“A community learning to love well”—that’s the stated vision of CityLights Faith Community, a new church in New York City that my wife, Lynette, and I started with 20 others in June 2003. When we left our jobs in Connecticut and moved to the city two years ago, this vision hadn’t yet been written down. But the concept of “loving well” was exactly what motivated me. Didn’t Jesus teach his students to love well? And wouldn’t secular New Yorkers be fired up by this same vision? We thought it was worth finding out.

At CityLights, “loving well” is expressed in three dimensions: inward, toward one another within the church; outward, toward anyone within our capacity to help; and upward, toward God through acts of worship. We designed CityLights so that all of our activities—everything we do—helps to fulfill our vision of being a loving community for the good of New York City.

One of the primary ways we learn to love well within the church is in our small groups. On a weekday night, five or six people gather after work in the living room of an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. One night they share some snacks, sing, pray and discuss a few chapters from The Story We Find Ourselves In, a book of postmodern fiction and theology by Brian McLaren. On another night they might take the Lord’s Supper together, or empathize with a group member who’s having a conflict with a coworker. All these activities are part of the process of discipleship, in which students of Jesus help one another to be more like the teacher.

Small groups are an essential part of CityLights’ vision. Meeting on a weekday night reinforces our understanding of the church as a community that does life together all week long, rather than a collection of individuals who convene once a week to do church. Belonging to a small group is a way for us to be intentional about our commitment to each other. If we are serious about learning to love well, we can’t just say, “We love the whole world.” In small groups we make our love specific by coming to know and care for specific people.

But a church can’t love well if it only focuses inward, so CityLights runs, or participates in, a number of other events that create opportunities for making friends beyond the church community. For instance, CityLights people helped to begin Salon, a weekly discussion group that gathers in a café in Greenwich Village to talk about philosophy, movies, politics, sociology or anything else of interest. Some members joined a book club that meets every couple of months. On occasion CityLights will sponsor a dinner party or a hike outside the city and bring our friends and coworkers along. In this way the CityLights community is broadened to include and serve a diverse body of people.

CityLights also places a strong emphasis on Christian activism as a way of loving our city and its people. God is not a Republican or a Democrat, but Jesus did not shy away from politics; his platform was to care for “the least of these.” Following Jesus, some CityLights people have committed to weekly service preparing meals for the homeless and the terminally ill. CityLights has organized several blood drives, helped to run a Christmas party for homeless kids, and made holiday cards for shut-ins. These kinds of service-oriented activities remind us that Jesus directed us to be doers, not merely hearers of the word.

We regard all these tangible acts of love for others as worship. But it is also important for CityLights people to spend time in worship that transcends the merely human and connects us directly to God. On Sabbaths we gather in the library of a Quaker school downtown. The library has a comfortable, familiar feel. It’s ringed with books, and large windows flood the room with natural light, so people seem comfortable inviting their friends into a neutral space without churchy overtones. Worship times are simple. There is singing and prayer, a talk and discussion. New Yorkers have serious doubts about Christianity, and I try to provide a useful framework for coping with these doubts, rather than resolving them with easy answers or pretending a greater level of certainty than I have. Most of us live with some level of uncertainty. It seems to me that one key to following Jesus is not to focus obsessively on intellectual certainty about his teachings, but to actually do what we are certain is good: like the command to love one another as Jesus loved his friends.

The best feature of our library meeting space is the view through the large windows overlooking Stuyvesant Park. As we worship we look out at trees and birds, pedestrians and taxis. I always love stained-glass windows in church buildings, but a real drawback is that they insulate worshippers from the world outside. Here, there is no barrier between us and the world. We are here in the heart of the city, and the city goes on all around us. This reminds me that the followers of Jesus are not called to be separated from the city, nor to be assimilated to it. We are a countercultural community within the city, joining in whatever work we perceive God doing here. We are part of the legacy of Abraham: blessed, but not for ourselves alone. We are blessed to be a blessing to all people.

Robert Darken is the community director for CityLights Faith Community. He is a former high school English teacher who attended a church in New York City for three years before moving to the city to start CityLights. You can find out more about CityLights by visiting www.citylights.info.