The Church of the Redeemer will INVITE ALL to know and serve Jesus as part of our faith community and to REACH OUT with love and support to those in need.

We are an Episcopal church in the Diocese of Southern Ohio, part of the nationwide Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America. Our mission statement states that we "will invite all to know and serve Jesus as part of our faith community and to reach out with love and support to those in need. We are an open, inviting community; we invite you to join us in our commitment to Jesus Christ and in our reaching out to serve Christ in others within our community and beyond our walls. We are guided in our common life by our Baptismal Covenant, a vow taken by us (or on our behalf) at our Baptism.

At the Church of the Redeemer, spirituality is an act of engagement with God, with fellow parishioners and with the world outside the church. This activism takes its cue from a question that the congregation, under the guidance of two successive rectors, has been asking for a generation: “Do you see God in everything you do?” By this process of discernment, the Redeemer’s people have come to a new awareness of – and new relationship to – God. It is recognition that old ways of going do not always apply to new situations, and that if one is to serve his/her community effectively, one has to be creatively engaged with God. That is how you know what direction he would have you take. At the Redeemer, this is called “listening to the Spirit.”

While members of the congregation do not always see eye to eye – politically, theologically, or even on how they might best observe their religion – rector Bruce Freeman celebrates their diversity. It is a part of the Redeemer’s calling, he says, to be a place of conversation, discussion, vision and action. Freeman cites Desmond Tutu’s ubuntu theology as an influence. Roughly translated, ubuntu means “I cannot be without you,” and Freeman wants his church members to be “passionate” in talking out their differences with one another and with the community. As Tutu says, “Africans believe a person is a person through other persons.”

The Church of the Redeemer is also deeply schooled in scripture. For more than twenty years, parishioners have studied the Bible, talked theology, argued faith and drawn connections between Old and NewTestament stories and contemporary ethical issues. This intellectual liveliness, coupled with prayer, becomes the “spiritual glue” that holds them together. The learning goes beyond information gathering; it becomes a “spiritual formation” that nurtures compassion and justice. Says Diana Butler Bass, whose recent book, Christianity for the Rest of Us, examines what is going right at mainline Protestant churches across the country, “Bible study is a ‘pathway’ through the mind that transforms the heart.”

Finally, Bruce Freeman likes to talk about his church’s awesome capacity for change. “Redeemer is called to new people, new communities, new ways of living,” he says. For both congregation and clergy, change is a way of life. People here don’t speak of being. They speak of becoming, and that means listening to what God is saying and responding accordingly.

Says Diana Butler Bass, "Church of the Redeemer reconfigured itself as a pilgrimage community, a place of personal transformation based in the life of study, prayer, and discerning the work of the Holy Spirit." Embrace of change is integral to that pilgrimage. Along with discernment, diversity, and scripture, it makes renewal -- ongoing, constant, spiritual renewal -- the defining feature of life in this church.

We are located at:

2944 Erie Avenue in Cincinnati, Ohio
Telephone: 513-321-6700
FAX: 513-533-5989