The City Church's first Easter Weekend is less than a month away, and we wanted to let you know how we'll celebrate Jesus' resurrection from the grave as a church family. We encourage you to remember that Easter is one of those weekends in the year when folks who avoid church the other 50 weeks will pop back in - pray and look for open doors in your neighbors, co-workers, and friends' lives, and bring them along to one of our Gatherings:
If you weren’t at The City Church’s All-Church Gathering Sunday, Feb 21, you missed the announcement that the church body of Samuels Ave Baptist Church is becoming part of The City Church family! A 75-year-old church with a long history of impacting the neighborhood northeast of downtown, Samuels Ave has had a hard time adjusting to the changing neighborhood in Trinity Bluffs, and voted on Feb 14 to dissolve and become part of The City Church.
In these first few weeks of The City Church's existence, we have been blessed and excited to see many folks jump into Villages, catch our church family's vision, and begin living life as "communities on mission" in your neighborhoods, jobs, etc. And we're excited and honored that the people of Sameuls Avenue Baptist Church are becoming part of The City Church family - it's a fast-paced, joy-filled season in our young church's life, to be sure!
This Wednesday, February 17, marks the beginning of the hundreds-year-old Christian tradition of Lent. Many folks grew up celebrating Lent; several others have no idea what it is; lots of us find ourselves somewhere in between. This week Ben is posting a few glimpses into Lent on his blog. Here's what you can expect:
This past weekend, 12 City folks headed to Austin for the VERGE conference, the first-ever "missional community" conference in the U.S. according to one of the speakers, Alan Hirsch. 12+ great thinkers/practitioners of this church model/lifestyle walked through some good foundations of why we do what we do. Each session started with a video, which we'll post below as they become available throughout the week.
Tim Chester [co-author of Total Church and leader of The Crowded House, Sheffield England] passed this video along through his generally-thought-provoking blog, from Brad Briscoe in Kansas City - a great, humorous, easy-to-understand picture of what a "missional church" is and why we do life as we do it. Great stuff to pass along!
After a week of thoughts and reflections, Ben posted his thoughts on our Jan 24 Gathering on his blog, here.
What about you? What was your take? Post responses below or at Ben's blog.
After a fantastic, Spirit-filled night at The City Church's launch gathering, we're not holding another All-Church Gathering until February 21. Why on earth would we do that? Here are a few reasons:
A few folks apparently enjoyed having our "prospectus" - a written version of our vision, plan, projections, etc. - available. It was posted on our pre-launch website, but disappeared as this one rolled out January 16. Below is a link to it, posted at scribd.com. A few things have been tweaked since we wrote it in June 2009, so if there's a difference between the prosepectus and our website, the website trumps the prospectus. Feel free to contact if you have questions, etc. Happy reading.
