Our Story
Our journey as a local non-denominational church began almost 50 years ago with a group of individuals on a mission to be good news in Northern Kentucky. A group of people began meeting on Sundays, in September of 1967, in an Elementary School (Crescent Springs) and began calling themselves “Lakeside Christian Church”. A few years later, In 1970, Lakeside hired their first full-time Senior Minister, John Russell. He went on to serve Lakeside for 40 years and under his leadership we expanded our Buttermilk Pike facility three times to make room for those who called Lakeside their home church.
In 2010 when John Russell retired, he passed the baton to a new Lead Pastor, Jamie Snyder who continued to lead our church to "Love Jesus, love like Jesus, and help others do the same." As God continued to guide Jamie and our leadership, Lakeside embraced a new strategy and launched its first “multi-site” campus in Hebron KY, in December of 2013. Then, through a unique opportunity of another local church donating their facility, a third campus launched in Taylor Mill in the Fall of 2015. We experienced exponential growth as a 3 campus church and continued to see lives being changed through the good news of Jesus Christ.
In 2021, Jamie Snyder and his family felt the call to become church planters and made their way to southern Florida to begin a new chapter and help start a new church there. Travis Whalen, a longtime staff member and gifted preacher, was identified as our next Lead Pastor. Not long after Travis began leading our church, he and our elders began feeling the sense that God was leading us to make some changes to our strategy in reaching Northern Kentucky and beyond. Through months of prayer, fasting, and seeking wise counsel, a couple of major decisions were announced. First, our Taylor Mill location would no longer be a Lakeside campus. We identified another like minded church who was interested in taking over that building and Lakeside became a two campus church. Not long after that, it was also decided that we would shift from being a “multi-site” church (one church in now two locations) to a church that plants other churches. Our hope is that our Hebron location will soon become its own independent body and grow like before as it continues to meet the needs of that community in fresh and life-giving ways. And we believe that this won’t be the only church that Lakeside “plants” as we continue to discern where God is leading us.
While the history of Lakeside is special to us, this brief summary doesn't capture all that God has been up to in our story. Marriages are being reconciled, addictions are being broken, the hungry are being fed, offenses are being forgiven, orphans are being welcomed into families, scars are being healed, significance and value is being restored, souls are being redeemed, and people are discovering what truly living means. Jesus IS who He said He was and He will always be! We’re so excited that you’re reading all of this and that our story is now intersecting with yours. We can’t wait to meet you and explore where you may now fit into what God is still doing here at Lakeside Christian Church!