Christ City Church Memphis

Part of trust in God is reaching for spiritual connection when you feel alone. This ache for the presence of a Someone is a part of being human. It points to the relational and spiritual longings within us. What will we do with that feeling of absence? What helpful ways could we think about it? Join us as we work through the importance of belief and absence in the series Belief+Doubt+Trust=Life.

Are you reaping the benefits of someone else's work or sowing “seeds” that others will harvest? -probably both! Recognizing that we are all reaping the benefits of others' work and that we are creating futures that someone else will enjoy (or struggle through) can have a profound impact on how we live. Join us this special Sunday morning as we thank Central Christian Church for gifting Christ City Church the church building we have been worshipping in since 2018. We will look back with gratitude and look forward with hope and vision!

At times in life we hold onto God through belief, and, there is also the possibility of letting go and allowing God to hold us, and believing in that. The difference in those two stances can make a significant difference in the decisions we make, the risks we take and how we engage our relationships. Join us as we continue the conversation of Belief+Doubt+Trust=Life.

Thank God for love. Love charges life full of meaning and hope. To love is to believe. To love is to trust and to love is to experience painful and significant doubt. Who and what we love, and who loves us, shapes our life and world as nothing else can. Join us as we continue to explore the ingredients of life in the second part of the series Belief + Trust + Doubt=Life.

Everyone decides what they want to believe. What we choose to believe in, or continue to believe, will expand or limit the borders of our world, and it sets the trajectory of what we can learn and who we will trust. Rational doubt allows us to question our beliefs, thoughts, and experiences and can lead us into deeper levels of trust and awareness. These ingredients can bring life and hope or death and destruction. Those who follow Jesus are tasked with the holy responsibility to gain an ever-deepening understanding of how we interact with belief, doubt, and trust to create a life marked by purpose, wonder, and service. Join us as we explore the boundaries of belief, the catalyst of doubt, and the necessity of trust for life in light of the resurrection.

Join us this Easter Sunday as we remember the resurrection and its power to reorient our hearts toward the life that God offers us through Christ.

Join us for a sacred and unique Good Friday service.

“The truth can set you free.” - AND freedom comes with the responsibility to make difficult choices, which is why we sometimes prefer to ignore it. Jesus' entry into Jerusalem was the inevitable clash of mounting tensions between truth and deception, acceptance and denial, responsibility and passivity. Listen in as we are reminded of the power of truth when we stop running from it and start listening to it.

There are seasons in which dramatic change is thrust upon us and times when we bring about change in our lives. Both are challenging, and both take spiritual imagination to navigate well. We are in such a time when volatile change is being thrust upon us. How will we respond? Join us as we conclude the Lenten series, "Resist Hopelessness, Fast from Complacency, and Persist in Imagination."

Reconciliation is the healing or repairing of something broken, fractured, or misaligned, especially a relationship. Reconciliation can give us hope, it can bring newness, and it can be an incredible source of imagination. Listen in this Sunday to hear how a force that is reconciled may be exactly what we, and the world needs.

 Join us this Sunday as we welcome back to the pulpit,  Rev. Ayanna Watkins, as we continue our Lenten series.

This Sunday we will continue our Lenten series: Resist Hopelessness, Fast From Complacency, Persist in Imagination. Robert Grisham will be teaching on the practice of Contemplative Activism. As followers of Jesus we are called to lives of activism, but when that activism is not rooted in an abiding relationship with Jesus, the results can be damaging, both to ourselves and to the recipients of our activism.

During Jesus's time in the desert, he learned what it meant to resist the temptation of hopelessness. Why is hopelessness even a temptation? How do we name it and then resist it? Join us in the first sermon in the Lenten series: Resist Hopelessness, Fast From Complacency, Persist in Imagination.

 As our series comes to a close, we settle into this important principle for our growth as followers of Jesus – we seek progress, not perfection. What are the steps toward progress we need to take after considering the topics we have addressed over the past two months? This sermon is the conclusion of Setting Your House in Order.

 Few words have the power to evoke such deep feelings of love, sadness, passion, loyalty, hate, division and belonging as family. Fewer still are the places we see the dynamics of a family play out with as much clarity as the dinner table. When it comes to addressing the health and spirituality of our families, how we gather (or don't gather) around the table may be the most important place to start. Join us as we continue to explore the series, Setting Your House in Order, as we discuss the centrality of the table as a tool to strengthen our families.  

 Join us, as we continue to talk about our sexuality and how we can apply what we are learning to the realms of dating and marriage. Part of the series Setting Your House in Order.

Our sexuality is one of the greatest sources of creative energy we possess. Unfortunately, many of us grew up without elders teaching us of its goodness and power leaving us open to messages that our sexuality is simply something to manage and restrain or to act on without inhibition or humility. Something as holy, powerful, and potent as our sexuality will not be reduced to either. We will not be able to order our lives if we spend too long in either extreme. Join us as we continue the series "Setting Your House in Order" as we spend the next two Sundays exploring sexuality.

Out of everything vying for our attention, health may be the most foundational. Our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being determines how we respond to the most significant events in our lives, yet sometimes, we push health to the sidelines of our priorities. Let's rally together and seek health in all aspects of our lives. In learning to do so, we honor God by stewarding the foremost gift we have been given- ourselves. Listen in as we continue the series “Setting Your House in Order”.

To be sober is to be aware, alert, observant, and clear-headed. How can an individual, a family, a city, or a country cultivate this awareness if it wasn't something learned or inherited? Furthermore, how we handle our finances requires tools, skill, and wisdom, but without an emotionally sober relationship with money, we can find ourselves misusing these tools in detrimental ways. Join us as we continue to talk money as part of the series Setting Your House in Order.

Join us this Sunday morning as we continue in our new series Setting Your House in Order. Robert Grisham will be teaching on the 10 things that wisdom teaches us about wealth.

Starting a new year gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we spent our energy, time, and money in the previous one. It allows us to take a sobering look at the difference and similarities between what we say we value and what are life choices show we value. Once we have taken a careful look backwards we can, with intention, help, and faith, begin to plan the next year. Listen in as we seek to create a year of purpose in our pursuit of following after Jesus.

What distinguishes one life from another? Why do we fall in love with one person and not another? Surely it's the particulars of our lives that comprise love. Join us as we discuss the experience of waiting for love and God in the particulars of life on the fourth Sunday of Advent- a time of expectant waiting.

Oftentimes waiting and worrying seem to go together. When you find yourself in a state of worry, how does it impact your life and relationships? Join us as we learn ways to let go of worry as a means of waiting and instead embrace an empowering life of waiting in prayer. The third Sunday of Advent - a time of expectant waiting.

What does it mean for us to find wholeness or completeness? You may have been told it is up to you to figure it out and that you are waiting to be judged as an isolated individual. What if the scriptures say that the work being done in us is a collective work? -That we are waiting, not for our isolated, individual perfection, but for the wholeness that we can only experience in relationship to one another? The work to be completed is in US. Join us as we discuss waiting together on the second Sunday of Advent- a time of expectant waiting.

When waiting for help from God, for intervention or rescue, what do you do? How do you manage the anxiety of not knowing the when or the how? Join us, as we approach the topic of waiting with confidence, in the first sermon in the series- Waiting for the World to Change. 

Are you a rule follower? What voices and personalities have influence or power over you? How's that going for you? How does Jesus interact with authority and what can we learn from it? Listen in as we address these important topics on Christ the King Sunday. 

Reminders can bring joy, prompt you to take action or cause you to understand an obligation. Join us as we discuss reminders of God's promises, grace, mercy, and love.

To live a life where you hope for justice in a world of injustice, and have faith in a God who upholds the oppressed, is to live a life marked by frustration. AND we are called to be a source of frustration for the ways of the wicked. In the tension of this post election moment,  let us find expression, hope and solidarity in both the frustration and in being a frustrater.

Join us this Sunday, as we welcome special guest Reverend Ayanna Watkins back to our pulpit!

When you lose someone you love what do you do? How do we hold the feelings of unrealized hope, sadness, pain, and memory? Is there hope beyond death? Where is God in all of this loss? Join us as we talk about the pain of hope, the grief of death and seek faith in resurrection.

There is a saying: “Heavy is the head that wears the crown”. Most of us would like to know what it feels like to have that “heavy head” because we have achieved our financial and relational dreams and must deal with the weight of managing it all. Or, to say it another way, “I'd love to know from experience that wealth doesn't solve all my problems”.  Jesus says the way to leadership and success, in his kingdom, the crown he is bestowes, comes through service. What does it mean to let go of the idea of worldly success and embrace a way of leadership and greatness through a life of service? Join us this Sunday to explore these ideas!

The prosperity gospel is not a 20th-century invention. It's been around a while. Even Jesus' disciples were surprised when he said wealth is not a sign of God's favor. Going against the grain, Jesus says mercy, empathy, and compassion rank above piety. Maybe it's better to give a bicycle than to win one.

Have you ever felt pressure to immediately make decisions, have answers and form judgements about people and events? While our culture tends to gravitate towards this type of posture in life, the wisdom of the gospel tells us there are many things that can only be understood after a time of suspended judgment and unsettling unknowing. Join us as we explore a path toward this wisdom of unknowing in a world of certainty.

Have you noticed how heavy it is to carry your true thoughts and feelings about life when you don't feel like you can share them? At what cost do we live life only showing up as who we think others want us to be? What would it look like to welcome all of ourselves to our life as followers of Jesus and human beings on a journey to become whole.  Listen in as we explore the path of wholeness and integrity.

Were you “cliqued up” in middle school? High school? Maybe you were on the outside looking in? In the first half of our lives deciding who's in and who's out is important to form our identity; it can even feel like the difference between life and death. As we get further along in life wisdom calls us to understand belonging in a new way, one that can build desperately needed bridges in our families, churches and cities. Join us as explore the wisdom of inclusion, what it looks like and how we can pursue it.

Have you ever thought “if I just get this, I'll be satisfied,” only to find yourself back in the same place of discontent moments later? What if finding deep contentment and satisfaction cannot happen through acquiring more things, control, power, money, admiration, etc. but can only happen by letting go, losing, and surrendering? Listen in as we explore this path, the path of a disciple of Jesus.

There are a variety of symbols that summon our allegiance- country, consumerism, political party and more. Whom and what we pledge our allegiance to, whether knowingly and unknowingly, has the potential to shape our lives in impactful ways. Listen in as we conclude our series Status Symbol as we take a look at the symbols that command our allegiance.

Symbols of love dominate the landscape of our lives: love songs, dating apps, instagram couples, hallmark and Netflix movies, etc., etc.  As humans we are often defined by whom and what we love (and who loves us). Do you love your family, your partner, America, God, money, the truth, capitalism, the church, yourself, the south? How do the symbols connected to these loves impact the level of importance  and influence they have in your lives? Listen in, as we explore how symbols of love make sense of our world and how we can relate to them with discernment and wisdom.

Where is God? In church? In us? Around us? In believers and not unbelievers? Just as we do today, the ancient people of God had symbols to give them, clarity, security and connection to the presence of God. What we believe about those kind of symbols and what they represent can determine what status we believe we have with God and others. Join us as we take a look at how sacred symbols have the power to change how we think and feel about the presence of God. The first installment in the series Status Symbol. 

In the previous sermon we explored the vision of CCC. To reach the destination of our vision we need a mode of transportation. Our mission is that vehicle. Explore with us how we move through the world as followers of Jesus who serve with heart, worship in wonder and create with purpose.

At Christ City we have a simple vision. We aspire to become: A place to belong and a place to know God. Just because it is simple does not mean it is easy. Join us as we remember and recommit our hearts and minds to this inspiring and challenging vision.