City Chapel NYC

The disconnection between our physical body and our Christian journey brings pain to ourselves and the world. Jesus reminds us of our three parts being: mind, body, and soul. Which is good news for a world disconnected from the physical.  Embodiment, conscious awareness of being a body, contrast with the Church's neglect, seen in refugee apathy, abuse cover-ups, and racial injustice. By embod...

We began a new Sunday series entitled, A Different Community, where individuals in our fellowship will share from Scripture about the community we long to see City Chapel become. This Sunday, we began with a desire to be a wonder-filled community in a world of cynicism . We saw that the problem with cynicism is that it lies . And though attractive in times of difficulty, cynicism has great power t...

Even with our best preparations, storms can catch us off guard, but we are encouraged to call out to Jesus for rescue. When you turn to prayer and trust in His sovereign authority to bring calm, Jesus, the Son of God with power over all will answer. Through Him, fear can be transformed into faith, enabling us to weather life's challenges with confidence. What are you worried or afraid about r...

This past Sunday we spoke about how life in this world will include moments of chaos! And knowing this, we asked the question, “what do we do in the face of chaos?” From Psalm 130, we looked at how the poet writes about God with three distinct prepositions - to (You), for (You), with (You). First, the poet, in their distress, cries “to” God. Scripture is utterly realistic about the pain the world...

This past Sunday we started a series through the Book of Acts called "Different," and we saw an early church fellowship - "koinonia" - that was SSUTT - Special, Supernatural, Unnatural, Tangible and Transformational. This "koinonia" was supernaturally formed by the Spirit, and models for us today a shared life motivated by intimacy-desire instead of consumption-desire...

Pastor Ariana shared from Psalm 23.5-6 and challenged us to become aware of the table we eat from.  The Psalms - a collection of poems in the Bible that scholar, Tim Mackie, describes as a “ literary temple ” - are a place for us, God’s people, to open and be transported into the presence of God.  We opened Psalm 23 and - with King David as our prayer coach - longed to be a different type of commu...

The day-to-day challenges we experience often leave us feeling overwhelmed, alone, and unsafe. Yet, in Psalm 23, the author describes an experience of life marked by safety, security, and confidence rooted in God’s perfect leadership and intimate presence.  This past Sunday, we looked at what this author saw and how the same hope and confidence is available to us today. 

BIG IDEA: This strange Book pulsates and reverberates with the story of God’s great love for you! RECAP I. The Book is Strange, v.1-8 We looked at chapters in Nehemiah that are realistic about how strange it can be to approach Scripture. God’s people are listening to Scripture read, and it is written in a different language, culture, and time from them. In the same way, it can often feel challengi...

REFLECT & APPLY:  What was/am I relying on to give structure, stability, and safety to my life?  Who in my life is experiencing the instability of broken walls and destroyed gates?  Who might Jesus be sending me to serve?  RECAP I. In the passage we saw broken down walls and gates destroyed by fire . The big point was for an ancient city walls embodied a sense of safety, and gates were the pla...

How do we find strength to rebuild when things fall apart? We find strength to rebuild by singing and being sung over. This past Sunday we saw that the reality of building or re-building can be incredibly discouraging. In Ezra 3 and 4, God’s people faced constraints in resources, constraints in power, and people actively trying to frustrate their efforts.  So, we asked the question, how do we face...

What are you sacrificing? In the last few years many of us have lost something significant—whether a relationship, community, church, job, or place we called home. And, in light of our losses, we currently find ourselves in a process of rebuilding. Yet, how do we rebuild well? In this series through Ezra + Nehemiah, we will see that rebuilding has four main components: 1) altar, 2) temple, 3) wall...

Pastor Ariana preached from Philippians 4:4-9 and put forward that our biggest problem as a church and culture isn’t our anxiety but actually our forgetfulness. We tend to forget these three things:  Jesus is near His kingdom is coming His peace is real for us today  The Good News is that God hasn’t forgotten us. When we pray and even before we pray God is attentive to the needs of His people. Try...

We should long to form an exceedingly magnificent fellowship – marked by rest. In 2 Chronicles 22.2-5, King David desired to build an exceedingly magnificent house for God, because David knew that this is what God deserved. This house required a selective profile of builder (a person of rest), extravagant provision, and abundant participation. The early Christian writers of the New Testament expla...

Why do we often have a difficult time sharing the most important thing to us (the Gospel) with people who are important to us? Or people who we know are important to God? Oftentimes believers can have a "famine" mindset when it comes to how we view the world and their receptivity to the Gospel. We fear bringing the Gospel to our neighbors and friends because we think we see opposition an...

Meg Baatz teaches us from John 20.18-23 and shows us 1) Jesus was sent into suffering and stood in solidarity, 2) Jesus was sent with power and wilded it with mutuality, and 3) Jesus was sent in a hope that imagines the kingdom. 

On this Easter Sunday, we asked the simple question, what is your hope in life and death? We spoke of the need for a hope that not even death can extinguish.  From 1 Corinthians 15, we saw that the Resurrection of Jesus carries with it three hopes: 1) a historical hope, 2) a cosmic hope, and 3) a personal hope.  First, we saw that the central question of Christianity is "did Jesus rise from t...

This past Sunday, we continued our series The Meat Is In The Street : Following Jesus Into His Mission by talking about how we can grow our sense of expectancy!  We looked at the story of David and Goliath in 1 Sam. 17 and saw how David modeled expectancy. In the scene, a mighty warrior named Goliath challenged God's people to a "battle of champions," where each side would choose on...

This past Sunday, we continued our series The Meat Is In The Street : Following Jesus Into His Mission by simply acknowledging that in this part of the country it is easy to be cynical about mission! "I have to do, so others can behave" And, we are cynical because if we are honest, our underlying suspicion is that mission can be boiled down to, "I have to do, so I can get others to...

This past Sunday, we moved from the "Why?" of our Vision Series into the practical "How?" How do we see rivers of renewal in us, the city, and ultimately our world? We saw that in Luke 10, Jesus chooses 72 anonymous disciples to be "Sent Ones" in pairs of 2, we talked about how this was probably representative of the 72 known countries in the world at that time. Jesus...

This past Sunday, we finished our Rivers of Renewal series, by talking about Cultural Beauty . We began by reviewing a key idea that unlike a modern culture that merely loves as a response to what it finds lovely... God's presence makes lovely! This contrast is important because a dysfunctional culture--that merely responds to what it finds lovely--creates a world of pretenders and strivers,...