St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sauk Village, Illinois, held its first worship service in 1957 as a mission station of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Crete, then affiliated with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. In 1959, the fledgling congregation became autonomous under its present name. By that time, both churches were no longer with the heterodox Missouri Synod but had affiliated themselves with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod as an optimistic move toward an orthodox denominational fellowship.
The present acreage was purchased in 1963; and in 1964 construction began on a new church building and also a school building with two classrooms. The congregation moved into the new buildings in 1965. Because of his objections to the synod’s growing heterodoxy in doctrine and practice, the Wisconsin Synod in 1973 requested St. Mark’s pastor to resign. The voters’ assembly, however, sided with their pastor, retained him by unanimous vote, withdrew from the WELS, and decided for the present to remain independent of any synodical affiliation.
In 1977 Pastor Wayne Popp, who had served St. Mark’s for nineteen years, accepted a call to Kansas City, Missouri; and the congregation called Vicar Edward Worley to serve it with full pastoral responsibility, even though he had not yet graduated from the seminary and had not been recognized as a candidate of the ministry. The call contained the stated understanding that, upon Worley’s graduation, he would be considered St. Mark’s pastor. The following year, the congregation joined two other churches in the formation of the Illinois Lutheran Conference and recognized the Lutheran Theological Studies Center in Tinley Park to be its official seminary.
When in 1979 Vicar Worley graduated from the seminary, he received and accepted a call to Anaheim, California; and St. Mark’s called Candidate Clarence Luke, a recent graduate of the Lutheran Theological Studies Center, who accepted the call and was ordained on July 8th that same year. Two years later, St. Mark’s Congregation severed fellowship with the Illinois Lutheran Conference and work with the “Lutheran Reformation Hour” of the ILC, in which the congregation and its recent pastors had actively participated.
After serving the congregation for seventeen years, Pastor Luke retired from the ministry on June 9, 1996, due to poor health and inability to continue. After brief service by a vacancy pastor and temporary help from a congregation in fellowship, Pastor Robert J. Lietz of Oak Park, Illinois, was called in February of 1997 as Vacancy Pastor; and he continued in that capacity until the summer of 2003. It was during this interim that the congregation, a member of the Fellowship of Lutheran Congregations since 1989, helped in 2000 and 2001 to correct the long-standing erroneous position of that church body on the matter of Christian church discipline and became aware of the Concordia Lutheran Conference, whose position in doctrine and practice it recognized to be truly orthodox. When the F. L. C. suffered a schism in 2001, occasioned by one pastor and his two congregations who refused to embrace the Scripturally-corrected position of the body, the Fellowship of Lutheran Congregations in 2002 declared fellowship with and, in 2004, merged corporately with the Concordia Lutheran Conference, forming an organic union under the latter’s name and constitution continuing to the present day.
Following his graduation from the Concordia Theological Seminary of the Concordia Lutheran Conference in the early summer of 2003, Candidate Paul E. Bloedel was called to be St. Mark’s pastor. St. Mark’s was at the time in fellowship with but not a member of the Concordia Lutheran Conference. Two years later, the congregation joined the Conference at its June convention. Pastor Bloedel served the congregation faithfully for almost ten years.
In June, 2013, Pastor Bloedel received and accepted a call to St. John’s Lutheran Church (C. L. C.) in Lebanon, Oregon. This left St. Mark’s vacant; and, since no unencumbered candidates were available, the congregation called Pastor David T. Mensing of Oak Forest to serve St. Mark’s simultaneously with Peace Ev. Lutheran Church, Oak Forest, where he was at the time and continues incumbent in the pastoral office. Pastor Mensing was installed on July 21, 2013.