Redeemer Church Wichita

Yesterday, Pastor Jon wrapped up our prayer series by teaching us on the corporate or communal nature of prayer. He pointed us to numerous examples in scripture where we see the people of God coming together to pray: Acts 2:42, 6:6, 12:5, and 13:1-3. This was to point out and emphasize that Redeemer as a church is committed to praying together.    The spirit of God will not pour out of our lives i...

To begin, Pastor Morgan reminded us that prayer is our practical expression of our need for God - an acknowledgment that we cannot live this life without him. One of the goals of prayer is to navigate life with a posture of awareness of & connection to God. But what does this actually look like? This is where we turn to the example of Daniel found in Daniel 6:1-28.   "For every New Testament point...

Yesterday, Pastor Jon continued in week two of our Prayer series. By way of reminder, he emphasized that our focus on the practices of following Jesus in community is not legalistic or compulsory. As a church, we will make recommendations to you, and you get to make decisions. This is invitational, not required. At the same time, Pastor Jon wanted to be clear as to why we desire for you to impleme...

Pastor Jon began our teaching series on the spiritual practice of Prayer. To do this, Jon taught us from the words of Jesus in Luke 11:1-4 —    Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples." And he said to them, "When you pray, say: 'Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us e...

Yesterday Pastor Morgan preached through our final installment of our series on the Sermon on the Mount before we break for our Prayer series and Brooke led us through an author spotlight for Black History Month. Brooke highlighted Jason Reynolds and you can find more info about Jason on his website:  https://www.jasonwritesbooks. com/   The text for the sermon this week was Matthew 5:27-30. Pasto...

As we move through the next few weeks of teaching, Pastor Jon gave us a structural tool to understand what Jesus is doing. Jesus is not dismissing the Old Testament in any way, rather he is showing us the correct and true interpretation of some key Old Testament teachings - the deeper righteousness of Godliness. Jesus does this by first saying, "you have heard it said" (Old Testament teaching). Ne...

In celebrating Black Histroy Month, we had the chance to hear from Myron Fisher during our call to worship moment about the author James Baldwin. You can find more information about James here: https://www.britannica.com/ biography/James-Baldwin

Yesterday Pastor Morgan continued our teaching series on the Sermon on the Mount by teaching Matthew 5:17-20. Our very own Susan Holmgren and Terrence Phox led us through our Black History Month moment during worship - you can find this recording online through our podcast!   So far, we have covered the series of blessings found in the Beatitudes as well as the two metaphors of salt and light. Pas...

In honor of Black History Month, Kamri Philippi shared with us about Brit Bennet and how she has been specifically impacted by Brit's work as an author.

This week Pastor Jon showed the tension we may feel when Jesus is now telling us that, as his followers, we aren't allowed to hide! Even though we are called to humility or to suffer for Jesus' name sake, following Jesus is not intended to be something we hide from others. Specifically, Jesus used 2 metaphors for demonstrate this.    The first metaphor was that we are to be the salt of the earth....

Pastor Morgan shared a line to begin our time that I believe is very important to remember, "the foundation of the Sermon on the Mount is on who Jesus is." Jesus was the original proclaimer of the gospel. Jesus lived and taught that the Kingdom of God was now and not yet. Jesus himself had ushered in the reign of God, this was the good news of the gospel for the now. While we wait for the "not yet...

The Gospel of the Kingdom

The fifth and final mark of the early church was their counter-cultural sexual ethic. Before we dove too deep into the topic, Pastor Morgan took the time to acknowledge two things: 1) We must work to not make the conversations surrounding sex and our bodies only an intellectual one. We all have very tangible stories and experiences when it comes to this topic and it's easy to distance ourselves by...

The Word Became Flesh (John 1:14)

Jon spoke today on the sanctity of life as we continue looking at the 5 Marks of the Early Church.  Our text was 1 Cor 13:  1-3 which is considered the "Love chapter" of the bible.  Nothing matters if you don't love. Sanctity of Life is a tough topic that many churches do not address.  Jon was open and honest about his fears of traumatizing, hurting or alienating people today.  Redeemer began disc...

Morgan continued today with the 3rd mark of the early church, non-violence.  Edwin Stanton was an enemy of Abe Lincoln.  He took every opportunity to embarrass and humiliate Mr. Lincoln.  When President Lincoln was elected, he selected Edwin Stanton as his Sec of War.  Many advisors thought this was foolish and tried to convince Pres. Lincoln to select someone else.  President Lincoln's response w...

Last week Jon spoke on loving the poor and this week Morgan spoke on multi ethnic churches.   He kicked us off with a joke centered around how divisive the church is today.  There are so many divisions among Christians, denominations, etc.  We live in a divisive world and the church shares it's own version of division.   We have to be carful because as the world secularizes, it will lean towards p...

Some may wonder why the focus on Sabbath the past few weeks.  Jon and Morgan firmly believe that spiritual formation is key to Redeemer.  Bible reading, prayer, sabbath and other spiritual practices are rapidly declining.  They want to introduce us to spiritual practices to grow our faith.  We all need mentorship in these areas.   Quick overview of the four areas surrounding Sabbath we have discus...

Morgan preached this week as we continued diving into the commandment of Sabbath.  Morgan made clear their agenda is to push us to be more like Jesus and Sabbath is a key piece of this.   Morgan started with a story of a family that won the lottery.  They imaged all their dreams coming true and no more pain and suffering due to this massive amount of money they won.  In reality, this windfall of m...

Jon continued our teaching around Sabbath this past week.  He kicked off with the story of the first company that went public with a Hydrogen powered truck that quickly became worth more that Ford Motors at the time.  Recently the CEO of this company was convicted of fraud.  Everything about this was a fraud.  And....everyone involved at the company knew it was a fraud.   The belief that we can go...

Jesus Tempted in the Wilderness | Matthew 4

Jesus Tempted in the Wilderness | Matthew 4

Jon preached from Matthew 3 on repentance.  He told the story of the lionfish that is beautiful, quiet, seems harmless, but is actually extremely poisonous, spreads quickly and has no true predator.  The lionfish is taking over the Atlantic ocean even though there have been many efforts to contain them.  Finally, Florida told their people that they have to kill them to control their growth.  We br...