Many people know the story of how Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic came to be born, how it sprang from the words of a pastor who cast a bold vision from the pulpit of the big stone church at 34th and Central. What might be less known is how the roots of the Clinic reach deeper into time, to the 1960s, when an all-white congregation refused to submit to white flight. Or even further into the past, to the 1920s, when a downtown church saw an emerging neighborhood as an opportunity for outreach. As such, Tabernacle Presbyterian Church’s seemingly out-of-the-blue decision to start a legal clinic decades later was not so out-of-the-blue at all, but rather, wonderfully consistent with its history.

“I don’t know how many people we helped that first year,” Lynn says, “but you probably wouldn’t have to take off your shoes to count them.”

In 1992, the vision for the Legal Clinic was first expressed in a Palm Sunday sermon by Dr. Frank Kik at Tabernacle Presbyterian Church. The church was located in the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood and the sermon noted the incredible need for pro bono legal services in the area. Six Christian attorneys who were in attendance that day answered the call and founded what eventually became Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic.