The Mission campus of City Church is about to celebrate a birthday, too--four years as of Easter Sunday. Back in 2010, we felt God leading us to start something new in order take next steps in loving the city locally, as a strategic part of following Christ to renew the City. So off we went, gathering together at first in Horace Mann Elementary School and then, a couple of years ago, finding a more long-term home at the Iglesia Presbiteriana-Mission, where we currently worship.

Moving to this location enables us to be a church that grows in serving the city so that it can flourish spiritually, culturally, socially, economically--in every way. Keeping the City Church DNA that has been part of our main campus from the beginning, we wanted to create a welcoming community, a place where people could come as themselves, bring their children, and be honored, challenged, and encouraged to explore and grow in the journey of following Jesus. We still want that.

Now that we are at the four-year marker, we are out of the start-up phase and growing into how we will live as a church, what our rhythms of community and service will be. And we want our definition of "service" to be robust. We want to serve our city outside our own walls, in organized ways through City Hope and other opportunities. We want to serve our congregation in organic ways, by equipping and filling and renewing every person who attends our church so that they, in turn, might bless the world around them as those who love their savior, Jesus Christ. But we also want to serve in ways of welcome.

We want to be a place where, on any given Sunday, you know that you can bring a friend and that they will be warmly welcomed. We want to be a place where a person interested in church for the first time ever, or the first time in years, can sit in the pews having been greeted and made to feel that they belong--because they do. We want to be a place where children are taken every bit as seriously as their dignity calls for, where they are taught by people who delight in seeing their faith grow. And we want to be a people of prayer--not just from the pastors and leaders of the worship service, but all over the sanctuary, after the services, for anyone who needs prayer for anything.

And that's where you come in.

We've decided to spend much of the month of February focusing on this understanding of service. We don't want to do that at the expense of other, wonderful ways of serving our city, but we do want to seek to understand what it means to serve the church, too. To that end, we are hoping that we can kick off a new season (and foster a culture) of serving within the church. We have a very real need for people to serve on Sunday mornings at our campus. Right now, a small but dedicated group of volunteers has taken much of the work on their shoulders. It would be easy for that to lead to burnout, which is the last thing we want. So we hope that you, if you call the Mission campus your home campus, will take some time to think about how you might get involved.

One thing to know is that we don't want you to get involved in a way that would wear you out. If you love kids, we've got just the place for you. But if teaching kids would exhaust you, perhaps it's not the best place to be--maybe you can get involved with our prayer ministry, or welcome people once a month at the door. The commitment level doesn't have to be high for the payoff to be felt throughout our community.

On Sunday, February 23rd, we will have a lunch immediately following the 10:00 service. There, we will be able to thank our incredible volunteers who are already doing so much, and issue a clarion call for all of you who are about to step up to the plate. And if welcoming, teaching children, and prayer ministry sound like areas you are interested in, that's wonderful--those are the areas where we have the most need. If you want to volunteer in other ways, or aren't sure where to start, that's okay, too. This lunch will be a time to explore that. We hope to see you there.