Church aims to expand worship opportunities around Kirkwood

Try to find a church near Kirkwood Community College and you're going to have to drive a ways.

Kirkwood, which sits just south of Highway 30 in southwest Cedar Rapids, and the neighborhoods around it are “underserved” when it comes to worship opportunities, the Rev. Kent Landhuis said.

Landhuis and his congregation at Cedar Hills Community Church, 6455 E Ave. NW, want to change that. They are starting The Bridge at 10 a.m. Sunday - “10/10/10 at 10” - on the Kirkwood campus.

“One of the fun things about this is you get to get in on this from the ground floor,” he said. “You get to come in and watch this hopefully grow.”

The community college, at 6301 Kirkwood Blvd. SW, is more than two miles from the closest church, Hus Presbyterian, 2808 Schaeffer Dr. SW. It's three miles to Living Waters Kingdom Church or Hope Lutheran Church, and four miles to Asbury United Methodist Church.

The plan is not to make The Bridge a satellite offering of Cedar Hills, Landhuis said, but instead to get a congregation growing well enough that it can be its own independent church.

“Cedar Hills will be like the ‘mother' but we hope to make this its own congregation,” he said.

For now, the congregation will meet in Ballrooms A and F at the new Kirkwood Hotel. Landhuis said he hoped it would become self-sustaining so the congregation could determine whether to remain there or find its own building. He hopes the services will be filled with people who live nearby.

“We feel like a congregation should be a mirror of the community it serves,” Landhuis said. He said he'd like to see a combined congregation of Kirkwood college students and families from area neighborhoods.

Additionally, he said the congregation isn't reaching out to just those who have a Christian background.

“We're trying to be very intentional about inviting people in who maybe don't have a belief system or who maybe aren't sure if they believe,” he said. “We want to reach out to those who are maybe on an exploration of faith.”

Landhuis said the church has planned 12 services but hopes there will be many more.

“Our hope is that it gets to a point that we can ‘pass the baton' to the new congregation and they can make it their own,” he said.