The City of Alamosa is located in the south-central region of Colorado, a high-altitude valley, the size of the state of Connecticut, but sparsely populated (less than 50,000 residents). It's a desert environment surrounded by high mountains where most of the people tie their livelihoods to the land. Due to a harsh environment and lots of poverty, the San Luis Valley can be a tough place to live.

Back in the mid-1970s, five local families started to meet for Bible study and their hearts turned towards the spiritual needs of the people. They prayerfully decided that God was calling them to begin a church. LWBF – then called Sangre de Christo Baptist Church - affiliated with Converge Rocky Mountain in 1976 and acquired their first building in 1977. The first pulpit committee made clear the goal and the challenge in a letter to our first pastor: “The San Luis Valley is in desperate need of a good Bible-teaching church. In an area where false religion holds free reign, the work of taking Christ to the people will not be easy."

For much of our history we were a small “family” church, with many struggles and financial hardships, but also lots of joy in serving college students from Adams State University and Trinidad State College, supporting missionaries, and ministry in the community.

By the late 1990’s our congregation faced great struggles to keep the doors open, but in meeting together and praying for the Lord's will, decided that God still had a call on this church in this community. In an effort to re-launch and to reach the community, the style of worship services was changed to a “contemporary service” and the name of the church was changed to Living Water Bible Fellowship. The name change happened not only to communicate the vision of what type of church we wanted to become, but also to remove mistaken belief that we were a Spanish-speaking congregation. The second reason was that the word “Baptist” had earned a strong negative connotation in our community. “Living Water” was selected to communicate the idea of being a life-giving church - that our church was here to bring the spiritual life of God into people's spiritual desert through the proclamation of the gospel. “Bible” was included to communicate the foundation and authority of our church and “Fellowship” was added to highlight our need for community in Christ.

From the early 2000's through 2015 our church grew ten-fold in size and we moved into our current facility. In the late 2010's we reached our high point in attendance with people driving long distances to fellowship. In these post-Covid days, there are many around the San Luis Valley who still claim that we are "their church" even though their participation has dropped. We now have 200 active members and around 300 people each Sunday attending services. LWBF has a non-denominational feel, Bible based preaching and teaching, conservative theology, with an informal, come as you are mentality. We're more functional than high speed or high tech, and we aren’t flashy or flamboyant, either in our worship style or our facilities.

Jeron Parkins was called to pastor the church in the fall of 2003 and the Parkins started serving in January 2004.  Jeron and Elizabeth met and married in Corvallis, Oregon in the early 1990s and now have three married adult children and are awaiting their sixth grandchild this December.