This Sunday is the beginning of Advent, which is the beginning of the liturgical year. At New City we follow the lectionary produced by the Anglican Church of North America, which allows us to read through the breadth of Scripture in a single calendar year, in a three-year cycle. The use of lectionaries is as…

We’re Americans, which means we love our independence and our ability to self-rule. We love our rugged individualism. Well, perhaps we actually hate it but we don’t know anything different so we cling to what we know. The sort of individualism we experience in our culture is unique in world history as it’s largely devoid…

In last Sunday’s sermon, we saw that New City is capital C Christian, not lower-case c christian. By this we mean our faith is not merely cultural. We’re not Christians by default because we’re neither Jews nor Muslims nor atheists, etc. For decades in this nation a form of cultural Christianity has prevailed, and it’s…

Our world of medicine is remarkable. Many of the treatments that are available today were unimaginable a generation ago. From MRI machines to medicines to surgical techniques, modern medicine would have been nearly indistinguishable from magic just 200 years ago. This means for most of human history injury and disease were largely untreatable. Bones could…

In early 2019 my wife and I were able to spend a couple weeks in the land of Israel. We received some incredible teaching and saw some truly remarkable sights—and sites. We stood on the shore of the Sea of Galilee near the location where Jesus told Peter three times, “Feed my sheep”. We walked…