“Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door, and see all the people.” What is a church? The rhyme has it right, the church is really the people. However, it also assumes that the church has a steeple. If asked explicitly, no one would say the church is a building. Yet, in practice, most of us have fundamentally bad habits in how we think, talk, and act about church.
Blog : Paradigm
Maturing leaders through lifelong learning
By Megan Wahl | June 15, 2017
The Des Moines cluster of Ames-Des Moines CityChurch has embraced a unique opportunity in its offering of ordered learning classes. What began five years ago with Des Moines church leaders plus a couple leaders from Crossway Community Church in Altoona has expanded to include emerging leaders from the CityChurch network, leaders’ wives, and even some teenagers.
Posted In Ames/Des Moines Network Life Development Ordered Learning Paradigm
Structured creativity within the churches
By Caleb Keller | May 23, 2017
All the churches of the Ames-Des Moines CityChurch take the bread and the cup—but some take the cup at the end of the meal, and others do so at the end of the meeting. All the churches invest some time in instruction, singing, sharing, and praying; some do so in a predictable order, and others do not. Some churches plan out certain elements for the formal meeting time—and (you guessed it!) other churches don’t.
Posted In Paradigm
"Story" Teaching Leads to Musical Collaboration
By Anna Bland | August 29, 2016
Caleb Keller approached me at a music rehearsal in November of 2014 with an idea to write a song, as our network was studying Jeff Reed’s series on the Story. "What if we added some verses to O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, so that it was a really full depiction of The Story?" The first verse was evocative of Israel’s messianic expectation in exile, but the Story was not fleshed out through the rest of the original verses. Caleb wanted to use that longing for Emmanuel to frame a song laying out the ma
A Network of Churches: CityChurch Lawrence
By Mark Bland | August 2, 2016
The churches of the New Testament were not islands unto themselves but were connected through a complex network spanning cities and the entire Roman Empire. The Ames-Des Moines CityChurch is a network of sixteen churches throughout the Ames and Des Moines areas and also part of a larger network spanning almost a dozen cities across the United States called the CityChurch Network.
Posted In CityChurch Network Paradigm
Telling Our Story
By Nathan Haila | June 2, 2015
We’ll be using this place to share our story as we plant churches in the Ames and Des Moines area. We anticipate stories of success and stories of challenges as we endeavor to carry out the work of the ministry. Our vision is that this blog would encourage and create conversation within our own churches and also create a greater conversation for others who are seeking to plant churches following a similar model as ours.
Posted In Paradigm