About HeavenEarth Church

We exist to make a lasting impact in our community

309 E. Main Street. Whiteland, IN 46184
Sunday Gatherings at 9:30am In-Person & Facebook Live

The HeavenEarth Backstory

After serving in an established church for six years, I (Ross) felt like God had ignited something in my heart and my mind that I couldn’t ignore any longer.

In the spring of 2018, I felt like it was time to take a risk and try to start a different kind of church with people who, perhaps like me, wanted something more with church, but could never seem to find it. Maybe they had given up on the idea that Christian community could be a legitimate source of purpose, healing, justice, and hope.

Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t set out to start the best church ever or a megachurch, or the perfect church. I just felt called to start a better church, one where all kinds of people could gather and take what Jesus says and does very seriously.

What always drew me to Jesus was who he spent most of his time with and what he showed and taught them over and again. He said that the kingdom of heaven was near, like heaven had started to burst into earth and that one day, when the work was finished, heaven and earth would be one.

HeavenEarth.

He did not say that he came to save our souls from hell, so we could go to some paradise resort after we die. (In fact, the word “hell” only appears around thirteen times in the entire Bible.)

Jesus spoke as if heaven can start to fill our lives now, as the Spirit of Jesus fills our hearts and lives now, so that we can join Jesus to build HeavenEarth starting now.

Our HeavenEarth Core Beliefs

We all have different perspectives. We all have different experiences. That is a good thing. We don’t want uniformity, but we do hope for unity in the midst of diversity in our faith community. We hope this narrative of core beliefs offers a place to start for unity as well as an anchoring place for faith.

The point of faith is a life-changing relationship with the Creator of all things.

At the center of faith is a person–a good, loving, powerful, creative being: God. God is the beginning and end of everything. God is life, the One who created all things. Believing something about how the universe was created is not nearly as important as having belief in Who created it: God. Our destiny is found in relationship with this Creator.

God created humankind to enjoy and take care of God’s creation with God.

All that God has made is worth enjoying, respecting, taking care of, and sharing. Humankind is unique as a part of God’s creation, because every human is made in the image of God, equally imprinted with God’s likeness yet uniquely gifted as a part of God’s divine purpose. God’s greatest joy and desire is relationship and partnership with humankind–that God and humans would take care of God’s world together.

Humankind’s abuse of the gift of free will has brought evil and suffering into God’s creation.

God created humans with the ability to freely choose how to live. True relationships require freedom, not control or manipulation. Regrettably, humans have used this gift to look out for themselves and to harm others. So, God’s world is now groaning after generations of human selfishness, greed, deceit, shame, and trauma. Worst of all, some of the most severe abuses of human free will and power have come from people who claim to know God. Even though there is evidence all around us of goodness, our world is now full of suffering, evil, sin, and death.

God’s heart is broken, and yet grace rules God’s heart.

God is heartsick and heartbroken to the point of anger over this. And yet it isn’t anger that prevails. Throughout the Bible, an inspired library of books through which we can discover God’s heart, we see how God keeps pursuing relationships with humans even as they wander away. This is called grace. God gives us grace when we’re running away, grace to help us turn around to God, and grace to help us go forward with God and grow up into the fullness of who God has made us to be.

Jesus Christ–his life, death, and resurrection–is God’s ultimate gift of grace to us.

The ultimate act of grace is that God came to Earth to show us what God’s heart really looks like and to offer us new life with God. God became flesh in the skin of a poor carpenter who lived in a place alongside people most folks thought were worthless. Because of his signs and wonders and teachings and, most of all, because he was raised from the dead after being unjustly and gruesomely crucified like a criminal, his followers believed what Jesus himself said: that Jesus was God’s anointed one, the Messiah or the Christ. Jesus the Christ confronts and overcomes suffering, evil, sin, and death on our behalf. His life, death, and resurrection have initiated God’s heavenly kingdom coming to Earth once and for all. In Jesus’s resurrection, we can know that nothing separates us from God’s love in Jesus Christ.

The good news is that a new creation has begun with Jesus. Heaven is on its way to Earth.

Jesus’ resurrection was just the beginning of something called the New Creation. Jesus came to bring what he called “the kingdom of the heavens” near to Earth. This applies to individual people: Jesus comes to transform our lives so we are new creations. The New Creation applies to everything: The entire earth is going to be transformed so that Jesus’s prayer–God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven–becomes the reality for ever and ever. So if we talk of “going to heaven”, a) heaven is wherever God is and b) we may be surprised to find that eternity ends up being on earth, but not earth as we’ve known it, more like HeavenEarth.

Accepting Jesus’s invitation to believe in him and follow him leads to transformation in us and transformation of our world.

Jesus invites us into a new life with him–a life transformed by God’s grace and a life filled with the same Spirit that raised Jesus. This transformed life happens through something called discipleship. We believe discipleship with Jesus–believing Jesus is the Christ, following him as Lord of the universe, and practicing his way of life–will transform us supernaturally and help us do our part to bring the kingdom of the heavens to earth.

God sends us the Holy Spirit to help us every step of the way.

Jesus may have left earth, though he lives and reigns with the Father (as Jesus referred to God), but we aren’t alone as we try to grow in this transformed life. God’s plan all along was that we, as spiritual beings, would be filled with the Spirit of God. So, Jesus confronts the worst of suffering, evil, death, and sin in our world–to show us how God’s love and power prevail over all these things–and he prepares our lives to receive God’s Spirit, who teaches us the way of Jesus and grows spiritual fruit from our lives from the inside out.

Jesus’s core teachings are simple and about love, but they are not easy.

Echoing commandments from the very beginning of the Bible, Jesus said the two greatest commands are to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. He said that basically everything depends on these two. Elsewhere, he said that his new command is that we love others as he has loved us.
If we are disciples of Jesus, we will grow in spiritual and emotional wholeness such that we love ourselves, God, and others like Jesus.

God’s heart is for the poor, the captives, and the oppressed.

The Library of Scriptures show us that God’s heart is big for people with little rights, representation, and resources. God’s anger burns hottest when humans exploit and abuse other vulnerable humans for personal or corporate gain.

In the end, God’s justice will prevail on Earth, and all things will be made new.

How justice–making things and people right–gets worked out in the end is something that is in Jesus’ job description, not ours. Jesus talks a lot about judgment–how every human will be held accountable for how they lived and what they did with their gifts, especially God’s great gift, Jesus. Unlike our human world, God’s good and perfect judgment will certainly and completely produce justice: all wrongs being made right. Our job–our fulfillment and our joy–is in learning to trust Jesus and practice his way of life in the places where we live, work, learn, and play. Here’s what we can know now: the end will be right and good, because God is right and good, as Jesus shows us.

The Mission and The Values

HeavenEarth Church exists to make a lasting impact in our community by building relationships with all kinds of folks, working in the community and with individuals to help people experience freedom from their burdens, and helping people know and live like Jesus together. We do all this so that our community is transformed for generations to come. Here’s what we value as we try to fulfill our mission.

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We Value YOU

We want to meet you where you are and see you as God’s masterpiece.

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We Value JESUS

We want to fix our eyes on what Jesus says and does and be changed by his Spirit.

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We Value ACTION

We want to learn and make a difference by walking the walk and putting what Jesus says and does into practice.

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We Value PARTNERSHIPS

We want to bless our community through friendships and partnerships.

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We Value RESPONSIBILITY

We want to be grateful, responsible, and loving with everything we are given.

If you want to see what we did last year to fulfill our mission in alignment with our values, check out our Impact Report.

Meet the Staff

Ross Stackhouse and Angela Stackhouse selfie in the woods.

Ross Stackhouse
Pastor

Meet Ross

Emily Holverson
Executive Pastor

Meet Emily

Ashley Walden Owens
Director of OHJ (Operations, Hospitality & Joy)

Meet Ashley

What’s HeavenEarth Spaces Got to Do With It?

The church is not a building, but we do meet in a building every week that has a really cool story. It is an historic building built in 1904 (with an addition built in the 1950s).

In 2019, Whiteland UMC, the former trustees of the building, voted to conclude their ministry. Then, we were presented with the opportunity to utilize the facility.

To make a long story short, we ended up creating a new 501c3 organization with a separate Board of Directors called HeavenEarth Spaces, Inc., whose mission is to create and maintain affordable space for nonprofits and families.

HeavenEarth Spaces became the owner of the building in 2022. HeavenEarth Spaces has started the process of transforming this historic church building into a community center.

With the help of HeavenEarth Spaces, Resources of Hope completed a buildout of the lower level and moved in in July 2022.

HeavenEarth Church has slowly been improving the upper level. The building is used by AA groups, scouts, and other community organizations.

In October 2022, HeavenEarth Church completed the stunning “Tree of Life” mural in partnership with Erin Davis with Love More (paint provided by Johnson County Community Foundation).