WHO WE ARE
Redeemer is a church in Parkersburg, WV. We are a redeemed community living out the gospel where life and culture meet. How do we do this? We Connect to Christ, Grow in Community and Serve Others.
Our story begins with folks who have encountered the grace of Jesus and are deeply committed to growing together in their love for God. This love compels us to serve the people in our city.
From the center of the city, the gospel will be lived out in neighborhoods and spread in all directions. This is a picture of what the gospel does in our lives. Church is not an additional activity to end the week but the central hub of our life together. We come together to center our lives in Jesus as we begin the week.
The grace of Christ, once experienced and believed, will impact the whole life of the believer. Our discipleship will cultivate a faith that transforms us into missional living. Missional Living means people provoked to transform the ugliness of culture rather than be offended by it. We will experience restoration in our lives, community, and workplace as Christ makes all things new.
To learn more about what drives this work and how we are to be formed into the community of God, listen to our Core Values sermon series.
HISTORY
While serving as an Associate Pastor at The River in Blacksburg, VA, Jim Sallie and his wife Becci, received a call from God to go “home” to plant a new church. Parkersburg is home to Jim and Becci, who both graduated from Parkersburg South High School. After 26 years in Virginia, they are settled back in Parkersburg.
God is gathering a people for this work here in Parkersburg. Since Fall 2012, a group has met regularly, with monthly preview services beginning August 2013 and weekly Life Group meetings throughout. In February 2015, we began weekly evening worship services as Lent began. A few months later, we moved to Sunday morning worship services in a former Jewish Temple on 20th Street in August of 2015. After a year there, we moved to 2210 Fairview Ave. (Parkview UMC), where we now meet, in the midst of the city God has called us to serve.
Rwanda Mission to West Virginia
In a groundbreaking response to the spiritual apathy and liberalism sweeping the United States, orthodox leaders of the Anglican Church acted to provide hope by establishing the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA). AMiA was originally established as a missionary outreach to the United States sanctioned jointly by the Anglican archbishops for Rwanda and Southeast Asia. It’s mission in the U.S. was to glorify God by building an alliance of congregations committed to gathering, planting, and serving dynamic churches in the Anglican tradition. In January 2000, the Anglican archbishops consecrated two Americans as missionary bishops to the United States. This allowed churches to stay connected to the world wide Anglican communion while having oversight from Rwanda.
When the spiritual leaders of AMiA precipitously pulled out of Anglican Church of Rwanda (PEAR) in December of 2012, the clergy and congregations who desired to stay canonically resident in Rwanda and in full jurisdiction with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), continued as a missionary district of PEAR to the United States and were named PEARUSA.
Four years later, in 2016, the PEAR College of Bishops decided that the ACNA (which they helped to create) was mature with godly leadership; there was no longer a need for Rwandan oversight of the U.S. churches from 6300 miles away. So, PEAR gave the PEARUSA churches to the full and direct canonical oversight of the ACNA College of Bishops. Redeemer became a member of a new ACNA diocese named Christ Our Hope. Christ Our Hope diocese has member churches from North Carolina to Maine and is headquartered in Chapel Hill, NC.
This is how Pastor Sallie is a Rwandan clergy serving West Virginia. After years of the United States sending missionaries to Africa, Africa is now the center for Christianity’s growth and Rwanda has enabled missionaries to serve the U. S. with the orthodox Christian faith once delivered to the saints.
