Looking for Purpose?

You may have noticed that our website has a series of rolling images. There is some purpose in that. I thought I'd chat a bit about the messages in the first of those images. 'Looking for Purpose?...An exciting adventure awaits'. Regardless of the status of our faith we are all looking for purpose in life. No one has the explicit goal of having a meaningless existence. We believe our ultimate purpose is to find our identity as children of God and live lives that glorify Him. As Christians we can't work that out outside of community so we have developed some small communities to help find God together and then work out how we can be most pleasing to Him. When we are pleasing Him we begin to discover exactly who we are and we really do find ourselves. We discover what being human is in all its fullness through Him! Pleasing Him is about becoming more like Him and He is a God who loves to be imitated. He gave us His son Jesus Christ as the model. To imitate Him we must engage with His goals, which are to see all people come into relationship with Him and see Him glorified. We work this journey out in community. We have discovered that the pursuit of this purpose certainly leads to an exciting adventure! Regardless of whether you are a follower of Jesus or not I highly recommend you try getting involved with a community that looks to be more like Jesus himself, you'll have a great adventure and you won't regret it. Don't believe me? Why not give it a try...

Miracles do happen

Here is a little story from our summer adventures that I mentioned last time round. James is a great guy who is part of CityChurch. In July he had a nasty fall and broke his ankle badly. In fact he broke six bones. At one point early on doctors were concerned he may even lose his foot. I'm a bit squeamish so I didn't like to look too closely and thankfully he had it in a great big boot. The boot, he was told would be on for 9 months and would secure the two metal plates that had been grafted in to secure his foot. After nine months he would have the boot and plates removed and then have the foot broken again and re-set without the plates. This was to be followed by nine more months in plaster. Not great! The x ray picture below shows the broken foot. If you don't quite understand it be assured that the leg bone is supposed to sit on the ankle not be completely detached as it is in this shot.

To further complicate matters James fell again and made it worse in August. Early September arrived and we upped our prayer. We have been building a culture of faith for the miraculous as we pursue the presence of God and have seen some great healings but this was a big one. However God is good and in early September James visited the doctors again and new x-rays showed that the bones were healed! The doctors removed the boot and told James he could walk on the foot! Praise God! Here is a picture I took of his ankles just last week.

Be encouraged that God does heal. Lets keep believing and keep persevering. We didn't just pray once for James, but we did keep going and keep building our faith. Let's here more stories like this one and keep sharing them. To the Glory of God.

A summer lesson

There are a number of principles by which we try to operate but every now and then God does something to really teach us the value of them. One of these is that 'Jesus is building His church'. This is aligned with the thought that our job is a different one, namely to make disciples. Entering this summer we were quietly pleased with how the first year of CityChurch Leicester had gone. Relationships were strong, people new to the city were settling well and we had identified our missional focus and got the whole church involved in missional communities. Pretty good really, but there was a nagging question for me, 'Lord, where is the fruit!?'. Nevertheless we entered a summer rest period, stopped the majority of our activity and engaged in sabbath rest. As soon as we did we began to see fruit! We didn't earn it, or strive for it or deserve it but by God's grace we saw it. New people were added, people met Jesus and were saved, new relationships developed and a series of exceptional miracles including deaf ears opening and broken bones being healed took place. In fact it is still happening, by the grace of God. We are now entering our busier autumn season but we go into clearer than ever that Jesus builds the church! He has taught us that and so we must remember it and continue to embrace the seasons of rest and abiding He calls for in John 15. We stay healthy, faith filled and clearer in our perspectives about our roles when we do. Lets keep Loving God and Loving People and leave the rest up to Him! If you want to know more about our journey get in touch!

New Website

CityChurch has a new website! You can find it at www.citychurchleicester.org. Hopefully that means we are now ready to smooth out our somewhat inconsistent entry into the world of online social interaction. You can follow us on twitter and find our Facebook fan page and now hopefully all these will now nicely interlink together. Of course technology is still dependent upon human beings so that will depend on us stepping up our game. We will try! It is easy to get quite excited about the advances in technology that allow us to interact more easily but we want to remain grounded and remember that technology isn't our God! Technology can help improve life but it can't eternally transform it like our God can. Seeing these transformations continues to be what motivates us at CityChurch and we have been blessed to see lots of small miracles in recent times. As these continue we will look to use this platform to share the stories. There are some other possible changes afoot for us, watch this space and we will let you know about them when we can!

Ready for take-off

We have been really taking our time over the last two years to ensure that we get started on the right footing. Five months since our launch, and about three years since beginning the journey I believe we are really close now to launching our first missional communities. The obvious question would be why so slow!? It's a good question and one I have continually wrestled with as it's not my natural approach but the simply answer is it has been essential.

The way we are trying to do things does not come naturally to those of us who have grown up in and be trained by the UK church. It's second nature to us to try and build "church" and try and attract people to our events in the hope that they might meet Jesus. The problem is Jesus commissioned to "make disciples" and leave the building of church to Him. Grasping that and the huge mindset and cultural changes that flow out of that takes time. In fact it takes about 3 years!

We have had lots of great help from 3DM UK and we are about ready to go so watch this space and see how we get on, we'll let you know.


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Location:Melbourne, Australia

White Hot Centre

We have been taking our time recently to ensure we have two cultures in place. The first is an encounter culture. As Paul tells us in Ephesians when we gather as the church we are the living temple built on the foundations of the apostles and the prophets, with Jesus as the chief cornerstone. We host the presence of God. We worship Him and expect to encounter Him. The second is a culture of radical missional discipleship. We are setting ourselves up as a people on a mission, ready to carry the presence of God out into the world.

The last two weeks we have been richly blessed in our gatherings. You could say we have been longing for the white hot presence of God, and we haven't been disappointed. We have seen numerous healings and God dealing with deep issues that prevent us from knowing how to encounter Him. My experience has been that when we expose the issues in our lives that hold us back from entering His presence to the light, we give Him the opportunity to heal us.

There is more to come but it sure is getting hot!

Getting into our stride

Well CityChurch has now been going for 3 months and God has been good to us, as ever. We have been working out what it means to have a radical missional edge and a white hot centre at the same time. is it possible? How do you do it? We are convinced it is possible! A radical missional desire should always come from having consistently been in the presence of God. When we take time put loving God first we can't help but be influenced by who He is, and He is the Father who so loved the world He sent the Son and then the Spirit in order that none might perish! Being with God pushes us out! Mission born of anything else is in danger of being little more than good works done in human strength.

To help us remember this we have found Mike Breen's Lifeshapes really useful. you should check them out. The Triangle is a simple concept and yet astonishingly profound as it reminds us that our lives should be balanced up, in and out. We encounter the Father (up), then love the Body (in) and together we love this lost world (Out). If we remember that always we will stay on track.

We are encountering some wonderful opportunities at present which are a gift from God. They are not as a result of our hard work and we deserve no credit but I believe we will have some powerful stories soon about how the above works out in practice.

Love God first, let him speak, intentionally share that love with the lost and lives get changed!




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