Westside Deaf Church | Generosity Story

Your generosity fuels all of Westside's efforts to make disciples, equip families, and share Christ's love here and around the world.

Hey God, I just thank you so much for this amazing day and I thank you for Kevin and his leadership and just the burden that he and his wife have carried for this amazing group of people and I just pray today is wind in the sails of my brother and I pray today that we are going to make a difference like never before in Kansas City and around the world for a group of people you deeply love. We thank you Father. Give him your mercy and your grace and your wisdom and your strength. Amen.

What it means for us to have a place, really a partnership here at Westside, I think is the opportunity that it represents to train more Deaf leaders, reach more Deaf people, send more Deaf people to the mission field. I mean that's the big goal.

Well, when I attended college, I attended a church that had a Deaf ministry, which I knew nothing about. I was just mesmerized by the language. It was just beautiful, especially with the songs. At the end of the message, the pastor gave an invitation and one of the Deaf ladies that was there that Sunday came forward to accept Jesus. I realized that it was this beautiful language that God was using to bring her into a relationship with Him and so from there I was hooked. I couldn't help but to say, "God, use my hands in this way if you can to bring people to You."

Westside, you may recall a couple of months ago that we did this thing called the trust project and I gave each one of you a dollar of my own money to teach you an important principle of stewardship and invited you to bring it back the next week. Well, you not only brought back my money, but you brought it back three-fold. Well we felt in our heart that we should give it to the Deaf church, so 100% went to the Deaf church and that is how they have gotten started.

The first thing that I want to do Kevin, is I want to say thank you. I want to say thank you on behalf of the congregation for standing in the gap for a group of people that we are learning more about- that struggle. They are a group of people that have been abandoned. They're often overlooked, they struggle to trust us and they're a group of people that often don't have a voice and they have been abused. And you have really worked hard and have sacrificed as a family and we want to say thank you.

I think just the benefit of having the children's program is going to draw in Deaf couples with young kids.
Usually families are not completely deaf. There's Deaf parents and they have hearing children, or they're Deaf children and they have hearing parents and the blend of both the Westside Church with the Deaf church offers these families so much more.

I want to say thank you guys for your generosity. Thank you most of all for your prayers and thank you for being a welcoming place where this partnership could even take place. We're looking forward to being a part of this church.

And Westside gets the great opportunity of reaching a very unreached people group.

Deaf people are the largest unreached people group in the world. And there's nobody better to reach the Deaf than the Deaf. And so the more we can train up and the more we can send, the more we can do together.

I mean, you are a generous people, not only for your support of the Deaf community and the starting of their church, but your support of our ministry to the lost, the last, the least here in Kansas City and around the world. You are amazing.