As we kick off this new year, our desire as a church is to seek God’s face together. Awakening is a movement to commit 21 days to prayer and fasting. We are joining together with all the HMCC sites and several other churches to participate in this movement. We’re calling all of you to participate as you commit to prayer and fasting from Jan 11-31. Some of us will be fasting by eating fruits and vegetables throughout that time. But all of you can participate by fasting from something that helps you direct you focus on God. It could be television, video games, or certain meal times. What’s most important is that we hunger for God as we fast. As a church, we want to capture that spirit of prayer afresh.

If you haven’t done so already, please sign up. You can do so online here. We’ve included all the information regarding the movement, including fasting guidelines. It would be great to see our entire church sign up and meet together to pray in your LCG’s and LIFE Groups. I believe that God will respond in some incredible ways as we earnestly seek Him together. Let’s commit this first month of 2009 to hungering after God.

Happy holidays! I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas with your family and friends! As we start off the new year we wanted to launch the new version of our church blog! I want to especially thank Josh for working on this. We hope you enjoy the new site and be on the lookout for some new updates.

Each year, we take a week to turn our attention to God’s work in the world. This year’s theme for Missions Week is “Here I Am”. We want to make ourselves available to however God would want us to participate in His mission as a church. We have alot of exciting things planned this week. You can check out the schedule of this week’s events here. We will also be sharing this year’s spring break and summer missions projects. We want to invite our entire church to participate in this week’s activities. My prayer is that God’s missionary heart will run in the veins of each member of our church.

I am very happy to announce that this year’s H-Games champion is none other than Mosaic! You guys truly represented the Flames well. I think it may have been all that Chicken Shack you ate the night before. Regardless, it was a well deserved victory. Take good care of the trophy ;).

Number One!

It was awesome seeing both sites come together as one church to build community. It gave me a glimpse of how God wants to work on campuses all throughout Chicago, gathering students and young professionals together with a vision to bring transformation to this city. I can’t wait ’til next year’s H-Games.

One Church

I’m looking forward to the new series that we’ll be starting this Sunday titled “Re: turn”. This series was birthed out of a burden our pastoral staff had for our church. In all our counseling sessions, we realized that one of the keys to experiencing true life transformation is repentance. It’s not a popular word in our day, but I think it’s often misunderstood which is why so many of us don’t understand its importance and experience its power. We’ve titled the series “Re: turn” because that’s what repentance is in its essence - turning away from sin and turning toward God. I’m praying that as a church, we’ll experience the freedom that comes as we return to God in repentance these next few weeks.

This weekend, all the LIFE Groups will be gathering together for our third annual H-Games! This is the second year we’ve had a group from UIC participate. I challenged the group (Mosaic) to represent the Flames well and take it to the NU groups. We’ll see how we do. No matter what the outcome, it’s gonna be exciting! Even if you aren’t currently part of a LIFE Group, we want all to come and have fun with us. Don’t miss out!

We’ve been sharing each week the importance of LIFE Group at our church. It’s impossible to BE the church without living out our lives together as a Christ-like community. You cannot experience biblical community and life transformation by just coming to Sunday Celebration. LIFE Group is the place where life transformation happens best. We love one another, invest in each other, grow in faith together and enjoy one another. This year’s LIFE Group is named Mosaic. It’s a great name! It represents people from different backgrounds coming together to create something beautiful. Check it out:

I know many of us have been following the current presidential election. This is a truly historic moment as we could have our first African-American President or first female Vice President. This Sunday, we’re going to talk about how Christians should engage in the political process. In this message, we want to raise our awareness on the importance of the issues at stake and call all of us to vote responsibly on November 4th.

With so much going on at HMCC of Chicago, we wanted to find more ways to keep everyone updated on the latest and greatest. So we’ve joined the world of bloggers! We want to use this site to share what’s happening in both our Evanston and Downtown sites. So we’ve created blogs for both sites. I hope this will give us a greater sense of unity as we see how God is working on both campuses. Also, I want to share more of my heart as we journey together as a church. I pray this site will be an encouragement to us all!