Church of the City New York

This Easter Sunday, Pastor Jon addressed our need to become “God conscious” and receive the hope and life found in Jesus’ resurrection. John’s gospel account includes Mary Magdalene’s discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb and resurrected body, and this story displays how a personal encounter with the living God sparked a movement of hope that is still going forth today. Pastor Jon encouraged those grieving the brokenness of the world and seeking hope to investigate the state of their hearts and consider pursuing a life that is “God-conscious."

This Sunday, Pastor Jon Tyson closed out our Missional Formation series with a call to follow Jesus’ lead in making discipleship the heart of our mission. Throughout this series, we have established a radical minimum standard through what Church of the City believes are the nine core competencies of being disciples in the Kingdom of Heaven. While God has done remarkable things in this season, Pastor Jon led us back to the question that began this series: Is our plan for discipleship working?

This week, Pastor Jon continued our Missional Formation series with a teaching on vocational mission and workplace prayer, addressing the tensions many Christians face in bringing these areas together. Since God created humankind for the purpose of work, and we will spend at least one third of our lives at work, it’s crucial that we examine how work fits into our discipleship. Pastor Jon exhorted us to imagine the history shaping impact of a community of people living on vocational mission by committing to lives of contending prayer and redemptive work, and invited us to be a part of it.

This Sunday, Pastor Ashley Anderson continued our Missional Formation series, where we are exploring what we believe are the “core competencies” of living life on mission with Jesus. This week we learned about the distinctive of The Redemptive Edge and the discipline of blessing beyond barriers. In His final few moments with His disciples in Matthew 25, Jesus prepared them for His death, resurrection, ascension, and future return. He spoke explicitly on the coming day of the Lord, where He will return in the fullness of His glory with all the angels, and the nations will be gathered before Him as He judges them according to their treatment of the poor and oppressed. Pastor Ashley called us to reevaluate our posture towards the poor against the heart Jesus clearly holds for the marginalized and oppressed.

This Sunday, Pastor Jon Tyson continued Missional Formation, where we are exploring what we believe are the “core competencies” of living life on mission with Jesus. We began our final three weeks of this series on Sacrificial Mission by looking at the distinctive of Disciple Making. The vision of our church is that everyone in our church is sharing the Gospel, seeing people come to Christ, and discipling them into the Kingdom of God. Discipleship, particularly in the West, has become associated feelings of frustration, over dependence on programs, and general confusion around what it actually means to both be discipled and disciple others. In light of this, we have to recover a Biblical standard for discipleship, and receive a fresh vision for multi-generational discipling like we see modeled by Paul in 2 Timothy 2:1-2.