Why are we doing this? Because we believe it’s going to help you discover an important thing about God and giving. God says in the book of Malachi that his people can test him on this. That when we’re generous with our offerings to his work he will “open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour out a blessing so great you won’t have enough room to take it in!” (Malachi 3:8-10). Those of us who do regularly give have experienced it! (Ask around… we think you’d be hardpressed to find someone who does give & doesn’t think it in some way enhances their life).

Signing up below ensures that your offerings over the next 3 months will be kept to the side as part of the challenge. Email finance@northbrooklynvineyard.org at any time with any questions.

I immediately called our Advisory Team to fast and pray, each member covering a day of the week, until he found a new home for our church. Well great news, St. John’s Lutheran, a beautiful old, neo-Gothic-style church located in neighboring Greenpoint, has graciously agreed to allow us to become their tenant congregation!

A God-thing

This is definitely a God-thing. In November, before we ever received notice that we were being kicked out of the school we had a prayer meeting in the basement of the St. John’s. Afterwards I went upstairs and stood in the front of the sanctuary. As I looked out over the pews in the dark something came over me and I got this strong sense that God wanted us to be there. A new home and a new beginning.

A couple of nights later I mentioned this to our leaders at our monthly team meeting and you know how when God speaks the room gets all energized? Well that’s what happened. Suddenly we were full of hope and new possibilities that frankly had been missing for a while. We allowed ourselves to dream a bit about what a new home and a new beginning might mean for our church… The ability to catch public attention; to meet in a space conducive to worship; new possibilities for neighborhood ministry; being in a community more open to what we were offering… Visibility, growth, and stability.

I hadn’t seen the team that pumped in a long time. But I quickly reminded everyone not to get carried away. After all there was no door open to us. St. Johns hadn’t given any indication that they’d be open to such an arrangement. Oh well, it was nice to dream…

A little help from a friend

But what I didn’t mention to you was that I had made friends with a guy who’s on St. John’s board and he just so happens to be in charge of their building. He was the one who arranged for us to have the prayer meeting there. Sowhen three weeks later we received the bad news of our impending homelessness I went to him and asked if he would act as our advocate. He caught the vision and went right to work, petitioning the other board members while our team prayed. A week or later he called and told me  that he had gotten permission for us to rent the church! In the short span of little over a month God changed the situation, opened the door and got us a new home.

The next step

So as of February 5^th we’ll be meeting Sundays at 12 noon at St. John’s Lutheran Church, 155 Milton St.,right off of Manhattan Ave in Greenpoint (Google Map). This move does not affect our Trash Bar service in any way. This may seem like the case of a new home and a new beginning, but I believe it’s more. I believe it’s the next step of an adventure God has had planned for our church all along and I’m excited to see what’s in store for us.q

On Thursday evening, January 19th we’re holding a prayer meeting at the church from7:00 – 8:30pm in order to seek God’s continued help in this time of transition. Come and join us.

God bless,
Pastor Mike

This will affect some 160 religious groups in the city. What this means is that as of Feb 12th, we’ll no longer be permitted to rent P.S. 132 for our Sunday morning services.

Now what? Well after getting over the initial shock I got in touch with our Advisory Team to put together a plan. This is what we’ve come up with so far: We’ve initiated a facility search in the Williamsburg and Greenpoint areas.

Several members have been assigned to put together a list of prospective locations. We’re looking at churches, synagogues, community centers, private schools, colleges, and any other family-friendly we can think of. Once we get the list we will begin the cold calling to see what opportunities we have open to us. A location has to be fairly easy to get to. It must be able to fit around 100 adults. It must have space for children’s ministry as well as a bit of storage. And most important, it must be cheap! If you have any ideas or have a contact who might be helpful please let me know.

In addition I have called on the members of the Advisory Team to fast and pray one day a week until we find a new home for our morning service. I invite the rest of you to join us if you’re so inclined.

This is serious but it’s not the end of the world. The church is a community of people committed to Jesus and to each other, not a building. Yes this will be probably be a season of inconvenience and sacrifice but it could be the very conditions that brings the best out of us and causes us to experience the Lord’s presence and power in ways we’ve haven’t up to now.

So take heart. The Advisory Team and myself are committed to maintaining a healthy community life that will include meeting together on Sundays. We do have a temporary fall-back space in case nothing comes up by mid-February, but it doesn’t offer separate space for children or nursery so we’d have to all meet together in some creative way until we found an adequate home. Other churches have gone through similar crisis and gone on to thrive. So all hands on deck. If you’ve been away now’s a great time to show up and offer your support. Let’s close ranks and pray. I will keep you in the loop as things progress.

Sincerely,
Pastor Mike

Well, the holidays are now here!

We have a few things happening this month you should know about… our Annual Christmas Party on Saturday, Dec 10 6 – 10pm, a workshop on praying for the sick Saturday, Dec 17 10am – 3:30pm & most notably our Christmas schedule:

December 18
AM service: Breakfast & Christmas celebration
PM service: Christmas service at Trash

December 25/Christmas Day
No Services! If you do want to connect with NBV folks who might be getting together for Christmas, post a note on our Facebook wall or ask around on a Sunday.

January 1/New Years Day
Trash Bar service only

*Our normal service schedule resumes Jan. 8th

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you do feel so inclined as to give to our Foundation Fund, you can do so at www.northbrooklynvineyard.org/giving.

If you find this interesting, check out other articles written about us over the years:

- Finding God in a Watering Hole from The Brooklyn Rail (Sept 2010)

- Punch-Drunk Church from The Village Voice (June 2007)

- N.Y. Church Goes Into the Bar and Finds a Flock distributed by AP/Religion News Service (2007)

Muldoons on 3rd Ave & E 43 St.

Our story begins in Manhattan. At the time we had an alternative church gathering in a midtown office building for twenty-somethings who liked Jesus but didn’t particularly like church. A trend began to develop. Afterwards a bunch of us would go to an Irish pub across the street to hangout and socialize.

It was during this time that we began to build stronger connections not only among ourselves but also with bar staff and patrons. Some of the most impactful movements to God’s kingdom would happen as we hung out and socialized. We began to see God at work right there among people who were not “part of our church” but who nonetheless felt like they belonged to our community because they were becoming our friends. They felt included without question and loved. That’s because they actually were! That’s because everyone – churchgoing or not- was actually on the same page and were simply enjoying the sweet community of God’s Spirit.

A God-given knack

That’s when we caught our sense of mission. We began to realize that God had been using us as a bridge between himself and people who would otherwise view God (if they believed in God), as irrelevant and impractical, unfair and unkind, part of an offensive and judgmental culture, or uninterested or incapable of helping them. However, to their surprise they began to experience quite the opposite: That God was accessible and active and that he was loving and actually made their lives better. What we found was that everyone, regardless of how close they were, or felt they were to God (church people or secular people), were finding greater connection with Jesus who actually did have “good news” for their lives.

The Trash Bar

We started to wonder, could this knack be a gift? Could it be our mission? Thus the Trash Bar service was born. We put an ad out on Craig’s list. The owner of Trash responded and met with us. He invited us to meet on Sunday evenings. We accepted the invitation following Christ’s example of accepting invitations to anyone’s house. Thus Trash Bar became an advancement of what God had begun in Manhattan, bringing together what God was doing at Submerge and what he was doing at Muldoon’s under one roof.

The bar was a natural gathering place for all sorts of people. We simply did what Jesus did and met the people where they were at. The church service would serve as a call to worship and provide an opportunity for exploring Jesus in a non-threatening way, with many of the confusing and often off-putting religious trappings of Christianity stripped away. What’s more, the after-service socializing again became more of an opportunity for community to develop for anyone and everyone – church affiliated or not. Over the years faith conversations, sharing of life stories and friendships have become the hallmark of the Trash Bar experience.

Connecting

We’ve experienced: Bar staff becoming like family. People from all walks of life, from all over the world becoming part of our community. We’ve connected with the most unlikely people often alienated from traditional Christian religion – Atheist scientists, cynical journalists, New Age spiritualists, members of the LGBT community, agnostic intellectuals, skeptical hipsters, Buddhist mystics, even Hasidic Jews

Morning Service @ the School

Not long after we started meeting we realized there was a larger community of people in the neighborhood that were spiritually curious but lacking a life-giving connection that Jesus provides who would not fit at Trash. So we began a morning service to provide the exact same opportunity for families and children. Both services are now integral to our mission; neither is more or less important than the other.

This knack or gifting is who we are at the NBV. You can say it’s our church family identity or mission. This why we exist in the first place and why we do what we do. This is what makes us unique and why so often people who have moved on say they’ve never quite been able to find anything exactly like the NBV.

We hear over and over that what people find attractive and helpful about us is that… We’re inclusive… We allow them to belong before they believe… We don’t use confusing God-talk and we keep things practical…They like our honest, no-hype style… They like it that we let them go at their own speed… They say God’s made accessible and they were able to experience him without being forced to… We’re prescriptive rather than directive and not preachy or talk down to people… They like that we’re relational rather than programmatic.

Measuring success

You might say we’re a church for the “rest of us” not just for the religiously informed and that makes us a safe place for anyone of any faith or non-faith background to explore what it means to follow Jesus. There aren’t many communities around like us that I know of. So we shouldn’t compare ourselves with other churches. So how do we know when we’re succeeding then?

Numbers shouldn’t be ignored but they can be confusing and not tell the true story of our success or lack of it. Our most important indicator is the level and frequency to which lives are being impacted by Jesus. It’s the number of tiny steps people, who previously considered themselves non-faith-types make towards a meaningful relationship with Christ. And because of this progress is slow.

How might success look around here? A person who’s been hurt by the church finds God, peace and healing in our community. A person who’s never put the pursuit of God high on their ‘to do’ list begins to take steps toward a relationship with Jesus. A long-time churchgoer who can quote 100’s of Bible verses experiences the power of forgiveness for the first time. A drug addict finds support and freedom in Jesus and through our community. Someone who’s been a church attendee for years begins leading a small group for the first time. Someone who has financial difficulties begins trusting God’s provision enough to be generous with the little money they have. Someone who has experienced a major moral failure doesn’t have to leave the church or God but walks humbly back towards both. People of diverse racial, gender, age, socio-economic and religious backgrounds worship Jesus together and become friends. A person senses God speaking to them for the first time. Someone learns to pray for the sick. The Bible becomes more important and a regular resource in a person’s life. Someone who is typically self-focused starts taking an hour to visit day laborers or help someone in need.

If these things are happening then we are succeeding in our mission and calling from God… and they are! We need to be thankful for the many, many blessings that God has given us and the way he’s used our community. Caring for what he’s entrusted us with is our only responsibility so let’s do that with enthusiasm and grateful hearts.

If you currently attend our church or are an alumni we’d love to hear how your story connects with or has been impacted by the bigger NBV story, so drop us a line at info@northbrooklynvineyard.org

Most groups are a combination of building friendships, some Bible or book study & prayer, although different groups might focus on different things. Contact the group leader for more information about a specific group.

There is no shortage of noise today. City life is full of noise – car horns, sirens, children at play, phones ringing, TV, radio, music, you name it. Even in our prayer time the tendency is to do all the talking.

It’s almost impossible to get away from noise at all. And when we do, often the awkward silence makes us uncomfortable because we’ve grown so used to noise we want to fill every moment with it.

Sure we hear a lot of things but all the bustle and noise of modern living severely undermines our ability to listen to each other and most of all to God. Yet Jesus said the ability to listen what he has to say to us was the key requisite for everyone who wants to follow him.

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. (John 10:27)

The point is that our ability to listen and respond to his voice is crucial to experiencing the abundant life Jesus came to bring us.

Listening vs. hearing

Listening is not the same as hearing it’s more.It’s actively taking in, processing and being attentive. True listening involves a level of recognition, understanding, of getting to know the other. Someone said that,“Hearing without understanding is like snipping an electrical cord in two, then plugging it in anyway, hoping somehow that something will light up.”  This is not something we do intentionally. But when we pray to God we’re often baffled and frustrated by our sense of disconnection   - a feeling of being left sitting in the dark.

A lost art

It can be said in general that most of us don’t how to listen. Though most of us have ears that can hear very well, we don’t actually know how to use them to listen especially to God. You can say hearing God’s voice has become a lost art.

Failure to recognize God’s voice and listen isn’t necessarily because you don’t care or you’re insensitive. All the believers I know earnestly want to hear God’s voice. However anxiety, preoccupation, busyness and pressure can undermine the skills of even a good listener and we’re all prone to these things. So listening for God’s voice requires effort. It takes work. I don’t pretend to be an expert at it, but I am trying to learn to get better at it. And like every skill, the more you do it, the better you’ll get.

A new series

In order to help us recover this ability to listen to God’s voice we’ve started a sermon series called, “Hearing What God Has To Say”. We’ll take a look at the common ways God speaksalong with some practical ways you can tell the difference between your own thoughts and imaginations, the voices of others, voices from our past and God’s voice. We’ll also talk about what to do when God speaks to us. I believe this is going to be one of the most interesting and helpful series we’ve offered.

I hope you’ll join us as we begin this adventure of learning listen and respond to God’s voice.

God bless
Pastor Mike

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