Church of the City New York

Epizodes

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  FOLLOW | Healing - Dr. Ron Walborn 27.07.2026 44min

  This Sunday, Dr. Ron Walborn continued our Follow series with a teaching on healing from Matthew 8:1–4. He began with the character of Jesus. Before healing a man with leprosy, Jesus reaches out and touches him first. It's a small gesture that reveals a God who moves toward people with compassion, not distance. From there, Dr. Ron explored both the posture of the man seeking healing and Jesus' example for those who minister to others, reminding us that healing is never an end in itself but an invitation into the life God has for us. Holding together both faith and mystery, he encouraged the church to pray boldly because God is a healing God, while recognizing that His healing is fully real now, even as we wait for the day when sickness and death are no more. His closing invitation was simple: the healing ministry of Jesus belongs to the whole Church.
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  FOLLOW | Obedience - Dr. Wanda Walborn 20.07.2026 40min

  This Sunday, guest preacher Dr. Wanda Walborn continued our FOLLOW series with a teaching on obedience from Matthew 7:21-27. Obedience is not an inspiring word for many of us. We want Jesus' love, His forgiveness, His grace, but we hesitate at obedience because we have seen the word distorted. Scripture presents it differently—not the loss of freedom, but the way we learn to trust a good Father. In the parable of the wise and foolish builders, both houses faced the same storm. The difference was the foundation, quietly formed long before the rain, built with integrity, consistent sowing, and grit. The habits formed in the calm show up in the storm. The application from this sermon was to ask the Lord for one habit to practice this week. Write it down. Tell someone. The small decisions you make each day become the foundation you stand on tomorrow.
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  FOLLOW | Seeking - Ralph Castillo 13.07.2026 34min

  This week, Pastor Ralph continued our FOLLOW series with a teaching on Jesus' command to "seek first the kingdom of God." He began with a simple observation—everyone is seeking something. The real question is what sits at the center of our lives. Working through Matthew's Gospel, Pastor Ralph showed that before Jesus ever calls people to seek the Kingdom, He reveals the King. Pastor Ralph quoted "the only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one." Lasting change comes less from trying harder than from discovering a greater love. As Jesus becomes the center, everything else begins to find its proper place.
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  FOLLOW | Resist - Raegan Griffith 06.07.2026 43min

  This week, Pastor Raegan continued our FOLLOW series by teaching from Jesus' temptation in the wilderness in Matt. 4:1–11. If apprenticeship to Jesus means learning His way of life, then it also means learning how to resist what pulls us away from Him. Looking at Jesus' three temptations in the wilderness, Pastor Raegan explored the ways the enemy still works today—drawing us toward comfort over dependence on God, cynicism over trust, and God's gifts apart from God Himself. At the heart of the message was the question, What is your ultimate prize? If anything other than intimacy with God becomes our highest pursuit, temptation will always have something to offer us. But when God Himself is the prize, even the wilderness can become a place where our faith is refined and our love for Him grows deeper.
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  FOLLOW | Apprenticeship - Keithen Schwahn 29.06.2026 50min

  This week, Pastor Keithen opened our FOLLOW series with a question that kicks off the heart of the series, "Is it possible to be a Christian and not a disciple of Jesus?" Teaching from Matthew 4:18–22, he argued that discipleship is not simply about believing Jesus' teaching but apprenticing under His way of life. Looking at Jesus' first call of the fishermen, Pastor Keithen showed that Jesus' invitation comes before anyone has proven themselves, calling ordinary people into a life of presence, formation, and mission. In a culture where "follow" has become little more than a social media gesture, he recovered its original meaning: to walk closely with Jesus until His life becomes evident in our own.
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  FREED | Oppression - Sam Gibson 22.06.2026 40min

  This Sunday, Pastor Sam Gibson concluded our FREED series with a teaching on freedom from spiritual oppression. Teaching from Colossians 1 and 2, he argued that how we understand spiritual warfare depends on how we understand the Gospel. The Gospel is not only the message that our sins can be forgiven. It is also the announcement that Jesus is King. The powers of darkness have been defeated, His kingdom has arrived, and believers now live under His authority. In the teaching, Pastor Sam offered practical guidance for navigating spiritual opposition. One of the enemy's great aims is to steal our song—our wonder, our confidence, our worship. Yet throughout Scripture, God's people continue singing in prisons, in exile, and in suffering. Their songs are acts of remembrance, resistance, and hope, and we can live with that same posture today.
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  FREED | Fear - Luke Lefevre 15.06.2026 46min

  This week, guest teacher Luke LeFevre continued our FREED series with a sermon on fear, exploring how fear can quietly lead us into self-preservation rather than faithful stewardship. Drawing from Matthew 25, Luke unpacked Jesus' parable of the talents, challenged the comparison that keeps many of us from embracing our God-given assignment, and called us to live with an eternal perspective. The invitation was simple but costly: freedom from fear is not waiting until fear disappears, but choosing to trust and obey Jesus anyway.
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  Freed | Unforgiveness - Tim Brown 08.06.2026 44min

  This week, Pastor Tim Brown continued our FREED series with a sermon on unforgiveness—what he called one of the most ignored sources of bondage in the Church today. Drawing from Matthew 18, Pastor Tim explored why forgiveness is so difficult, how bitterness quietly takes root in our lives, and why Jesus speaks about forgiveness with such urgency. Through the parable of the unforgiving servant, he showed that forgiveness is not minimizing an offense, but absorbing the debt, humanizing the offender, and releasing them. The invitation of Jesus is clear: unforgiveness imprisons us, but forgiveness opens the door to freedom.
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  Freed | Rejection - Sam Gibson 01.06.2026 40min

  This week, Pastor Sam Gibson continued our FREED series with a sermon on rejection—opening by admitting he couldn't promise freedom from it. Rejection is inevitable. The real question is whether it will deform you or transform you. Pastor Sam unpacked the snare of recognition as rejection's dangerous shadow side, walked through the Greco-Roman context of adoption in Romans 8, and landed on this: in Christ, we are not rescued strays but chosen heirs—named, inheritance transferred, legally irrevocable. That is the spirit of adoption available to us, and it is what sets us free.
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  Freed | Shame - Jon Tyson 25.05.2026 1h 2min

  This week, Pastor Jon preached from John 7:53–8:11, using the story of the woman caught in adultery and dragged into the temple courts before a crowd with stones as his text for the freedom Jesus offers us from shame. He pushed back on the typical cultural responses to shame—the "you're worthy" or "do better" responses. Neither reaches the place where shame actually lives. He walked through the honor-shame architecture of first-century Jewish culture to show what Jesus was subverting every time He ate with tax collectors, touched lepers, and stopped for the people everyone else walked past. Jesus coming to deal with our shame was a central theme to His ministry. From the animal skins God fashioned for Adam and Eve to the white robes of the saints in Revelation, Scripture traces an important story—God clothing the naked and the shamed in righteousness and glory. That is what Jesus came to do. That freedom is available today.
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  FREED | Anxiety - Raegan Griffith 18.05.2026 44min

  This Sunday Pastor Reagan Griffith continues our FREED series with a teaching on freedom from anxiety. Drawing from Matthew 6:25-34 and Philippians 4:6-7, Reagan identifies the roots of anxiety within lies and the cycle this creates. As New Yorkers we may feel exempt from this freedom, but God calls us to be free and empowers us to "not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." By embracing this truth that anxiety has no place in our lives, as followers of Jesus, "the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
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  Freed | Idolatry - Ralph Castillo 11.05.2026 41min

  This week, Pastor Ralph Castillo continued the FREED series with a teaching on freedom from idolatry. Drawing from Jeremiah 2, Pastor Ralph traces God's grief over a people who abandoned Him for lesser things. The passage is startling in its intimacy. God isn't issuing a legal verdict, He's asking a relational question. "What happened between us?" He speaks in the language of a wounded covenant, the devotion of youth, the love of a bride. Idolatry, in God's framing, isn't just disobedience, it's betrayal. The quickest route into it is simply forgetting who God is and what He's done. The text calls us to respond to idolatry the way God does, appalled, heartbroken, undone. Jeremiah 2:13 gives us the clearest picture of why. God is a fountain of living water, and our idols are cracked cisterns that can barely hold what they promise. The sermon concludes by saying that in God's wrath, He remembers mercy. Like the father in Luke 15, He doesn't wait for us to close the whole distance, He runs.
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  Freed | Lies - Tim Brown 04.05.2026 47min

  This Sunday, Pastor Tim continued our FREED series with a teaching on freedom from lies, drawing from John 8:31–47. He opened with a confession that many of us could relate to: New York has trained us to believe that freedom is always one system away, and if we are not careful, that same restless optimization spills into our spiritual lives too. Pastor Tim argued that the problem is not that we haven't tried hard enough. It's that beneath every sin pattern is a lie we have been carrying so long it feels inseparable from who we are, and no amount of effort will ever reach it. Jesus does not come to help us manage that lie. He comes to replace it with something stronger: Himself, the truth that became a person, who walks up to the lie that has been running your life and extinguishes it. The condition He places on that freedom is not more effort but abiding, remaining in His word long enough for the truth to do its deep work underneath.
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  Freed | Sin - Sam Gibson 27.04.2026 44min

  This Sunday, Pastor Sam continued our FREED series with a teaching on freedom from sin, drawing from 1 John 1:5–10, 2:1–2. He opened by naming what sin actually does to us: it separates, stains, sensitizes, steals, and spreads. The heart of the message, though, was not diagnosis. It was invitation. Through the lens of both guilt-innocence and honor-shame frameworks, Pastor Sam showed that Jesus doesn't just declare us innocent; He restores the relationship. Through the practice of honest, specific, and confident confession, we can walk out of the shadows and into the freedom that is already our inheritance in Christ.
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  FREED | Past - Jon Tyson 20.04.2026 57min

  This Sunday, Pastor Jon continued the FREED series with one of the most personal questions it will raise: can you actually be free from your past? He opened with a number—nine out of ten—his and Christy's combined score on the Adverse Childhood Experiences assessment. The score wasn't shared for sympathy, it was shared to make the question real. As James Baldwin wrote, "people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." Sin works the same way. It exerts power by keeping you in what has already happened, but the antidote isn't denial. Pastor Jon called the answer, "eschatological realism" — a clear, inhabitable sense of the future God has for you. When you're living from that future, what the present holds over you loses its grip. Paul is the guide. In Philippians 3, a man with a past that could have defined him entirely writes about forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead. Biblical forgetting isn't numbing, rather it's the intentional release of failure, guilt, and the pride that can calcify even around our wounds. In Christ, we've been given an identity more defining than anything we've been through. Scripture gives us a redemptive orientation toward time: a past that has been redeemed, a present marked by wonder, and a future held open by hope.
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  FREED | The Call to Freedom - Jon Tyson 13.04.2026 39min

  This Sunday, Pastor Jon opened the new series "FREED" by putting our cultural moment under pressure. We are the freest people in history, and among the most anxious. The freedom we've been promised has not delivered the peace it advertised. What we got instead was exhaustion, comparison, and a quiet sense of fragmentation. The Bible's definition of freedom is entirely different. The question is not whether you're free to do whatever you want. It's whether you're free to become who you were made to be. Paul, writing to the Galatians, doesn't treat freedom as a footnote to the Gospel, he puts it at the center. From there, Pastor Jon traced what Christ sets us free from: condemnation, religious performance, the pull toward lawlessness, and what we're freed into: a new identity as sons and daughters, the Spirit, a community where we actually belong. Freedom, in this reading, has a direction and a destination. The invitation of this series is honest work: name what has you bound, reject the lies that sustain it, receive the grace of Jesus, and learn to walk in step with the Spirit alongside people telling the truth.
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  Easter | Resurrecting Hope - Jon Tyson 07.04.2026 39min

  This Resurrection Sunday, Pastor Jon asked a question most of us don't say out loud: what happens to hope when it dies? He opened with the concept of "hope theory" — the idea that hope requires a vision, a pathway, and a sense that you can actually get there — and traced what happens when that vision collapses. The disciples on the road to Emmaus knew that feeling. They had built everything around Jesus, and then watched Him die. Walking away from Jerusalem, they said the most honest thing in the passage, "we had hoped..." Into that exact moment, Jesus shows up, not to people with their lives together, but to two people walking in the wrong direction. His next move of opening the Scriptures, sitting down at the table, breaking bread is less a lesson in theology, than an invitation back to life. All the information in the world doesn't close that gap. What changes everything is relationship with the risen Savior.
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  Come to Me | Rest For Your Soul - Jon Tyson 30.03.2026 50min

  This Sunday, Pastor Jon concluded the "Come to Me" series by asking a question worth sitting with: why Jesus? He pointed to a cultural moment where confident secularism is losing its footing, and the Christianity quietly growing is not the therapeutic, accommodating kind — it's the traditional, committed, and costly one. From there, Pastor Jon offered three reasons to come to Jesus: longing, forgiveness, and rest. He challenged us with the idea of "miswanting": the gap between what we think will satisfy us and what actually does, and made the case that Jesus doesn't shame us for our desires, but wants to save us from the lesser loves we've been chasing. Jesus's invitation in Matthew 11 is not to a system or a philosophy. it's to a person. One you come to, and keep coming to.
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  Come to Me | Resurrection - Keithen Schwahn 23.03.2026 1h

  This Sunday, Pastor Keithen taught from John 11 and made the case that most of us, have gotten the story badly wrong. He opened with a telling moment from an "Ask the Pastor" session at a high school on the Upper East Side. Every question the students asked him was about who gets into heaven. Not one was about Jesus. From there, he traced the two answers to eternity we've inherited — secularism, which says death is just the end, and a kind of religious gnosticism, which says the physical world is bad and the goal of faith is to escape it. Pastor Keithen argued that neither is what Jesus actually taught. In John 11, standing outside the tomb of his dead friend Lazarus, Jesus doesn't offer Martha a better destination. He weeps. He raises Lazarus bodily from the dead. And before he does, he says the most staggering thing anyone in that world had ever heard: I am the resurrection and the life. He wasn't pointing her toward a place she'd go one day. He was telling her the hope she'd been waiting for was standing right in front of her. Our eternal destiny isn't something transactional, it's relational. And because resurrection is true, it changes how we live right now, not just what happens after.
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  Come to Me | I am the Way, the Truth, the Life 16.03.2026 48min

  This week, Pastor Tim Brown unpacks one of Jesus' most profound declarations — Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life — and gets to the heart of what it means to follow Him. The Christian life is not a transaction with God, a performance for His approval, or a checklist of spiritual obligations. It's a relationship, and there's a sobering difference between knowing about God and truly knowing Him. If you want to know what God is truly like, look at Jesus. His weeping at the tomb of His friend, His washing a betrayer's feet, His forgiving the condemned. He is a compassionate Father worth following, and worth knowing. Pastor Tim concluded with the most invitation to follow Jesus. In Him is life.