Faith before law?
Non-traditional minister says case is about religious liberty
Staff writer
When Hillsboro police stopped Kristi Friesen, a full-time minister with Vision of Faith Hope and Charity Ministries, Nov. 15, 2025, the encounter appeared routine.
Police alleged Friesen drove without a valid driver’s license, vehicle registration, or proof of insurance. She also was accused of displaying an unauthorized license plate and interfering with law enforcement by refusing to provide documents officers requested.
To Friesen, however, the stop was anything but routine.
She did not dispute that she lacked the documents officers sought. Instead, she argued that obtaining them would have violated her religious beliefs.
Those beliefs became the foundation of her legal defense.
In court filings, Friesen argued that the Kansas Preservation of Religious Freedom Act and constitutional protections for religious liberty barred the state from substantially burdening the exercise of her faith.
She contended that requiring her to obtain a driver’s license, register her ministry’s vehicle and carry liability insurance violated those protections.
Marion County Attorney Michelle Brown disagreed.
“She wasn’t cited for driving on her own property,” Brown said. “She was cited for driving on a U.S. highway.”
The disagreement began long before a police officer activated emergency lights behind Friesen’s vehicle, Brown said.
She traced it to a childhood spent questioning the faith in which she was raised and a search for truth that reshaped her understanding of God, government, and individual liberty.
The reason she handed over ministry documents instead of a driver’s license traces back more than four decades earlier to when she was about 12 years old.
Raised in what she described as “kind of a religious cult,” she questioned teachings that left her with more questions than answers, she said.
Even as a child, she wondered whether she was hearing God’s truth or simply repeating what others believed.
One night, she sat looking out a window at the moon.
“I said, ‘God, I want truth,’” she recalled. “’I don’t care what I have to go through. Show me truth.’”
That prayer shaped the rest of her life, she said.
She spent years studying scripture on her own, comparing English translations with Hebrew and Greek texts and researching historical context of Biblical passages. Her search expanded into natural health, nutrition, and what she believed was God’s design for caring for the human body, she said.
Years later, she battled serious health problems before suffering what she described as a massive heart attack at age 28.
She believes she died.
She met angels who told her it was not yet her time and that she still had a purpose to fulfill, she said. She entered the presence of God, whom she described not as a man sitting on a throne but as perfect, overwhelming love.
She was given a choice whether to stay or return, she said. She chose to come back after seeing what she believed was a ministry she had yet to build.
“I came back with a mission,” she said.
That mission became Vision of Faith Hope and Charity Ministries on K-15 and 240th St. near Hillsboro.
The property, owned by the greater ministry organization, is five years delinquent in property taxes, but Friesen said they were marked as exempt for religious reasons under Kansas law before.
Friesen cited a change in state treasurer that revoked their exemption.
The ministry has a case before the Kansas Board of Tax Appeals to restore their exemption.
Friesen said the ministry measures success by service rather than attendance. They grow food, teach families to preserve it, help establish community gardens, and support humanitarian work. Those efforts included helping provide running water to villages in Sierra Leone and furnishing classrooms for schoolchildren, she said.
Asked who led the ministry, Friesen rejected the idea of a human hierarchy.
“God’s at the top,” she said. “When man gets involved, that’s when corruption starts.”
She traced those convictions to her Mennonite ancestors, who fled Russia and Germany seeking religious freedom before settling in Kansas. Stories of persecution, conscience, and Bleeding Kansas were passed from one generation to the next, she said.
“The right to worship God according to the dictates of your conscience is in my bones,” she said.
Friesen is asking Marion County District Court to recognize those convictions as protected under Kansas law.
She contends that her vehicle involved belongs to her ministry and that she was engaged in ministry when she was stopped. She also argues officers were aware of her religious convictions before the encounter.
Vision of Faith Hope and Charity Ministries has described her prosecution as a test of religious freedom and encouraged supporters to attend court hearings.
Friesen has filed complaints alleging religious discrimination by officers involved in the stop.
The Kansas Attorney General’s Office forwarded those complaints to the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training for review while noting that the referral was not a finding that discrimination or biased policing had occurred.
Administrative review remains separate from the criminal prosecution, however, prosecutor Brown said.
Whether Friesen’s arguments prevail now rests with district court.