Lighthouse Community Church

On September 7, 1999 Daren Busenitz moved into the Oaklawn community in South Wichita. This was to be the target area for World Impact Wichita’s next church plant. Matt and Angie Penner and Lynn Carey were also missionaries who began to get more involved in the ministry to kids and teens in Oaklawn. Soon, Scott Edgren joined the Oaklawn ministry and together these individuals formed the first church plant team led by Daren (later, Audrey Hanneman would join the team). The church plant team went through World Impact’s first church plant school, which was five days of intense planning, prayer, and preparation for the task of planting a church in Oaklawn, which culminated with a joyful commissioning on March 29, 2000.

For the next five years the team worked hard in kids clubs, teen clubs, family outreaches, adult Bible studies and prayer meetings as they began to work toward launching a church. The church officially got started when a family in the community, Sam and Angie Valdez, opened up their home for a weekly fellowship. A second fellowship also started on a different night and soon the two fellowships merged to form Lighthouse Community Church, which first met in the Oaklawn Community Center and then moved to the Baptist church building in Oaklawn where the church resides today. (Lighthouse now owns the building.) In 2005, the team began to transition out of leadership and later in January, 2008, Pastor Jerry Willhite, a TUMI graduate, was called to be the pastor. Jerry and his wife Erlene now pastor and lead this growing church that is actively evangelizing, discipling, and training leaders to start more churches in South Wichita!