He and his staff recently raised $7,500 for Bridge Builders by baking 120 loaves of traditional cardamom bread, for which they received pledges ranging between 10 cents and a dollar for each loaf baked. Local community members also were “chained” to the ovens in the kitchen of a local church and were not released until family and friends provided sufficient bail. The total was three times the $2,500 when he first started the bake-a-thon in 2006.
Bridge Builders provides counseling for up to six months to single-parent families and links them with others to provide lifelong mentoring. Attempts are made to link the families with people in local churches who serve as mentors. Many of the children have come to faith in Christ through the counseling center, Lundblad says.
When he founded the organization in 1994, Lundblad also started Bread of Life Swedish Bakery to help pay the bills. Clients learned job skills at the bakery, but he was forced to close the operation in 1996. Still Bridge Builders continues to make a difference in hundreds of lives.
Growing up in Congo – the son of Arthur and Florence Lundblad, two of the Evangelical Covenant Church’s pioneering missionaries in that country – he has been guided by his faith to help others, he says. After graduating from North Park University in 1970, he worked at the denomination’s Children’s Home in Cromwell and developed a single adult ministry at his local church before opening Bridge Builders.
Lundblad decided to open the center after the words of James 1:27 resonated afresh with him: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress . . .” The children of many single-parent families are today’s orphans, he believes.
Lundblad says the lack of male role models in many homes has created major problems for many families.
The breakup of families due to pornography is the biggest change Lundblad has seen since he began counseling. “This is huge now,” he says. “Men are tripping into this stuff. It is destroying our family units.”
The pervasiveness and ease of accessing pornography on the Internet has enlarged the problem, Lundblad says. “If anyone tells you that they’re not tempted, then they’re lying.”
Lundblad more recently has started to provide life coaching, which he says is a rapidly growing field. “Counseling is looking back to find healing,” Lundblad says. “Life coaching is looking ahead to possibilities.”
