Community Transition
Our transition at Jacob's Well
In September 2009, our founding pastor, Tim Keel, left his position as senior pastor so that he and his family could move to New Zealand to begin a different chapter in their lives. Since then, we've taken the opportunity to discover how God may be shaping and forming us in the midst of this transition. Moreover, we sought to listen, both to God and each other and we resolved to turn towards each other so that we could truly be co-journeyers together. As we listened, we also started to form a picture about the next phase of our life together. Some things consistently remain. The DNA of Jacob's Well remains the same, our grounding in Christ remains the same, our passion to join God's mission in the world remains the same, our commitment to discover together as a community remains the same. We also recognize that there are new opportunities and new expressions of what it means to be God's people. For that we're excited and thankful.
Our secondary teaching pastor
As we developed a profile for what we wanted teaching to be at Jacob’s Well, our intention has been to have a teaching team in place who embody our core identity, calling and commitments and who are able to articulate the richness of the gospel as it informs how we fully live as a holistic, missional, Christian community committed to engaging worship, creativity, learning, hospitality and justice around us.
In January we announced that our primary teaching pastor is Tim Keel. Still the elders knew that we needed more than one person to complete our teaching team. So, we are excited to announce our secondary teaching pastor.
Our secondary teaching pastor is Isaac Anderson. Isaac has been a longtime friend of Jacob’s Well. In fact, the first sermon he ever delivered publicly was here. Isaac was our teacher last August and again was with us on Christmas Eve. Currently, he is finishing an MFA in nonfiction at Ohio State University. He will join us this summer and begin his teaching responsibilities on July 31.
We ask that you pray for Isaac as he finishes his thesis and prepares to transition from the world of academia in Columbus, Ohio back into a church role in Kansas City. In Isaac’s own words, “I am honored and thrilled to be joining you in my new role and I cannot think of a better place to do it than at Jacob’s Well.”
We couldn’t agree more!
Our new life together
Our community has been on such an eventful and transformative journey since September 2009. In the midst of it, we are grateful for God's sustaining grace and for the many people in the community who have declared, by their presence, that Jacob's Well is definitively all of us seeking God together.
So two years after our community transition began, we are a new people with the same DNA. As a new people, we will begin to live and write a new chapter in the life of Jacob's Well with Tim and Isaac as our teaching team, with the elders serving as leaders who are responsible for the broad and systemic functions of the church, with staff who daily intercede and interact with and on behalf of individual members of our community and with the entire community engaged in God's mission in the world.
As this new chapter unfolds, we ask that you continue to pray for Jacob's Well; that we are a cruciform community intent upon pursuing God wherever God may lead us. In this, may the boundless grace of God continue to fill us, shape us and surprise us beyond our wildest imaginations!