My friend, Marie, called me on my birthday this week. I haven’t seen her since I visited her in the hospital a while back. A couple of her grandchildren were in my youth group years ago and I officiated the marriage of another. She worked part-time at the church where I served in my first pastoral role. Most Sunday mornings, provided I arrived early, we would pray together before the service.

Belief is a difficult thing, especially for modern people. This is a basic assumption for us at City Church. We’re not just a community for the convinced but also for the curious and spiritually conflicted as well. We want to be a genuinely safe place for anyone to process their doubts. Starting this Sunday, we’ll explore some of the most common questions people have about the Christian faith in a new sermon series called Why? Questions About Christianity.

Plato said the most important part of a work is the beginning. It’s when something new is being shaped into what it will be. That’s what is happening right now in the early days of City Church.

During this season of Lent, the lessons from Israel’s past have been on my mind. On Sunday mornings in City Kids, the children are learning about the Israelites in the wilderness. They’re learning about the grumbling and complaining, the disobedience and distrust and the forgetting and forsaking that happened. But more importantly, we are teaching the kids about the importance of remembering. The Israelites often forgot the Lord’s deliverance and how far he had brought them.

We pray because we’re human. While we all need moments of solitude, studies consistently show that isolation from others is detrimental to our health. If that’s true interpersonally, how much more so with the One who made us? Prayer opens up communication with God and gives us a lifeline to the world beyond the walls of this world.

At the bottom of a pit of suffering, the likes of which none of us will ever experience, Job longs for nothing more than to face God.

Roughly 15 years ago, the computer was taking over the studio. Advances in technology suddenly gave consumer PCs the power to not only record sound waves but also edit them with surgical precision or even generate them from scratch. Digital recording, comprised of “binary code” (ones and zeros), could fool the human ear into accepting sounds that were heavily tampered with, or outright counterfeit, as being legitimate. These sounds could be as ‘perfect’ as one desired.