time did she try to get out of the relationship; it was her nature to acquiesce and take the road of least resistance. Eventually, she married this man, and the last I knew was a prisoner in her own home.

What did I learn from Maggie? I learned that a counselor can do everything right: show the love of Jesus, share scripture, offer practical help, pray for the client, but it is up to the client herself to turn to God. The counselor can not do that for her. When I saw the engagement announcement in the newspaper, my first instinct was to run over to her house and “save” her. It was my husband who pointed out that I had fallen into that trap of “rescuer,” which ultimately does not help the client.

Almost twenty years later I wonder whatever became of Maggie once she was a grown woman. Did she ever gain self-confidence? Did she ever truly turn to the Lord? And I remember to say a prayer for her once again.

The other initial lesson I needed to learn was to trust God for the finances. Each month, the checking account went down to about five dollars. I would worry. How can I budget? How can we grow? There was never anything extra. Yet we were never in the red. One Sunday morning at church I took the problem to the Lord at the alter. I told Him, “This is Your ministry, not mine. I'm just an instrument. If You want this ministry to succeed, You will bring in the money. I refuse to worry about it anymore.” The next afternoon when I picked up the mail, donations amounted to $1,100.00! The Lord was just waiting for me to let go! I kept my word; I never worried about the money again, and I never needed to.

The subsequent years are a bit of blur to me now. Wonderful counselors have come and gone. Board members have come and gone; all of them having made excellent contributions to the growth and maturity of the ministry. The office moved twice while I was directing it – first to a small two-room office downtown which Rod Brown remodeled for us, next, to a small office attached to Randy Ann Realty. Later, the office moved to South Main Street in the same set of businesses as Planned Parenthood, which we thought was amusingly ironic, and Planned Parenthood found to be extremely annoying! I believe that the office where the CPC is housed now is just down the block on South Main.

My season with the Crisis Pregnancy Center was short. I believe God put me there to get things started, but Julie Wright, and later Janet Modjeski, was in place for the long term. As I look back over that mission God called me to complete, I know that Julie was my right arm, and our success is mightily due to her help over years and years. What a blessing these two ladies have been to the HCPCC, and what a blessing the HCPCC has been to the community.

Linda Samaritoni