Grace Church was born out of need.
Our founding pastor, Kyle McClellan, was living happily in Lexington, KY, and working for an orality-based missions organization (now known as Spoken Worldwide). He somewhat reluctantly returned to Fremont for his 20-year High School reunion (reluctantly because 20-year reunions make you feel really old). At that reunion, Pastor Kyle discovered something that troubled him: a number of his classmates, who once self-identified as Christians, now identified as agnostic, or were worshipping in non-Christian traditions. One lesson that working with Spoken Worldwide taught him: the best person to reach a particular tribe with the Gospel is someone from that tribe. Fremont has lots of churches, but very little gospel. Clearly, a life-changing relationship with Jesus was missing from whatever Kyle’s classmates gained growing up in church. The sociologist George Barna has dubbed such people, “churched but lost.”
Armed with the knowledge, Grace Church strives for a “different than” ethos. We’re not better than other churches in Fremont, what we strive to be is “different than.” Our different than ethos is most clearly seen in how we practice the sacraments (baptism and the Lord’s Supper). Like some churches in the Christian tradition, we practice infant baptism (or also referred to as covenant baptism – more on that later), but we understand what happens in that sacrament differently than they do. Like our low-church evangelical friends, we don’t think that baptism imparts salvation to that child, however we still practice covenant baptism – so we’re “different than” them in that regard. We observe the Lord’s Supper every week, so we’re different than our low-church evangelical neighbors – but we believe the preaching of God’s Word is the central event in our corporate times of worship, so we’re different than our other friends. Not better. Not worse. Simply different. Since August 2010, we’ve been seeking to put different than into play in Fremont.
