OUR STORY

Southeast started in an apartment living room in 2011 when our founding pastor, Ryan, and his wife, Jill, gathered a group of friends together and dreamed about a new kind of church in Indianapolis.

Having graduated from Franklin Central High School in 1998, starting Southeast was all about coming home helping people looking for a new kind of church find a place to belong. A lot of the focus early on was about helping people find a church after giving up on the idea of church.

A lot of people today talk about this as deconstructing faith. Language changes, but the need for a different kind of church, one that redefines church continues to be a need. For a long time church has been defined with words like anti-science, judgmental, and political.

There’s got to be a better way to be the church. The questions that drove us in the beginning, drive us today. What if we can reconstruct our faith and redefine the word church with words like family, goodness, and love? That’s why we exist and why our mission is to explore the way of Jesus as we learn to love God, love others, and bring life to our community.

The group in that living room soon moved gatherings to a bar, then to a conference center, to a theater, and now at a school. Wherever we go, we seek to create a home for people looking for a different kind of church where all are welcome to explore the way of Jesus.