Our Mission:

Love God. Love People. Go and make disciples of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Love God.

“And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’” — Mark 12:30

The first half of Jesus’ great commandment defines the vertical purpose of the Church. We exist to love God with our whole selves, both corporately and individually. We seek to love God through our worship on the Lord’s Day and in our homes throughout the week.

  • The Church exists to worship God and to draw others into this worship. The Lord’s Day is primarily for lifting high the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Lord’s Day gathering is not seeker-sensitive or a heady Bible lesson meant to fill Christian heads with doctrine. Our worship on the Lord’s Day affects how we live throughout the week, but we know that one day a week is not enough for true worshippers of God. For this reason, we prioritize daily family worship in our homes, where we read God’s Word, sing together, and pray with and for each other.

  • We believe every church has a liturgy—some formally recognize it by writing it down. Our written liturgy reflects our desire to love God in our worship while doing so as He commands, and each element is based on the Scriptures (check out a past liturgy here).

    We find a more formal approach to liturgy helpful in engaging each worshipper regardless of age; utilizing a higher form of liturgy develops active participants in the worship of the Triune God, not mere spectators.

    It's not our conviction that one form of liturgy is inherently correct and another wrong, but we find a more formal liturgy valuable for worship in both spirit and truth.

  • We place ourselves within the stream of Protestant Reformers who emphasized a high view of God’s sovereignty and taught the doctrines of grace. We believe Reformed theology is faithful to the text of Scripture and gives us an exalted view of God's glory. Reformed theology isn't meant to make intellectually proud Christians but joyful and humble Christians who come empty-handed to the cross, where they encounter the grace of their Redeemer.

    Does this mean we’re Calvinists? The short answer is yes. We hold to a Calvinistic view of salvation, or soteriology, believing that God, in His sovereignty, graciously elects some for salvation. But this doesn’t mean we hold to hyper-Calvinism or the “frozen chosen” view of salvation. God is sovereign over who is saved, and He is also sovereign over how they are saved. We don't presume to know who is elect, so we share the Gospel freely and willingly, praying that God would use our efforts to save many! To learn more about our beliefs and core values, click here.

  • If you join us on the Lord’s Day, you'll notice portions of our liturgy that feel very “old.” In our liturgy, we pursue “Reformed catholicity.” By catholic we don’t mean Roman Catholic, but the catholic Church, that is, the universal Church, which has stood against the gates of hell for 2,000 years. As such, we have a bias toward the historical practices of the Church, which conform to the principles laid out in Scripture. This results in those things which seem “old.” We desire to worship in continuity with the Church through the ages, whose past reminds us that our faith is both corporate and ancient. That's also why we recite the Apostles’ Creed each week.

    We also seek to avoid what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” We can be tempted to think old is necessarily inferior, but we believe historic Christian practices are a lot like your grandmother’s cast iron skillet — it worked then and still works now. But we don’t accept old things as inherently better just because of their age. There are practices that we reject due to their stepping outside of biblical confines; this is a healthy balance between the Reformed regulative principle of worship and pursuing historical orthodoxy.

  • Jesus taught us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We worship with our whole selves and reject the false duality between head and heart, theology and worship. Sound doctrine is meant to lead to heartfelt devotion. Sound theology will inevitably result in proper, life-giving worship, and proper worship will teach good theology if oriented correctly. This type of whole-person worship means what we do with our bodies matters.

    This is why in our liturgy, you'll find us standing for the reading of God’s Word, kneeling while we confess our sins, sitting as we eat at the Lord’s Table, and raising our hands as we sing the ancient hymn, the Doxology. These outward postures of the body are meant to change the inward postures of the heart, not just on Sunday but in our daily lives. Put simply, Christian worship and theology is meant to change the way we live — we’re not just brains on a stick.

Love People.

“The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” — Mark 12:31

The second half of Jesus’ great commandment defines the horizontal purpose of the Church. Our love for God leads us to show love to those around us.

As the parable of the Good Samaritan makes clear, our “neighbor” extends beyond the Church to those near and far. Our calling is to love beyond societal barriers, even those who hate us.

Jesus said people will know us as His disciples by how we love each other. In the Church, our primary call is to love each other through self-sacrifice and humility.

  • When we look at the ministries of Jesus and the Apostles, we see a repeated theme of breaking bread and fellowshipping over meals. At Redeemer, we share a meal every Lord’s Day as a tangible way to serve and love each other. We also seek to share meals in our homes throughout the week. We believe life is better spent together, so we fellowship often.

  • The Greek word philoxenos, commonly translated as “hospitality,” is a compound of the word philo, which means lover, and the word xenos, which means stranger. Hospitality is the extension of love to strangers.

    In many churches, hospitality describes the coffee bar or the door greeters on a Sunday morning. While hospitality certainly takes place on the Lord’s Day, we seek to be hospitable outside of the four walls of the church building.

    Our church and homes are meant to be open and available to anyone in need, Christian or otherwise. We don’t get to live behind high fences and locked gates; we live on the front porch, not the back deck. This is a radical reorienting of how we view our homes and families. Through this type of selfless, stranger love, others might come to know our Redeemer.

  • This is an extension of hospitality, manifested in intentional service projects we all do together. We desire to work collectively to love our neighbors, whether we're building a fence, cutting down trees, or making meals for a family in need. God places each of our neighbors by us so that we can extend the love of Christ. As a church, we seek to help each other do just that.

  • We’ve chosen to love Rogersville and the greater Springfield area by partnering with these local missions organizations:

    Pregnancy Care Center

    Victory Mission

    We commit to support them with our finances, our prayer and our time.

  • By God’s Providence, we've linked arms with a Reformed Baptist church, Hope Baptist Isiolo, in Isiolo, Kenya.

    Because of our sponsorship through Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary, they are church partners with full access to the same seminary resources our church utilizes. In the future, we hope to send missions teams to Isiolo to encourage them as they advance the Gospel in their region.

Go and Make Disciples.

“And Jesus came and said to [the disciples], ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” — Matthew 28:18-20

While Christians are called to share the Gospel with others individually, we believe the Great Commission was given to the Church and can only be fulfilled by the local church. We want to make fully-formed disciples who shake the very gates of hell, not just converts.

  • We seek to train men to desire godly wives and families and to joyfully accept the responsibilities of providing for their families spiritually, morally, and materially. We aim to train husbands to lovingly lead their families in all respects, especially by training them in the practice of daily family worship. We seek to encourage older men to disciple younger men, teaching them how to balance their responsibilities as Christians, husbands, fathers, and laborers. We do this through once-a-month informal men’s gatherings, quarterly “skills days” where men teach other men how to do “stuff,” and a yearly camping trip for fathers and sons. Men are also encouraged to meet together throughout the week over a cup of coffee or maybe even a cigar.

  • We seek to train women to desire godly husbands and families and to embrace their calling as wives and mothers joyfully. We will seek to train wives to be godly helpmeets to their husbands, respecting them and nurturing their families. We aim to encourage older women to teach younger women to be busy at home, looking after the affairs of their households and actively ministering to their families with their God-given gifts. We do this through once-a-month informal women’s gatherings and frequent “skills days” where women teach other women practical skills that can be used in their homes.

  • We seek to train children to respect their parents and those placed in authority over them and enjoy their family's company. We desire to raise our children to early maturity, rejecting the world’s standards for childhood and adolescent behavior, teaching them to be responsible, kind, and reverent in all aspects of life, and training them to promote their family's spiritual and social welfare.

    We believe the discipleship of children is to take place primarily in the home. The church’s goal is to come alongside men as they lead their families so that multiple generations of disciples are made through the efforts of godly fathers and grandfathers. We do not have a “children’s pastor” or “youth pastor.” Our elders are called to shepherd the entire flock, regardless of age, which means much of their time is spent on whole-family discipleship.

  • We seek to minister faithfully to those who, in God’s providence, have been called to live in singleness. We desire to encourage them in their fellowship within the family of Christ, aiming to direct their energies into the active service of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

  • “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven." - Matthew 19:14

    We feel a unique burden for a multi-generational community, which is best expressed through family-integrated worship. In our commitment to disciple the next generation, we seek to integrate them into the life of our church from the very beginning. Until recently, in church history, children were engaged in the life and worship of the church, so rather than send our children off to the nursery, children’s “church,” or youth group, we all worship together. This model isn't for everyone and involves a learning curve, but we gladly embrace all that comes with it. It's not without its challenges, yet we believe this is how Jesus would have us worship.

  • We believe every education system has a worldview and a god worshipped by that worldview. For this reason, we are committed to unapologetically Christ-centered education — “all of Christ for all of life.” Practically, this means that mostof our families homeschool or send their children to a private Christian school.

    We don't condemn those who send their children to public school for providential reasons, but we are overwhelmingly committed to the need for genuine Christian education. This is the principle. The particular method for providing that education is up to the parents. Our elders, in their teaching authority, emphasize the principle as we strive to bring children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4).

    We are also committed to lifelong learning for all followers of Jesus. This has led us to join the Church Partnership Program at Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary. Through this partnership, our members have free access to seminary-level education. We also encourage members to attend the seminary’s annual conference, “Cov’ Con,” in March. For more information, visit their website.

  • Though we don’t require a specific eschatological position for membership at Redeemer, we are unapologetically optimistic about the last things. We believe the Gospel is effective and Christ’s Kingdom is victorious. As a result, our teaching will come from an optimistic amillennial viewpoint. We believe our mission statement necessitates optimism and hope-filled working until Christ returns.

    This also means we reject an evangelism model that “gets as many people on the boat before everything goes to hell in a handbasket.” We labor to see disciples made, not just converts, because only disciples can make more disciples for generations to come. Christ might not return for another 1,000 years, but He could also return tomorrow. This leads us to wrestle with the tension of building things that last and preaching the Gospel with expectancy and urgency.