February 27, 2010 - 17:42 By ben 0 comments

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. Their leadership has humbly and graciously resigned, and is integrating into City Church life as normal “City folk,” becoming involved in Villages, etc. as they begin to live out our church’s vision and transition into other local, non-City Church ministry opportunities.

City Church leadership is spending time and sharing Sunday morning responsibilities at Samuels Ave until its official last service on March 14, and beginning the following week, March 21 at 10am, we’ll walk Samuels Ave folks through “Foundations,” an intro to life in The City Church, which will look much like Fall 2009's core team training did, for those of you who were involved. Once this training wraps up in late May, Samuels Ave folks will become at least one new City Church Village, meeting in the Trinity Bluffs neighborhood. And our hope and prayer is that the Hispanic members of Samuels Ave’s congregation will become our first Spanish-speaking Village, to reach that population of our downtown mission field.

Samuels Ave Baptist Church owned property at 715 Samuels Ave (click here for map), with two buildings on site, and as of Feb 14, that property transferred ownership to The City Church. Many of you may be wondering what our plans are for this property. For several reasons (the difficulty of getting to the address, the condition of the facilities, our current relationship and commitment with Four Day Weekend, and the desire to keep All-Church Gatherings in Sundance Square and the heart of downtown), and especially because our philosophy of ministry isn’t based on a “church building,” our Sunday Gatherings will not move to the new “Samuels Ave Building.” Over the next few months, we will continue to use the facility to transition former Samuels Ave members into our church family, and will utilize this space for band rehearsals, classes, meetings, and other equipping opportunities that arise in the coming months. But in the meantime, we are continuing the process already begun by Samuels Ave Baptist Church leadership, of meeting with developers and selling the property.

This is surely an exciting step for both church families, but one that is very fragile as well. Please pray for Samuels Ave’s congregation, for our leadership’s wisdom, for a clear sense of unity and vision, for leaders to raise from the congregation, and for all the logistical elements to work out, as two churches become one. Thank you very much for your prayers, and if you have questions, contact Matthew Hudson, who is heading up most of the logistical elements of this process.

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