Friends and family,
City on a Hill (CoaH) Church in Brighton is off to a great start with approximately 75 people (or more) regularly attending our worship gatherings each week! We have a wide variety of college students, graduate students, singles, young marrieds, and several families with kids that attend our church on a regular basis. We also have had many non-Christians in our church services every single week, hearing the good news of Jesus week in and week out. Please continue to pray for our church through the requests provided below.
1. “Ask Anything”
Over the past two months, our church has established a special Community Group, called Life Explored, designed to focus on Christianity’s foundational beliefs in a way that engages and helps seekers and skeptics. This group has had approximately 20 people regularly involved throughout the course! This is a huge answer to prayer as there are several in that Community Group that are continually asking more questions and are very interested in learning more about Jesus. Specifically pray for “J”, who has a unique thirst to understand the good news of Jesus but still has questions about the faith.
Life Explored has been so fruitful that the participants asked to increase the number of meetings. The group continues to meet each week addressing specific questions the attendees wanted to cover, such as “How do we know the Bible is the Word of God?” or “How can there only be one way (aren’t all religions basically the same)?”. Please be in prayer for the following:
-Community Group leaders to answer any and all questions with truth and grace
-That J, F, and many others would come to faith in Jesus as they grow in understanding of Jesus
2. Indoor Movie Night
Over the past two years, City on a Hill Church in Brighton has hosted free outdoor movie nights for our community throughout each summer. Now, on November 15, we will have our very first free community indoor movie night! We will be showing Toy Story 4 at 7pm in Brighton High School's auditorium (where we worship each Sunday). These free movie nights are a great way to engage our community, serve those around us, meet our neighbors, and show our neighborhood the love of Jesus. For many in our area, these movie nights are as close as they will get to interacting with a church.
City on a Hill Church was able to advertise this movie night to approximately 2,000 people at our local trick or treat event on Halloween (a huge success! See the pictures below.). At that event, we hosted two tables, increasing our opportunities to pass out our church’s information and invite people to visit while also inviting those in our area to join us for the movie night. Be praying for this movie night as we hope it will be an easy gateway for seekers and skeptics to visit CoaH Brighton since the movie night is held in the exact place we worship every Sunday! Pray that the Spirit would strongly urge our community to visit our church and ask questions about their faith following the movie night.
3. Friendsgiving
Holiday celebrations are a great way to further friendships and develop new relationships with our neighbors in our Boston context. For the past two years Emily and I have hosted a Friendsgiving for our apartment complex, which has around 75 people in it. This year, the Daniels (a couple from Hickory Grove North Campus that moved to Boston as a part of our core team last year) will be hosting since they are now tenants of our same complex! We are excited to have friends so nearby but also to have another couple seeking to share the good news of Jesus with our friends and neighbors.
Please pray for:
-New faces/neighbors to attend that we haven’t yet met; that we will have good conversations that can lead to friendships and even discussions about Jesus
-Deeper friendships and continued spiritual conversations with recurring attendees (neighbors we do know and have come to our monthly events before)
-Create a welcoming and warm environment of hospitality and love as we display, declare, and delight in the good news of Jesus
4. CoaH Brighton Family Meal
The core values of our church are gospel, community, and mission. We believe that part of community at CoaH Brighton is to be more than just a Sunday morning gathering. We believe that in and through Jesus we have been made a family! And just as families eat with one another on a regular basis, we also desire to build a family culture within our church by occasionally providing church-wide meals.
On November 17 directly following our Sunday morning worship gathering, CoaH Brighton will be having our third family meal together as a church since we launched in September. We established these family meals to better display the good news of Jesus to our neighborhood. These meals are a great way for new attendees to become better acquainted with the church in an informal setting. Also, eating together as a church family grows in us a deeper understanding of community that we find in God’s Word and develops a greater love for His church and those in it. At each family meal we have had amazing opportunities for deep spiritual conversations with the spiritually interested attending our church (but do not yet know Jesus). Please pray for continued conversations and even for new relationships to be established at this family meal.