Our Story
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Our Beginnings
Started in
1950
In 1950 Dwight Johnson started our church at 29th and Strong Ave in the Argentine district of Kansas City, KS. The famous flood of 1951 destroyed the original location, and the church moved to the "High-Land" area of KCKS at the "Crest" of the hill - Hence the name of the subdivision (Highland Crest), and he named the new building Crest Bible Church. Dwight pastored Crest for the next 30 years. From 1980-1993 several pastors oversaw Crest until 1994, when Greg Axe was called to be Senior Pastor. Greg served as Senior Pastor for the next 30 years until, in 2024, he decided to step back to Associate Pastor, and allow his longtime and very gifted friend, Kenny Morgan to take over as lead pastor.
Our Historic Building
The building in which Crest Bible Church meets has a very historic civil rights past. Built in 1947, the South Park School opened as a segregated white only school. In 1949, Black families petitioned the Kansas Supreme Court, who upheld a state law prohibiting segregation in small towns, ruling in favor of admitting black children to South Park Elementary. This South Park legal case became an important predecessor to the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit, which would make school segregation illegal nationwide.
South Park School was used as an integrated elementary school from 1949 until closed in 2001, when the Shawnee Mission School District replaced it with a new school. Crest Bible Church then purchased South Park in 2002 and has been using it since that time.
