A Great Presentation of the Gospel

Here is a link to a great presentation of the gospel called Two Ways to Live. I just linked this to New City's website. Check it out! I am always looking for great gospel presentations. If you know of any good ones, let me know.

A thought on prayer at church by a newspaper editor visiting a church

Here's an excerpt from an article about a church an alternative newspaper editor visited. I found it to be humorous:

A word about the praying: When I was dragged off to church by my parents, we folded our hands together to pray and assumed a posture of humility. In today’s emerging churches, you lift both hands up toward heaven, arms out, in what looks like a sort of double-armed fascist salute. It’s a posture that screams, “Look at me, God! I’m praying! To you!” The more enthusiastic worshippers looked like toddlers reaching up for Daddy, anxious to be picked up and hugged past their comfort levels.

Planting Fast Growing Churches

I just read a book by Stephen Gray called Planting Fast Growing Churches. It is a finding of a study of over a hundred church plants to determine what made certain churches fast growing as opposed to struggling.

Interesting results. There are many findings that are suprising.

As for me and where I am in ministry, I found the following three factors most interesting:

1. Core group at the time of the launch was 40-50. It is important to develop a decent size core team before the launch. Those that had smaller core teams often struggled after the launch.

2. Multi-staff at launch. Fast growing churches had 2-3 staff members at the launch.

3. Large launch service (150-200). Fast growing churches started big and invested in massive outreaches and marketing.

Potential New Venue for New City

New City Church will be officially launching on September 14, 2008. That's our Grand Opening! We are going to invite the entire Downtown community to our opening. We have been praying for a new venue where we can fit at least 150-200 people for our Grand Opening and afterwards.

Today, I met with Ralph Verdugo, the owner of 740 (http://www.740la.com/), a night club in downtown LA (at the corner of Broadway and 8th). He is a great guy and offerred to allow us to have our Sunday gatherings at the club at a very low price(pretty much at his added cost).

Here are some pictures of the venue:

Let me know what you think about having church at a nightclub.

We are Finally Moving Closer to Downtown!

Finally, we are moving closer to downtown. When we decided to plant New City Church, we wanted to move closer to downtown, but we wanted to wait until Kaetlyn got out of school. Well, Kaetlyn is officially on summer vacation as of today (6/13) and we are moving to La Crescenta tomorrow (6/14). We found a great house to rent and we found a great family to rent our home. It all worked out great. Praise God for that! Now, we will only be about 15 minute drive from downtown. We hope to use our home as a place where love and hospitality is shown to the people of New City.