Redeemer Church plant putting down roots in Canyon Country
May 2 - Elizabeth Powell
When Mark and Michelle Spansel moved back to the Santa Clarita Valley from their church in Ohio in 2019, they little knew that God was preparing them and a group of other believers to plant a church in Canyon Country five years later.
“We weren’t sure what was next,” Mark Spansel said. “I was praying and looking at churches all over the country. It became apparent that it wouldn’t be the best decision just to immediately jump into another church situation as the lead pastor where we didn’t know anybody.”
Through an old friend, the Lord opened the door for Spansel, a graduate from TMS nearly 20 years prior, to serve as a pastor of discipleship at Crossroads Community Church.
Over the next few years, members and elders in their church, like John and Raimi Book, Hugh Jackson and Shane Critser, began to have conversations about what it would look like to plant a church. It was when the Spansels attended the Southern Baptist Association’s Send Network church planting assessment that the desire to start a church plant began to cement.
In the fall of 2023, a group of like-minded members from Crossroads began to meet in the Spansel’s backyard every few weeks to think through and pray about planting a new church.
One of those members was Jefferson Henson, assistant professor of communication at TMU and founder of Axia Ministries. Henson and his wife, Shannon, have six children, four of whom they adopted during their 10-years as foster parents. They had also been involved in inner-city church planting for five years in South L.A. before moving to Santa Clarita.
The Lord brought the Hensons to Crossroads, where their family continued to grow and they transitioned from foster parents to a position of mentoring other foster families. Through partnering with Crossroads, they founded Axia Ministries in 2023, which equips and cares for foster families and vulnerable children in Santa Clarita.
It was also through Crossroads that Henson met Spansel and the other members interested in planting a church — something he’d been a part of before.
The Hensons had moved to Santa Clarita after a hard parting with the church in South L.A., due to leadership disagreements in the process of planting and growing. To be involved in another church plant would not be an easy decision.
“It did make us a little gun-shy,” Henson recalled.
Henson remembers walking into the first interest meeting about starting Redeemer.
“I just had this really deep sadness about it,” he said. “I think it both made it hard to commit, but also exciting because we knew what it could be.”
In February of 2024, the group began to meet on Sunday mornings, led by Spansel, Book, Critser and Jackson.
“For us to actually be a church, we need members and elders,” Spansel said. “So we talked through membership, we went through a process for four of us as elders.”
Redeemer became an “official” church in August of 2024, six months after they first began meeting.
For Henson, the process of deciding to transition to Redeemer took time. His family, facing unique challenges, had already become rooted and identified with Crossroads.
“It’s really easy for my wife and I to see our family as being burdensome to other people just because there’s a lot of time demands, a lot of physical demands,” Henson explained. “And so to go to a church plant that is just starting out a Sunday school that only has a couple Sunday school workers… that’s just a big transition…and almost like de facto obligating them to care for us.”
Shepherding his family through a season of change brought a lot of conversations and prayer, especially with their older children who struggled to process the change. Still, after much prayer and discussion, the Hensons showed up to the first meeting of the church plant.
“We started going every other week,” Henson said.
Soon, it became every week. The family gradually began to “latch on to the community” at Redeemer. After about two months, they finally committed to being members.
“Now that we’ve moved, we’re very, very happy and we do feel part of the community,” Henson said. “It doesn’t feel as burdensome or hard.”
Redeemer now has about 70 members, with 100–120 attending on a typical Sunday. The congregation meets at Golden Valley High School in the theater — which, Spansel noted, is a built-in mission field.
“We wanted to reach the east side of the valley; there’s fewer churches over there,” Spansel said. “It tends to be part of the valley that maybe has some more challenges economically.”
Golden Valley High School is one of three Title I schools in Santa Clarita, serving low-income students from diverse backgrounds, including children who are homeless and "at-risk" families.
While not having a building of their own comes with challenges, Spansel and the leadership at Redeemer see the partnership with the high school as a blessing. Being in the school embeds the church body into the community, opening doors for what Spansel calls “kingdom relationships” and opportunities to share the gospel and minister to the needs of those around them.
“Some of us have become volunteers through the school district so we can be on campus and help with whatever they need,” he said. “It means a lot to them that we want to be there — we’re not just renters. And so we’ve found ways to be a part of projects they’re doing.”
Recently, the church sponsored lunch for a social services event that the school hosted in an effort to serve both the school and the families in the community.
“We’re praying that those relationships bear fruit in time, that some of the families and the administration will perhaps begin to come to the church and be a part of what we’re doing,” Spansel said.
The effort isn’t purely social, Spansel clarified. He pointed to the passage in Jeremiah where God instructs his exiled people in Babylon to plant vineyards, buy homes and work for the good of the city rather than avoiding the Babylonians.
“We have that attitude sometimes that says, ‘You guys need to get your act together…’ that sense that we’re on this crusade to fix the broken world,” Spansel said, “as opposed to, ‘We’re on a mission to hold high the beauty of Jesus,’ and for people to get to see that there is a better way than trusting in themselves.”
Pursuing this Christ-centered mission looks like worshiping together and studying God’s Word and discipling one another through intentional relationships within the church. It also looks like working for the good of the city, a key distinctive at Redeemer, which includes both speaking the gospel to meet spiritual need as well as meeting other everyday needs.
Sometimes that means serving lunch for the school. Another avenue of ministry is Redeemer’s partners with Axia Ministries via the Hensons in order to better care for the vulnerable children and foster families in their community.
“We have to be a non-religious non-profit to be able to be where we’re at in the schools,” Henson explained. “A part of the way that we signal and we show people that we’re Christian is our partnership with churches… Redeemer has been, from the beginning, they’ve wanted a more formal partnership and support, and they’ve been absolutely amazing in caring for us.”
Spansel calls the Santa Clarita Valley, in the words of Tim Keller, a “gospel ecosystem,” where every church partners together as God has uniquely called and equipped them, every believer in every school, every ministry and every organization working together as God’s people for the sake of his name.
“We’re all needed in the different parts we play within the larger church kingdom, such that it’s not competition, it’s cooperation,” Spansel said. “And may God bring revival so that... we would make a difference in the lostness in Santa Clarita.”