Just One: Our Hope For New City Church
Our mission statement at New City Church is to help people meet Jesus and grow in a relationship with him. We planted New City Church in a very particular place of Raleigh for a reason. It was a place we found where there weren't many churches that were like us. Since then, a few churches have moved into the area we set out to be in (praise God!), but there is still a lot of work to do.
In fact, there are roughly 295,000 people who live within a 7.5 mile radius of where New City Church meets on Sundays (roughly a 20-25 minute drive or less). As I shared at New City Church's Vision night this Sunday, and I'll briefly share here, we want to do more about this.
While I fully believe our heart as a church is in the right place, I have always been fearful of being public about our desire to reach more people. I don't want people to think that I am trying to grow New City to stroke my ego or for someone to accuse us of "only caring about numbers" because that is profoundly untrue.
And yet, operating out of fear of what people may think often prohibits us from being faithful to what God has called us to do. So I as a leader and us as a church are not going to do that this year. This year we are going to clear and upfront with what we want to see happen. We want to see more people meeting Jesus and growing in a relationship with him.
Our goal this year is to see 250 people hearing and experiencing the Gospel every Sunday at New City Church by the end of this year. We also have discipleship goals and community group goals and seeing people take their next steps goals, but all of those flow from them connecting with New City first.
250 people may not sound like a lot, but it is an 85% increase from where we stood after January. Given those terms, and 85% increase in less than a year seems rather high, so how are we going to do it?
#JustOne Campaign
If you call New City Church home, we want you to join in on our Just One campaign. The reality is, if all of us brought just one new person with us this Sunday, we will have already surpassed our goal for the year. But we know it's not that simple. It often takes a lot of prayer, discussion, and invitation before someone might agree to come with you.
So our ask is simple, be very intentional with just one person this year. Pray for them, get to know them, and invite them. If we all find just one person we want to see hear and experience the good news of Jesus, our goal doesn't seem so hard after all.
So will you join us? Let's be unapologetic in our belief that Jesus changes everything. And if we believe that to be true, let's find just one more person to share it with.
Let's play a small role in helping some of the 295,000 people in our area find true hope in Jesus. We have a little ways to go to be reaching 250 every weekend