Donor Spotlight: John & Michele Sturdevant
Donor Spotlight Series: Generosity Rooted in Faith
This is the third story in a donor spotlight series highlighting the impact generous supporters have on students, families, faculty, and the mission of Sioux Falls Lutheran School. These stories reflect how generosity—grounded in faith—continues to shape lives and strengthen our Christ-centered community.
“What Do You Need?”
When we asked John and Michele Sturdevant to be featured in a Donor Spotlight, John declined an interview.
Instead, he wrote us a letter.
Six handwritten pages arrived first. A few days later, John returned with six more—“the rest of the story,” as he called it.
That seems exactly right for John. He didn’t want to talk about himself and worried that writing about the business he helped build might sound like boasting. Even on paper, he consistently chose we over I. He credited his family, his employees and his customers. He wrote about God’s grace. He wrote about Sioux Falls Lutheran School.
But to understand John, it helps to begin with the question he has asked throughout his life:
“What do you need?”
It’s not a polite question when John asks it. He genuinely wants to know. And once he knows, he’s very likely to do something about it.
John remembers people—their names, children, struggles and celebrations. He remembers because he pays attention. And he pays attention because people are never incidental to him.
People are the point.
Learning the Business from the Floor Up
John’s story began in Pipestone, Minnesota, where some of his earliest memories were formed in his grandfather’s automotive repair shop. He still remembers the smells of gasoline, oil and exhaust.
His family’s connection to the automotive industry stretched across generations. During the Great Depression, John’s grandfather Arvid opened a repair shop in Pipestone. John’s father, Jack, eventually expanded from a four-foot parts display in the front of that shop into a growing auto-parts business.
John learned the business from the bottom up. He worked Saturdays, school vacations and holidays. He swept floors, checked in parts, put away inventory and ran equipment in the machine shop.
In June 1970, when John was 15, he decided room and board on the family farm were no longer sufficient compensation. He asked for a job at the parts store and was hired at the minimum wage of $1.65 an hour.
That first job became his life’s work.
For 46 years—from 1970 until 2016—John worked in, co-owned and helped lead Sturdevant’s Auto Parts. He managed a store, worked in the warehouse, met with vendors and spent countless days on the road building relationships with customers.
As the company grew, John became its outward-facing leader. He visited stores, developed new customers and helped existing customers become stronger. Eventually, the business included dozens of company stores, two warehouse-distribution operations and relationships with independent stores across several states.
His care for people may have been the heart of his leadership, but it was matched by an extraordinary drive—a determination to keep moving, keep building and keep finding a way forward.
“That drive was instrumental to the company’s success,” said Mark Stevens.
Mark first met John in high school, and the two reconnected through Sturdevant’s, where Mark was already employed. Mark and his wife, Lynnette, who later worked in the company’s credit department, grew close to John, and the two families became lifelong friends.
But John doesn’t emphasize his own role in the company’s growth.
“I was very proud of my people,” he wrote. “We were tight.”
“He knew everybody,” Mark recalled.
John didn’t simply walk through the warehouse offering quick greetings. He stopped and had conversations. If an employee’s child had been sick, John remembered and asked about the child later. He attended graduations, sent cards and letters and helped employees personally when life became difficult.
“He was invested in you,” Lynnette said. “His heart is so big.”
And every Friday afternoon at 3:00, when everyone in the warehouse stopped what they were doing to sweep the floors, John picked up a broom, too.
John may have been an owner, but he never considered himself too important to work alongside everyone else.
The same was true with customers. If a store was struggling, John made a personal visit, tried to understand what was happening and looked for a way to help.
Where someone else might have asked, “Why aren’t you doing better?” John asked:
“What do you need?”
Long before servant leadership became a familiar term, John was living it. He knew the work. He knew the people. He served both.
That same devotion was woven into his life as a dad. John fondly remembers his daughters, Joey and Sydney, tagging along on Saturday workdays in the Sturdevant Auto Parts warehouse, sleeping bags and favorite VHS movies in tow. When the movies grew tiresome, they played “secretary,” pretending to answer the phone and help customers. As they grew, he remained an active part of their lives—coaching soccer teams and cheering at golf events were just two of the many ways he showed up for them. They remain the lights of his life, along with his beloved grandchildren.
God’s Grace Changed Everything
John grew up without a strong connection to a church. He was confirmed in the United Methodist Church and received a Bible, but faith wasn’t central to his daily life.
Yet, as John wrote, “I always believed and loved Jesus.”
And he always knew where his Bible was.
In July 1991, John entered treatment for alcoholism and experienced what he describes as an immediate deliverance from his addiction—a miracle from God that got his attention. Through Alcoholics Anonymous, he encountered a truth that would shape the rest of his life:
He was helpless without God.
John’s story isn’t one of a man who succeeded because he was strong enough to master everything placed before him. It’s the story of a man brought face-to-face with his own need—and with the God whose grace was more than sufficient for it.
John knew how to ask others, “What do you need?”
Now he understood the answer for himself.
He needed God.
And God, in His grace, hadn’t let go of him.
Gratitude became one of the clearest marks of John’s life. The man who remembered what others needed also remembered Who had rescued him.
Finding a Ministry at SFLS
John speaks with gratitude of Michele’s steadfast support for the people and causes he holds dear. When their grandsons, Lewis and Howard, enrolled at Sioux Falls Lutheran School, the two found a ministry they would embrace together.
At a Christmas program on the school’s former 37th Street campus, John listened as the evening was opened and closed with prayer. It touched him deeply.
“I think at that time, we knew SFLS would be a big part of the boys’ and our lives,” he wrote.
As their grandsons moved with the school to the Boe Lane campus, John and Michele began to see SFLS as far more than the place their grandchildren attended. They saw faculty and staff whose work was a calling. They saw a ministry shared by everyone involved.
They saw people John describes as “the salt of the earth.”
They watched Brenda Bernard and the early childhood staff surround Lewis and Howard with love and help them become part of the caring culture of SFLS.
“We will never be able to repay Brenda Bernard and her staff,” John wrote.
Perhaps not.
But John and Michele have responded in the way most natural to them. Again and again, they’ve come to SFLS and asked:
“What do you need?”
Their generosity can be seen across the campus. They provided two industrial riding mowers and planted a grove of maple trees along the south side of the property. They funded the school’s band room and have contributed significantly to SFLS capital campaigns, helping make the growth of the Boe Lane campus possible. They also financed a major branding initiative that included a redesigned academic logo, a new website and expanded digital marketing.
And they’ve invested in people—giving generously to faculty and staff and faithfully supporting the Celebrate His Gifts Gala and the Eagle Fund.
There is no single “John and Michele project” because their generosity has never been about attaching their names to one thing.
It’s been about listening.
What does the school need? What would help its people? Where could their generosity make a meaningful difference in advancing the Gospel mission?
Then they respond.
Yet the real measure of their giving isn’t found in buildings, equipment, trees or programs. It’s found in the children and families those gifts allow SFLS to serve—and in the “precious little hearts and souls” John and Michele hold so dear.
They hope SFLS will preserve the small-school atmosphere “where everyone knows everyone’s name.” They hope it will remain affordable and accessible to families. They hope the school will continue to attract and retain the exceptional faculty and staff who carry out its mission each day.
Above all, they want children to know Jesus.
“We feel so blessed to be part of an unbelievable calling and ministry at SFLS,” John wrote. “We are so blessed to become friends of the faculty and staff.”
Those blessings run both ways.
Arm in Arm
Mark described John’s commitment to SFLS in a way that feels especially true:
“He’s not an in-and-out donor. He’s locked into this place and hooked up with you arm in arm.”
That is John.
When he gives his heart to people, he doesn’t do it halfway. He learns their names. He remembers their children. He encourages them. He celebrates their successes and stays near them in their struggles.
Across 46 years at Sturdevant’s—and through recovery, friendships and family life—John continued to ask the same simple question:
“What do you need?”
Then he listened.
He remembered.
He picked up the broom.
And he found a way to help.
John and Michele, thank you for locking arms with Sioux Falls Lutheran School. Thank you for seeing needs both ordinary and extraordinary—and for understanding that both are part of the ministry. Thank you for loving the people who fill this campus today and for planting trees whose shade will welcome generations still to come.
Most of all, thank you for showing us what capable Christian servant leadership looks like when it’s quietly, faithfully and generously lived.
Once an Eagle, Always an Eagle.
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About Sioux Falls Lutheran School
Sioux Falls Lutheran School is a family community committed to developing capable Christian servant-leaders in a complex world who are World Ready and Faith Secure. We are passionate about giving our students the tools they need to be successful academically, socially, emotionally, and spiritually. We strive to accomplish this goal by maintaining high academic standards, employing excellent teachers, and upholding a Christian worldview drawn from Scripture. Ultimately, our vision is to partner with families in preparing children, as led by the Holy Spirit, for faithful and bold use of their God-given gifts to navigate and serve a complex world with the love of Christ.