Covenant News

Memorial Service Tonight for Helen Solander Three Stars

EVERETT, WA (April 5, 2004) - A memorial service will be conducted at 7 p.m. this evening at Lake Stevens Covenant Church for retired Covenant missionary teacher Helen Solander Three Stars, who died at Providence Hospital in Everett on Thursday afternoon.

Retired Covenant pastor Willis Adell, who was a longtime minister at Lake Stevens Covenant, will officiate. Solander Three Stars previously served as a teacher at Covenant High School in Unalakleet, Alaska, from 1957 to 1960. At the time, the Evangelical Covenant Church considered Alaska a foreign mission. She had been a member of Lake Stevens Covenant Church since 1977.

Born March 24, 1930, she attended the Evangelical Covenant Church of South Bend, Indiana. She attended North Park Junior College in Chicago, earning her associate's degree, and then earned her undergraduate degree from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

After taking the required Christian Education courses she needed at the North Park Theological Seminary in 1955, she served as a parish worker at Ravenswood Evangelical Covenant Church in Chicago and took education courses at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, before beginning her mission work in Alaska.

Solander Three Stars had originally considered being a missionary in Africa, but she was encouraged to consider Alaska by a missionary speaker at a camp in Jonesville, Virginia. In a 2002 Internet church newsletter interview with one of her five children, Lenore Three Stars (online at www.lakestevenscovenant.org/realpeople.htm), Helen recalled the life-changing experience that steered her towards mission work while at an InterVarsity summer Bible camp in Ontario, Canada.

"One night we were watching a movie about Tibet," she recalled. "All of a sudden I was crying. I looked at my friends sitting on either side of me - they were not crying. I thought what is wrong with me? After the service, I went to my cabin and hopped up on the bunk. I lay there awhile. Then I felt God was talking to me, 'Helen, you have all these plans for your life, where do I fit in?' . . . My plans that I had made in high school were (to get) a college education, so I could get a job in which I could earn lots of money, travel, buy a car and lots of clothes. I had never said to God, 'What do you want me to do?' Since we had just finished watching a missionary movie, I felt God was asking me to be a missionary. I told God I was willing to do and go wherever he told me to go."

She married her husband, Peter Paul Three Stars, in 1961 while she was in Unalakleet. Peter was a longtime worker for the Bureau of Indiana Affairs. Peter died December 31, 2001, after serving Covenant High School as development director and taking interim pastorates in four ECCAK congregations during the 1980s and 1990s. Helen is survived by daughters Lenore Three Stars and Paula Blair and sons David and Erik Three Stars.

For more information about the service, call the church at 425-334-3368.

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