Our Story.

Heartland.k10 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 h.k10 community. Our 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.

Our name reflects our mission. From the beginning heartland.k10 has been committed to building a new community of Christ followers who live in the Western suburbs of Kansas City along K-10 highway all the way to Lawrence. 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 h.k10.

heartland.k10 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." h.k10 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.

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 h.k10 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 h.k10 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 h.k10 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 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 h.k10 till 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. h.k10 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.

Over the past few years we've experimented often with what that means exactly. We've honed in on three essential destinations that we all hold in mind as we embrace our collective spiritual journeys.

• Intimacy with God: we believe that all humans are created with the capacity for God. We believe that through Jesus Christ it is possible for all humans to have a relationship with God. The pursuit of an intimate relationship with God is at the center of what we think it means to follow Jesus.
• Community with Connected People: for any talk about religion to make sense, we believe it must first be embodied by a people...a church. We seek to acknowledge the reality that we need each other in order to follow after God. We seek to exist as a community of faith, not as an aggregate of individual believers. We think anything worth doing is worth doing in community—so we do most everything that way.
• Influence with Disconnected People: we believe that Christ's call to us is to express his love for the world around us. Much of what we do as a community is designed to enable those who are disconnected from God to become connected to our church no matter where they are in their spiritual journey. Helping the spiritually disconnected to become connected to an authentic community of faith is central to why we exist as a church.

Our heart as a church is expressed in a simple prayer which has been prayed in almost every h.k10 service: "God, bind our hearts together as a church. Teach us how to love each other well, and teach us to love the world around us for your sake."