City Church: ‘It’s Worth Being a Little Uncomfortable’

Pastor Sarah Hooley describes how messy and beautiful a diverse church like City Church can be.

Tell me about the community surrounding City Church.

We’re a nine-year-old church plant, with eight of those years being a set-up, tear-down church. During COVID-19, we purchased a building—an old grocery store that had been a warehouse for the last several years. City Church has been in this building for about a year, intentionally in the urban core of the city. 

Fort Wayne as a whole is predominantly white, but the 46806 ZIP code is very diverse. So, [about equal thirds] African-American, Hispanic and white. That has always been a core part of our mission: to be a multiethnic, multieconomic, multigenerational church.

A pretty significant part of our surrounding neighborhood lives below the poverty line, impacting the multieconomic aspect of our church. It’s been incredible having CEOs of pretty large organizations attending City Church alongside people who are living below the poverty line, and not just alongside but in community with each other.

As an Outreach 100 Fastest-Growing Church, how do you define growth?

We keep track of things like attendance, but we’ve had a significant desire not to just grow in transfer growth where it’s simply church swapping. One of our growth indicators has been baptisms. We have professions of faith and baptisms, and this calendar year alone we’ve had 259 people get baptized.

You mentioned that City Church’s goal is to be multiethnic, multieconomic and multigenerational. What does that look like?

Anytime you have people from very diverse backgrounds in all those different categories, it’s messy. You don’t have some of the easy commonalities of someone who grew up in the exact same neighborhood or the same home or the same kind of environment. But there’s such beauty in how God has used that, even just to reconcile past hurts in people’s lives.

We really are diverse across the board. Our leadership team purposefully reflects the diversity of our church body. In fact, all levels of leadership are intentionally diverse—our small groups and serving teams are multiethnic, multieconomic and multigenerational.

Early on as a church plant, about 60 core people went through an intensive dialogue on race and culture, led by someone within the community. This was a defining moment for our church to open up the conversation, and that’s something that we don’t shy away from. I think people want that level of authenticity—a space to be real and to have real conversations—and that’s happening in our groups and on our serve teams.

There’s something beautiful on our worship team as well, and even our worship style. It’s not contemporary Christian music, it’s not gospel, it’s this beautiful blend of the two. So, nobody gets their exact worship style.

Everybody sees someone that looks like them, and I think that that’s really important that it’s not just within the church body, but also within the leadership as well.

How would you describe your strategy for retaining people?

From the beginning, we’ve had such an incredible buy-in to our small groups and community—we’ve always been at about 50% involvement. As you grow, it’s hard to keep that percentage of engagement up. We know that in community is where you get to know each other’s lives and are able to encourage each other, challenge each other and have that real accountability.

We intentionally do not have church membership. For many within our community, the term “membership” carries some baggage. We do, however, talk a lot about the practices of what it means to belong here at City Church. It’s so simple, so basic, and our lead pastor revisits it every year: attending regularly, being in community with each other, serving on a team, and giving.

Our semester system for small groups provides easy on-ramps so people can jump into a group pretty simply. Then all year long, we have a men’s Bible study and a women’s Bible study that are both always welcoming new people. A newcomer can immediately jump into a group or a study—to be in community with others and talk about Scripture.

We have several serving teams that don’t require you to be a Christian in order to join. You can’t be antagonistic toward Jesus, but you can be a part of our parking lot team, the greet team, our coffee team—and you could just still be checking it out. This individual is going to get to know the person next to them who loves Jesus and is following Jesus, and they’re going to build a relationship, and that person’s going to have an opportunity to share with them what God has done in their lives.

There is a much longer process and higher expectations to serve in our discipleship ministries—small groups, kids and youth ministry. We ask every leader to affirm our statement of belief and complete an application because that’s a higher level of leadership and influence.

While we have a skeleton staff for our church size, our passion is to equip the church to do the ministry. The City Church staff are equippers who engage with the church body and raise up leaders within them. Their role as a volunteer leader is an opportunity to be a discipler, to share the gospel. And there is something that is incredible about that.

Share an example of how God is moving at your church.

We have two of our prayer team members named John and Caroline. John is young and has a number of neck tattoos, while Caroline is in her 80s. I don’t know if she had ever talked to somebody who had a neck tattoo before they both joined the prayer team. 

This unlikely duo prays for people together—and they pray for our church. John and Caroline just have this relationship that you would not see in other places because they both love Jesus. There’s something electric about that, and when you’re a part of it, you don’t want to be anywhere else. When we don’t have much in common except Jesus, we can still bring people together.

What is your church’s posture toward change? And how does that help or hinder people in regard to staying at City Church?

Because we have been a church plant with steady growth, we have always had to be very openhanded and very open to change. Even good change is hard because there’s a bit of a loss of what once was, and the nostalgia even within a short period of time.

I think the thing that has made the most profound difference in navigating change is the ability of our lead pastor, Chris Freeman, to cast that vision. He helps people to see that even though our location changed or the number of services changed, the core of who we are, the core of our mission, has never changed.

I just am so happy to follow a leader who is so passionate about continuing to come back to Scripture and to make the gospel central. These are people who are coming to meet and encounter Jesus for the first time—and whose lives are being changed. Reminding everyone of the reason behind the change is a good thing.

If we’re going to be in a diverse church, that means it won’t be perfectly geared for just one person. So, everyone is going to be a little bit uncomfortable—engaging in aspects that are outside of the norm of what they experienced in the past. And yet, that is such an incredible and exciting environment to be a part of—where I have to set aside some of my preferences. Being in community and relationship, learning from each other and seeing others’ perspectives has opened my eyes to things that I would not have seen otherwise. It’s worth setting aside the preferences. It’s worth being a little uncomfortable.