OUR STORY

Renew Church LA launched on April 5, 2015 (Easter) with a beautiful mission: “to renew a broken people who will renew a broken city through the Gospel of Jesus.”

We aspired to be an authentic community of broken people eagerly seeking gospel renewal for ourselves and the city. In the 8 ensuing years, we faithfully lived out this mission, and witnessed this little family birthed in Culver City become an incredibly diverse, inclusive, healing, gospel-centered church that has deeply impacted the lives of many on the Westside and throughout greater Los Angeles.

The God stories we have experienced over these last 8 years are too many to count. But the community itself is perhaps the greatest God story. On any given Sunday, we look across the church, and there are people of every color, culture and background. At Renew, it is normal to see the affluent worshiping next to the unhoused; ‘silicon-beachers’ embracing the recently incarcerated; college students doing life with families. Our community always was and is a beautiful riot.

The most common refrain we would hear about the church was that Renew welcomed you “as you really are.” We actually introduced ourselves to visitors as  a “hospital church rather than a museum”, for a hospital is a place for broken, wounded people seeking healing. A museum, in contrast, is a place for perfect looking specimens that are dead and stuffed behind glass. For 8 years, we were unapologetically a hospital church, a refuge for the broken, a place of renewal and healing. And God did so many beautiful things…