Our Story.

Redemption Church began in 2003 with just a few families and friends who decided to try and start a new church in the Western Suburbs of Kansas City & Lawrence. Our dream was to create a place where we could worship Jesus together even though we are from different church backgrounds and histories - and to have it be the sort of place where we could welcome and include our friends, co-workers and families, whether or not they were used to going to church. Today, our hope remains the same: to participate in the Kingdom of God through our involvement in the redemption community. Our passion is to participate in the mission of God, as God moves and works to put the world to rights. Part of that passion is to help people who are disconnected from God to find that connection again, and to engage & embrace them into our community no matter where they are in their spiritual journey, and to walk together along the path. But it doesn’t stop there. Our hope is that we will be a people who are focused not on ourselves and our own self-enhancement, but on the world around us. We endeavor to always build conduits through which we can take the love of Christ into our neighborhoods, workplaces, families and friendships.

Our name reflects our mission. We want to participate in God’s redemption of the cosmos. We hope for redeemed lives, marriages, careers, relationships, self-images, families, etc. We often talk about redemption of the person in all directions: self to God, self to self, self to others, and self to the created order. This redemption comes through God’s grace as we follow, in faith, the teachings of Christ. We believe if we are to be successful in our attempts to follow the teachings of Jesus, this will only happen by living in community with each other. We live near each other, we experience roughly the same culture, our kids go to the same schools, and we are trying to live our lives together in loving, authentic community – all the while, taking great care to insure that people who crave this sort of connection are always welcome at redemption.

Redemption Church was originally called the “K-10 Project,” as we were planted from Heartland Community Church in Overland Park in 2002. In 2003 we launched our church as “heartland.k10 church” and we met for the first time on Sunday morning September 7th, 2003. Our mission from the very start was to become an authentic community of faith which would help us to engage the world around us like Jesus would. Often in those days you would hear people pray "God don't help us build a church, help us be a church." Redemption has always been a place where normal everyday folks gather together to form a community that seeks to embody who Jesus Christ is through the way the live out their lives. The changing of our name to Redemption Church came from a desire to have our church name more closely reflect what we feel our calling is as a church. We want to participate in God’s redemptive project!

This is the part of the typical "Our Story" section where we start to brag about all that we've accomplished. But that doesn't really fit for us. The story of Redemption is not of unbelievable rapid growth, though we've always enjoyed the way new people are always coming to join our community, we're no poster child for church growth. The story of Redemption is not of some incredible teacher or phenomenal music, though we love what happens in our worship service, we're not world beaters in that area. The story of Redemption is based in the idea that God is with us and present in the world through the person of Jesus Christ. We believe that he has invited us into a relationship with himself and with each other for the purpose of discipleship. We seek to be a community who sincerely follows the teachings of Jesus – actually letting our faith define us as people in a very natural way – and we have come to embrace the idea that the best place to do that is in community with other spiritual seekers.

From the very first days of Redemption church until now, this is the defining characteristic of our church. From our very first series as a church "Re:defining Church" we have explored the idea that Jesus came to usher in the Kingdom of God. Over and over in our services we think through and wrestle with what that might mean for each of us. We never shy away from our own brokenness and failures. Redemption has never been a plastic place, but a place where we are honest about the reality of our sinfulness, our fear, our pain, and our regret. We believe that the Kingdom of God is advancing not through rules and regulations or through violence and coercion, but through self-sacrificial love. This is the example Jesus gave us and it is the example we are attempting to embody as a community. Our heart as a church is expressed by a prayer that is repeated every time we gather: “Lord teach us how to love each other, and how to love the world around us for your sake.”