10/08/2026
Love this -
This is where I met my husband, and where the dream of the charts began so many years ago in the summer of 1992🤍
Before Sonshine Festival could book a single artist, somebody had to find their phone numbers. They found them on the backs of records.
In the summer of 1981, a few dozen people gathered at a restaurant in Willmar, Minnesota, tossing around an idea: what if this little town put on one day of Christian music for the kids around the area? By December, the group had narrowed down to three — youth pastor Bob Poe, Gary Crowe, and Linda Westberg — with zero connections to the Christian music industry. So they improvised. They walked into Christian bookstores, flipped over album after album, and cold-called whatever number was printed on the back, trying to book real artists for a festival that didn't exist yet. Linda's own vision for the whole thing traced back further still, to a friend's dream of "thousands of kids praising the Lord on top of a hill." They scraped together donations from local churches, and in July 1982, around 1,800 people showed up at Willmar Community College for the very first Sonshine Festival.
That scrappy, phone-book-and-faith beginning grew into one of the largest Christian music festivals in the country, drawing crowds to Willmar every summer for more than three decades.
Did you ever make the trip to Sonshine in Willmar? What's the one memory — the lineup, the weather, the friends you went with — that's stuck with you all these years?
