First and foremost we want to thank Jesus for all He has done for us, for authoring our story, and for never leaving us on our journey as people,
or as His church.
Kessid Church was formed in April of 2009 with a dream of being a church that did not hold any one person besides Jesus in the limelight.
In short, we want to be a ministry without applause, that moves quietly yet powerfully in our community. Our intention is to positively impact the community and existing area organizations with our time, talent, and resources. While doing this, we want to maintain family as the highest priority after our personal relationships with God and always focus on being a community that honors Christ.
We started with a group of friends and families that believed in this vision of church. We didn’t have a building, equipment, staff, denomination, or any church organization backing us. What we did have was a passion to focus on what we saw as the most important part of a church: being a Christ-focused community. We started from scratch, using what we already had, and most importantly, we prayed. We were blessed to have a number of team members who had prior ministry experience. With that knowledge, experience, and a lot of faith, we soft-launched on April 5th of 2009.
After a successful soft launch, we officially opened our doors at the Firstenburg Center in Vancouver, Washington on October 4, 2009. God blessed our little church and soon it needed more space. We first moved to a facility in Fisher’s Landing, and as we continued to expand God brought us to Endeavour Elementary School. We held services at Endeavour for several years while our staff met in homes or clubhouses because we had no permanent location. Even the copy machine lived at the home of our production volunteer until the beginning of 2015, which was when we settled into a brilliant space we called the Kessid Ministry Center. The Center was home to our church offices and mid-week ministries, but God continued to bless our Sunday gatherings and we outgrew Endeavour. We looked for a new place to hold services, and God guided us to an excellent location at Clark College. We moved our Sunday services to the Gaiser Student Center in Clark College on Easter Sunday of 2015. That facility allowed us to serve our children’s ministry and congregation in ways we couldn’t have imagined!
Our hope is to keep building and stewarding a healthy and vibrant church community where we can raise up and equip the next generation in a way that honors God and prepares them for their own journey…then give it all away to them.
Being a set-up/tear down church that rents a school presented some challenges. One such challenge was being unable to hold baptism services (large bodies of water are frowned upon in college auditoriums.) During the winter of 2016, we were looking for a place to hold a baptism. Someone mentioned that they knew a church with a baptismal that would be willing to host us, which happened to be Main Street Community Church. Little did we know, Main Street was looking to give their building to a younger congregation in town. They just didn’t know who it was they wanted to give it to yet.
Following our service, Pastor Danny was approached by a Main Street elder and asked if we would be interested in having a discussion about inheriting the building. Of course he answered, “Yes, we would love to talk more about that!”
Then, an amazing miracle happened early in 2017. After more prayer, meetings, and promptings of the Holy Spirit, the Main Street Church family unanimously voted “yes” to merge and give the building to us, and the Kessid congregation accepted! Kessid was given, debt-free, a church building with over 30,000 sq. ft. in Uptown Vancouver! After an extensive remodel, we began to hold in-person services in our new church home, Kessid Uptown 111 W 28th St., Vancouver, WA 98660.
In January of 2020 Kessid was approached by another church family here in Clark County, Columbia Christian Church, located across from Columbia River Highschool. Through much prayer, blessing, and meetings between both our church communities, we were excited to announce that we joined with another church family to create the new location of Kessid Columbia 907 NW 99th St. Vancouver, WA 98665!
Collectively, Kessid consists of two in-person locations and an online campus (kessidonline.com). Looking over the past decade of ministry, we could have never prepared for the amazing blessing He has so graciously given us. With a lasting spirit of gratefulness, we will keep following Him, stewarding our resources with wisdom and integrity, and loving the people God brings through all our doors.