There are about 40 inmates in all, every one sporting a blue shirt. They’ve been filing slowly into a stuffy room under harsh fluorescent lighting in the basement of the Lansing Correctional Facility’s maximum security unit — max, as they call it for short.

There isn’t air conditioning in this room, a few of the inmates point out. Just a couple of fans. They carry chair after chair through the corridor-like space that warms slowly as more and more of them plant themselves on either side of two televisions set up in the middle.

Chatter fills the room. Small talk. Polite nods. Catching up. Learning names. The kind of interactions you’d expect in a grocery store, maybe, or an elevator.

Then the voices quiet, except for one. In prayer.

Gerry Lewis bows his head, speaking quietly but firmly enough so his voice carries throughout the large room and over the whirring of the fans. Other heads follow suit, dropping in unison to bend toward the floor, closing their eyes and opening them again with a full-throated chorus of “Amen!” at the end.

Soon, the inmates will begin watching a video about the life of Jesus Christ. They’ll finish that and file out of the room to meet in small groups of seven or eight men and a pair of volunteers to talk about Christianity. Not all of them are Christian — that’s not a prerequisite to be part of this group. Some have different faiths. Some say they don’t believe in anything at all.

Then they’ll go back to their cells, but not before most say a quick goodnight and give a firm handshake — and an occasional hug — to Lewis and his volunteers.

The men who arrived on that drizzly Monday evening are part of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection’s prison ministry. It’s Lewis’ brainchild, a suggestion from 2004 that came to life about seven years ago. The group works with Brothers in Blue, a program that prepares inmates for life in the world beyond the concrete walls of Lansing Correctional Facility by teaching them about things like fatherhood, money management, job skills — and religion.

The ministry work of the church takes its people into basement rooms with fluorescent lights and no air conditioning every week, into the embraces of men whose crimes they choose not to learn about right away because everyone is a child of God.

It takes them into schools just miles from where they live, schools filled with students who might not have enough to eat over the weekends when school lunches can’t help them get by.

It takes them far away from the suburban sprawl or the downtown high-rises of Kansas City to Haiti and Malawi and Honduras and Jamaica to shovel concrete or give children basic medical examinations.

It takes a lot of people to pull off what they do. But raw numbers aren’t a problem for Church of the Resurrection: More than 15,000 church-goers attend four campuses sprawled across the Kansas City area. Thousands of them have left their mark through missions work over the years in whatever way they can.

Almost everyone you talk to nods knowingly when the word “megachurch” comes up. That word has had its fair share of criticism, garnering something of a negative reputation and summoning images of mechanized, army-like congregations packed into auditoriums the size of football fields.

But being “that big church” isn’t at all what they’re striving to be — though that’s the label they sometimes hear. This isn’t about size. It’s not even about evangelism or conversion.

It’s about leaving a footprint.

**

On Oct. 6, 1990, about 100 people gathered in McGilley Funeral Home for services led by Adam Hamilton, a dynamic young pastor from Southern Methodist University’s theology school.

Two years later, that number had jumped to 230, prompting a change of venue to the gym of Leawood Elementary School. That same year, Brownsville, Texas, became the growing congregation’s first mission trip.

The next year, Matthew’s Ministry began to give families with developmentally disabled children and adults a place to worship. Five years after that, their mission work went global.

Now, it’s coming up on the 22nd anniversary of the day those 100 people met for the first time to start a new house of worship.

It’s quite the dichotomy: Members say that Church of the Resurrection is larger than life and as intimate as the group of 100 who started it.

In that time, the congregation has built an enormous home campus in Leawood. It’s impossible to miss the buildings, even from a good distance away — driving down Roe Avenue gives you a sense of the expanse of the grounds. On your first visit, you’d probably find yourself in need of someone to guide you from building to building and along the labyrinthine hallways.

The growing didn’t stop in Leawood. The church has a branch that found a permanent home downtown last October, though it’s been around in a couple of buildings since 2009. Another campus opened in Olathe under the name Resurrection West in 2006 and also moved to its own building last year. Still another campus began in Blue Springs in 2010. Each of these satellites has Sunday services that stream Hamilton’s sermons live from Leawood or feature another pastor — or sometimes both.

Sitting in a packed sanctuary with hundreds of other people in Leawood, listening to the reverberations echoing in the space as the Lord’s Prayer is on everyone’s lips, it’s easy to wonder if people feel lost in a congregation the size of a small town, on a campus that seems like it should have its own zip code.

“You don’t really feel that way. It’s amazing,” says Rita Malone, who’s been with the church for three years. “You feel very included, like you can take part in whatever you want, ask any questions you want to. You can just do as you want to, and you’ll still be loved.”

“It’s a place that doesn’t really judge whether you’re atheist or not,” says Addi Stewart, a 16-year-old high school sophomore who — according to a few of the church’s older volunteers — is one of the most dedicated young people in the congregation. “If you come here, you’re going to be welcome no matter what.”

If you don’t come to church five times in a row, says five-year congregation member Mary Lou Finch, someone will call you.

Attendance is taken every week at every service, with separate sign-in cards for returning congregation members and new ones. You might get a squeeze on the arm and a warm “Welcome!” from the woman next to you if you fill out a new member card at the relatively small 7:45 a.m. service inside the Wesley Covenant Chapel on the Leawood campus.

At Rez Downtown, the church that grew within the open-face brick walls of the old Crosstown Station on McGee Street, you’re probably going to shake hands with everyone sitting around you at the 10:45 a.m. service after a band — complete with electric guitars and drums — sings a few songs of praise as people filter into the space that could pass as its former self with concert posters still lining the walls.

Missions program director Jeanna Repass arrived at Church of the Resurrection from a traditional, normal-sized Lutheran congregation, curious to see what she’d encounter.

“What you find very luckily is that we’re a very large church made up of a very small people,” she said.

A smallness that comes, in part, from the host of ministries that send the congregation from the sanctuaries to the schools, the prisons and the stores for holiday gifts and canned goods and bed linens. A smallness that comes from the small groups the church helps its congregation to form.

“In the small groups, they learn about each other, about what’s going on in everyone’s lives,” said Len Pfeifer, who works closely with Matthew’s Ministry. “It’s surprising. If you sit in the auditorium upstairs, there’s thousands of people who come here every weekend. But this” — he motioned to the basement operation where groups of volunteers were stuffing backpacks to deliver to elementary schools for children who would otherwise go hungry over weekends — “is where we connect.”

**

In a curious, circular way, it’s possible that the very thing that makes the church seem small may actually be helping it get even bigger.

The programs handed out at services and the inserts within are covered in ways to give back — be it with time, money or both. The church’s website lists the ministry options its congregation has to choose from.

Beds. Furnishings. Cars. Computers. Clothing. Food. Tutoring. Summer reading. Foster and adoptive care. Prison. Human trafficking.

And those are just the options in Kansas City. Should you want to travel the world with Church of the Resurrection, there’s a separate page for that..

For those who take it upon themselves to get involved, it seems likely that the promise of having this many people behind any given cause is a big draw.

“It’s got a lot more opportunities, and I think that’s the reason that so many people stick with this church,” said Addi Stewart.

“I think one of the reasons the church is so large is because they do projects like this,” said Malone, who volunteers with the Backpacks for Hunger ministry. “They outreach to the community.”

“The church is not so big and so faceless that we don’t have the opportunity to do these things,” said Ed Ost, another Backpacks for Hunger volunteer who’s been with the church for seven or eight years now. “We really do. If you look at the bulletin, you’ll see a hundred different things. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why the church is so big.”

As pervasive as the attitude of service is within these walls, it’s not the first thing the church asks for. The first thing is to show up — “Just come and come back,” Repass says.

**

With a backpack strapped to her chest, Mary Tostenson walked down a row of large tubs filled with trail mix, breakfast bars, cookies, crackers and pretzels.

She called out instructions to the 50 or so volunteers gathered on a Wednesday night to stuff these bags, each bearing a laminated label with the name of a student, a teacher and any allergies. The volunteers gathered in the cavernous foyer upstairs in one of the church’s Leawood campus buildings, their voices echoing near the church’s Spring Cafe — staffed by volunteers serving food made by those involved with Matthew’s Ministry — before being herded to a basement workshop by Tostenson, who’s on the church staff coordinating local ministries.

Slowly, two lines formed, and an assembly line operation began. Volunteers mirrored Tostenson, strapping their own bags to their chests and walking slowly in circles around the bins set up, dropping in applesauce, juice, diced fruit and pudding.

Some were barely as old as the children whose names were affixed to the bags, there with their parents to lend a tiny hand. Others were just beginning retirement, trying to find a way to make the most of their now open hours.

Chatter filled the room. Hugs. Handshakes. Calling up some names from memory, learning new ones.

For many of the people gathered here, serving through the church goes deeper than finding their niche in the congregation.

For Ed Ost, it means connecting with children, both those to whom the backpacks belong and to his own daughter, Nikki, who’s in high school.

Ost began serving with the Backpacks for Hunger ministry last school year, taking a break from his full-time job as a healthcare consultant to help pack bags during these Wednesday night efforts and delivering them to the schools on Friday mornings.

The real treat is to see the faces of the children when he walks through the school doors with the backpacks.

“They’re yelling at you, and they see the teacher’s name, and they know that the food is theirs, and they get really excited about it,” he says with an earnest smile. “…I was able to face-to-face see where the product was going and so there’s a lot more texture to it.”

Nikki walks by carrying boxes. She has on a volunteer T-shirt, which she sometimes wears to school. Ost hopes he is passing along the excitement of leaving his own footprint to his daughter so she can leave hers.

“This is something that has a measurable effect on somebody,” he said. “For me it’s trying to be aware of the world and outside of my skin and looking outward.”

Rick Pretz notes that he was a Christian before he started volunteering here. Like many in his congregation, he had a place to worship before joining Church of the Resurrection.

But now, Pretz — who’s been in retirement for about a year — has found a more hands-on way to serve. Before, it primarily meant donations, he said. On this Wednesday night, it meant hauling boxes with a few other men so they could make way for the next set of backpacks to be loaded away.

He knows the impact the church has had on him. Although he’s technically been in retirement for a year, family issues have made it so that he’s just now breaking into the open, just now truly having his own time.

“I think it helps me be a better person,” he said “I just feel good about coming in and having a hands-on situation where I get to help.”

Given that this is the start of the school year, there are kinks to be worked out, though the operation was starting to run smoothly in its second week, Pretz said. But it took 140 volunteers to get to this point — the logistics of delivering more than 1,700 backpacks to five area schools every week throughout the school year aren’t simple. The volunteers joked that it was chaos, though the assembly line stuffing, to the untrained eye, appeared to run like clockwork.

Pretz jokes that all of this makes him feel a bit shameful. Some of these volunteers, he says with a gesture, spend a good deal of time working to make sure Wednesday nights run smoothly.

He points to Len Pfeifer.

“He’s been here multiple days for hours, so it’s a huge part of his life,” Pretz said.

“It makes me feel like I didn’t contribute,” he added with a laugh. “I didn’t break a sweat.”

Part of what keeps Pfeifer coming back are the men, women and children of Matthew’s Ministry, a program to enable adults and children with developmental disabilities to participate in missions work.

He’s into his fourth year working with the backpack ministry, and he, too, is retired, doing the things he never had time to do before. His Matthew’s Ministry team works on Tuesday afternoons to get everything ready for the volunteers arriving the next afternoon or evening to stuff the backpacks.“They give so much love,” he said.

Pfeifer recalled a conversation he had with one young man who came to a realization when he considered, in the larger scheme of things, what exactly stuffing these backpacks means.

“He said, ‘We’re really lucky, aren’t we?’ ” Pfeifer remembered. “Here’s a young man who has to have help with many things in his life, but he considered himself lucky. And I thought, wow. It’s hard for me to feel down when I hear stuff like that.”

Jeanna Repass, who coordinates the lengthy list of ministries, is one of just nine church staffers who handle thousands of volunteers.

They’ve worked with three Kansas City schools to paint and do light renovations to get the buildings “in the type of shape where kids feel like they could learn,” Repass said. They’ve tutored, working one-on-one with students and helping teachers with whatever they need. They try to fill the role a parent-teacher association would, throwing back-to-school nights and teacher appreciation lunches.

“We always go in for a blitz in the summer,” Repass said. “We try not to be as intrusive in the school year if possible.”

And they stick around — this isn’t a “paint and run” organization, in Repass’ words. There are liaisons who keep up with the schools to meet any needs that might come up during the school year. Repass said they’ve put about $120,000 into the schools they work with, including maintaining their playgrounds.

In other words, they’ve left a footprint.

They’ve built a storage closet with shelving and rods to hang things inside Troost Elementary.

They’ve wrapped notebooks and crayons and toys for more than 2,500 children who might not otherwise get gifts over the holiday season.

They’ve bought box springs and mattresses and put together care packages of bed linens, comforters, pillows and pajamas for children.

They’ve bought children new coats, gloves and hats for when the weather gets cold and school supplies for their first days in classrooms.

They’ve operated the church as a food bank — despite not having a kitchen — feeding pantries around the city.

And, of course, they stuffed backpacks with trail mix, breakfast bars, cookies, crackers and pretzels for a child to eat over the weekend.

They have gone into prisons to bow heads in prayer with inmates, all dressed in blue, in a basement room under fluorescent lights.

The scale is impressive, but Repass doesn’t attribute it to the work the missions staff does.

“I wish missions could take any kind of credit,” she said. “It really is about the vision of Adam Hamilton.”

---

Rev. Hamilton will tell you that the dream of the church on Oct. 6, 1990, was to give people a way to “live out their faith in the world.” On a 25-year horizon, he said, those first 100 people wanted to make Kansas City look more like Jesus pictured it — as the kingdom of God.

The ideal city. Starting with Roe Avenue and working outward.

But how does a church turn a Midwestern metropolis into the kingdom of God? It’s a big task, to be sure, but they started with poverty relief.

“Our hope is 20 years from now … that there are literally hundreds of children that might have ended up in poverty that don’t,” Hamilton said.

If these were easy problems to solve, Hamilton says, they would’ve been solved already.

“We come not as the people who have all the answers but as servants coming alongside others,” he said. “We’re going to roll up our sleeves, and we’re here to help.”

Ministry volunteers don’t lead with explaining why Jesus wants people to be fed or have beds or clothes or Christmas gifts, Repass said. It’s their work, and not their words, that go a long way.

That’s also why a lot of people are surprised to find out that Church of the Resurrection is a Methodist congregation. Some of the larger churches in the country — such as Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston and Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. — are non-denominational.

“We do evangelism without words,” Repass said. “We’re going out with our tools in our hands, not our Bible in our hands.”

When people think of Church of the Resurrection, Hamilton doesn’t want the words “that big church” to be the first thing that comes to mind.

“Right now, when you tell people you go to Church of the Resurrection, wouldn’t it be great if the first thing they said was, ‘That’s that church that serves the poor’? ” he said. “They really are trying to do this thing, and they’re trying to do it right. And we want to get it right.”

And they’ve got the added benefit of sheer numbers. For Hamilton, it’s the congregation that makes the missions possible.

“Twenty years from now I’d like to know that with a community of 18,000 people who were seriously about making a difference in the community and being servants, that Kansas City will be tangibly different because we were here,” he said. “If it’s not, then we failed.”