ABOUT

Our Father Abraham is a ministry of Lon Wiksell, D.Min, and Kingdom Living, a congregation of Messianic Jews and Gentiles in the Kansas City area. Our mission is to be a vital resource for people of all backgrounds to understand the Hebraic Roots, and essential Jewishness of the Christian faith.

We accomplish this through teaching, worship, advocacy, and celebration of the Jewish sabbath and other festivals. This site is our new online portal for teaching resources and promotion of our events, and we need your help!

We’re looking for like-minded individuals and organizations to contribute finances and written resources to help make this a comprehensive learning destination for people all around the world. Please click the button below to connect with us, and find out how you can help make this vision a reality.


WHY IT MATTERS

Whenever we, as humans, experience true immersion, we come away changed. Immersion is another word for Baptism, which is one of the primary sacraments of the Church. When a new believer experiences this sacrament, he or she comes up out of the water as a new person. Although the waters of immersion have no inherent miraculous power, they allow us to feel the spiritual renewal with our physical senses, and associate the feeling of cleansing and refreshment with God’s transforming work in our hearts.

The passion of Our Father Abraham is to immerse ourselves in the original cultural context of Scripture. We discovered years ago that this immersion results in something profound and permanent. We saw word pictures that could not be unseen. Learned deep insights that could not be unlearned. We could related to Yeshua, the disciples, and indeed all the characters in Scripture, in a new and stronger way.

It’s a process that will never end for us. Every time we think we finally understand a teaching of Yeshua in its fullest, or wrap our heads all the way around a parable, we inevitably realize there’s another layer beneath it.

Sometimes these discoveries cause delight, and sometimes dismay. But taken together, they’ve made us who we are. And they’ve shown us a picture of a Master Craftsman who delights in the brilliant threads he weaves into a stunning tapestry of grace. And when we find and follow our own threads through his intricate patterns, we know in our hearts that he put them there for a reason. When all is said and done, he leaves no loose ends, including ours.
This is the vision we cast for Our Father Abraham. God has immersed us in his grand story of redemption, but so few can really see it. We just want to show you, no matter your background, the thread that runs from Creation to Israel to Yeshua to you. And once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. Every relationship, every current event, every personal experience, is seen in a whole new light.

You matter to God. It takes one second to say, and a lifetime to understand. But what kind of a life would this be without it?


WHO WE ARE

Our Father Abraham got its start in 2017 with Father-Son duo Lon Wiksell and Ryan Wiksell. Lon is the teacher and expert in Messianic Jewish studies, and Ryan is the editor, designer and marketer. They are currently the producers of all content on this site, but stay with us as the organization grows, and more voices are added to the mix.

Lon Wiksell

Lon A. Wiksell, D.Min

Executive Director

Originally from Sioux City, Iowa, Lon grew up in church as the son of Pentecostal pastors. He completed his first two years of college in Iowa before moving to Springfield Missouri and working for Evangel University where he met his wife Fran. He later worked for Drury University and Missouri State University, where he also completed his BS and MBA. In 1988 they moved to Tulsa where Lon studied at Oral Roberts University and received his MDiv in 1992. In 2013 he received his Doctorate of Ministry in Messianic Jewish Studies from The King’s University.

Lon and Fran were co-founders and co-leaders of Or HaOlam Messianic Congregation from 1995 to 2002. They then went on to start House of Messiah in 2004, devoted to understanding the words of Yeshua within their historical context and celebrating the seven biblical festivals as a pattern of personal and community life. Lon and Fran have now merged House of Messiah with Kingdom Living, and are also highly involved in organizing our city-wide Biblical festivals.

Email Lon

Ryan Wiksell

Ryan Wiksell

Development Director

Ryan was raised in the Assemblies of God in Northeastern Oklahoma, and joined the Messianic Jewish movement with his family in Kansas City during his high school and college years. A personal call to ministry led him to study music and theology at Evangel University. Doors were then opened for him to serve in various Southern Baptist churches, as he held positions of music leadership and communications support. Ryan married Christina in 2003, and shortly thereafter they pursued a call to plant a grassroots independent church in downtown Springfield, MO, called The Front Porch. After this effort drew to a close in 2011, they sought out a new spiritual family, which they found in Christ Episcopal Church in Springfield.

Today, Ryan and Christina are blessed to be the parents of twin two year-olds Asher and Anya. In the summer of 2018 they will relocate to Alexandria, Virginia, for Ryan to enroll in the Master of Divinity program at Virginia Theological Seminary.

Email Ryan