Why this church.
Why now.
A rationale for City On A Hill — and a candid account of the cultural moment that calls for a particular kind of church in New York. Written for those considering whether to partner with us, and how.
I.
A crisis of solidarity.
Late-modern Western life has lost the basis for basic human solidarity. We no longer share a coherent account of what makes us one. In the absence of any shared ground, people increasingly anchor their identity in the particularities of ethnicity, tribe, nation, or class — in what makes them different from their neighbors rather than in what they hold in common with them. The result is a society that cannot honestly answer the most elementary civic question: what is it that we owe one another?
This is not a partisan diagnosis. It is the convergent verdict of sociologists, political theorists, and historians across the ideological spectrum. James Davison Hunter has argued, in Democracy and Solidarity, that the American democratic project rested for two centuries on a "hybrid Enlightenment" — a fusion of Enlightenment political form and Christian moral substance — and that this hybrid has now collapsed. The political form remains; the moral substance has eroded. What is left is a thin proceduralism asked to do work it was never designed for.
Tyler VanderWeele's research at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program adds the empirical complement. Religious practice — across traditions, controlling for confounders — correlates significantly with measures of human flourishing: meaning, mental and physical health, social trust, civic engagement, family stability. Religion is not a private hobby running parallel to public life. It is a load-bearing element of human wellbeing whose erosion is felt across every domain a serious social scientist measures.
We stand, in other words, in the ruins of something. The question is what comes next.
II.
The image, severed and betrayed.
The doctrine that could have grounded human solidarity in the West was the doctrine of the image of God. From the early church through the medieval synthesis and into the Reformation, the conviction that every human being bears the divine image was the substantive theological basis for universal human dignity, for the moral equality of persons across class and tribe, and for the long arc — uneven, embattled, but real — of Western moral progress.
That doctrine was undone by two failures running on parallel tracks.
The first was an epistemological failure. Modernism's turn to the autonomous knowing subject — Descartes, and the centuries of philosophy downstream of him — gradually severed the image of God from the knowledge of God. The image became a freestanding humanism. Without its theological anchor, it had no resources to defend itself against the disenchanting force of late-modern critique. By the time figures like Foucault, Rorty, and the late-twentieth-century academy had finished their work, the image of God was no longer a self-evident moral fact. It was an artifact of one culture's mythology, with no claim on anyone else.
The second was a moral failure. As Western Christendom expanded outward through colonialism, it failed to let the image-of-God doctrine fully challenge the racial and civilizational hierarchies it carried with it. The image was preached but unevenly enacted. The result was a profound moral compromise whose effects we are still metabolizing. The doctrine that should have grounded human solidarity was discredited, in the eyes of many, by the failures of those who claimed to hold it.
Today the same doctrine — properly retrieved and faithfully enacted — is again the most promising resource we have for re-grounding solidarity. But it cannot simply be re-asserted as if the last three centuries had not happened. It has to be re-earned: argued for intellectually, practiced credibly, and embodied in concrete communities that demonstrate what it actually looks like for people of every background to be one body.
III.
Why familiar answers fall short.
The church has two common responses to the present moment, both true as far as they go and both incomplete on their own.
The first is the privatized response: plant more churches and lead more people to Jesus. This remains essential. Personal reconciliation with God through Christ is the heart of the Christian gospel and the source of every other good the church offers the world. Yet by itself, this response leaves unanswered the broader social questions increasingly confronting our culture. It rescues individuals from a sinking ship without asking why the ship is taking on water. A church that speaks only in personal terms risks leaving the deeper crisis of solidarity unaddressed.
The second response is the one most closely associated with Tim Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. It was one of the most fruitful ministries in the history of New York City. Through preaching, church planting, mercy ministry, faith-and-work initiatives, and extraordinary generosity, Keller's ministry helped lead thousands to faith in Christ and distributed resources, leadership, and gospel influence far beyond Manhattan into the boroughs, the suburbs, and cities around the world.
The Keller era answered with remarkable effectiveness the defining question of its cultural moment: Is Christianity intellectually credible in a secular city?
For a generation shaped by skepticism, New Atheism, and the assumption that faith was incompatible with serious intellectual life, this was precisely the right question to answer. The Keller era answered it with rigor, beauty, humility, and grace. The fruit is incalculable.
Yet every faithful ministry is called not merely to repeat past answers but to discern the questions of its own moment. The city Keller entered in the 1980s was fragmented in many ways, but it still possessed substantial reserves of social trust, institutional confidence, and civic cohesion. The dominant challenge was often existential: Can Christianity be believed?
The city emerging after COVID is asking an additional question. Trust in institutions has eroded. Loneliness has increased. Political and cultural fragmentation have intensified. More and more New Yorkers are asking not only whether Christianity is true, but whether any community can sustain a meaningful common life at all.
To honor Keller's legacy is not to move beyond it. It is to build upon it. The same gospel clarity that addressed the existential questions of one generation must now be brought to bear on the social questions of another.
IV.
How City On A Hill Builds on Keller's Legacy.
The question before us is not whether the gospel has changed. It has not. The question is which dimensions of the gospel need to be brought most clearly into view for the present moment.
The Keller era rightly emphasized the gospel's answer to the problem of personal alienation from God. The language of redemption, reconciliation, forgiveness, and justification spoke directly to a generation asking whether Christianity could be believed and whether grace could be found.
Those themes remain foundational to everything we preach.
But Scripture gives us another image that speaks with particular force to our moment. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his disciples: You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.
The image is not primarily individual but communal. It points to a visible people whose life together displays the reality of God's kingdom. The image reaches back to Isaiah's vision of the nations streaming to Zion and forward to the New Jerusalem descending from heaven in Revelation. Throughout Scripture, God's people are presented not merely as redeemed individuals but as a redeemed society — a foretaste of the world God intends to create.
The challenge facing New York today is not only a crisis of belief but a crisis of belonging. The church therefore has an opportunity to demonstrate something the wider culture increasingly struggles to produce: a community capable of sustaining genuine solidarity across differences of class, ethnicity, politics, vocation, and background.
To call a church City On A Hill is not to abandon the emphasis on redemption. It is to ask what redemption produces. The gospel does not merely reconcile individuals to God; it creates a people. It forms a visible community whose shared life becomes a witness to the city around it.
That, we believe, is the aspect of the biblical vision that our moment most urgently needs to see.
V.
A different basis for being one.
Every coherent vision of human community proposes some basis for solidarity. The viable candidates are limited, and worth naming.
Nationalism proposes solidarity through shared ethnos or nation — a thick basis for community within the nation, with no resources for solidarity across nations. We are seeing its return globally; we should expect to see more of it before we see less.
Tribalism — political, racial, ideological — proposes solidarity through shared in-group identity, with no resources for solidarity across the boundary. Late-modern Western culture has been increasingly captured by tribal modes of belonging, especially as the older liberal universalisms have lost their grip.
Class consciousness proposes solidarity through shared economic position. It has the merit of crossing some ethnic and national lines; it has the limitation of weaponizing economic difference as the master frame for every social relation.
Islamic political-religious solidarity proposes solidarity through unified civilizational expansion — what Augustine would have called a Kingdom of this World form. It is, among the global options on the table, one of the few that offers a thick positive vision of human community. The secular West has so far been unable to articulate a comparably thick alternative. This is part of why so many young people are drawn to its coherence even when they reject its specifics.
The Christian gospel proposes a different basis: solidarity grounded in the shared image of God, recovered and reordered through what Christ has done. The image of God is the deepest fact about every human being — prior to ethnicity, prior to class, prior to nation, prior to ideology. Our particularities are real and not erased. But they are subordinate to what we hold in common as image-bearers, and they are gathered, finally, into a single new humanity under the singular authority of King Jesus.
This is not a thin universalism. It is a thick solidarity — produced by grace, sustained by sacraments, embodied in a particular community that takes the long, patient work of becoming one body.
VI.
Neither captive to the right nor to the left.
The cultural moment we have described has produced, in the American church, a recurring pattern of political capture. Churches on the right have, in significant numbers, fused the Christian faith with American nationalism in ways the historic Reformed tradition cannot recognize as faithful. Churches on the left have, in significant numbers, fused the Christian faith with the latest progressive policy agenda in ways equally distant from the gospel's center. Both are forms of co-option. Both render the church silent in the very moments when its voice would matter most.
City On A Hill is committed to a different posture, grounded in specific theological convictions and specific pastoral disciplines.
We confess that Jesus Christ is the ascended King over every nation. Every business leader, every civic leader, every elected official — like every private individual — gives an account to him. This is not metaphor; it is the literal claim of the New Testament. A church that holds this truth steadily cannot be in the pocket of any political party, because no political party can compete with the throne of God.
We confess that no nation, including this one, holds a privileged status before the ascended King. The United States has been, in many ways, a remarkable gift of God to the world. But its rightful posture is not presumed privilege; it is increased stewardship and accountability. If ancient Israel could not presume upon its covenant privilege — and the prophets are unsparing on this point — then no nation after the resurrection can.
That framing changes the church's relationship to American political life entirely. It frees the church to celebrate what is genuinely good in this country's history without sacralizing it, and to name what is broken without despairing of it. The lens for evaluating any political moment is not the fortunes of any party but the moral substance of the questions at hand under the lordship of Christ.
We commit to preaching the truth prophetically without descending into the details of policy-making or taking partisan sides. This is not cowardice; it is discipline. The pastor who tells you how to vote has, in that moment, traded the freedom of the prophetic voice for the leverage of the political operative. We will speak to the moral substance of public questions — the dignity of every image-bearer, the obligations of justice, the temptations of power, the limits of every human regime — without converting the pulpit into a policy desk.
We hold a sober view of government itself. Scripture and history together teach that governments tend toward expansion in ways that damage human flourishing, even as they remain essential to basic social order. No government is wrong. Too much government is wrong. Wisdom is the discipline of seeing which way the present pressure is running.
We cultivate a church culture in which genuine solidarity exists across political difference. Republican members and Democratic members sit at the same table, take the same supper, and serve each other in the same body, because the bond that holds them together is deeper than the bond that separates them. These differences are not embarrassments to be hidden. They are useful reminders that every political order is provisional until the new earth.
The same posture extends to culture more broadly. We actively value the distinct contributions of every people — vestiges of God's own creativity refracted through the nations — while acknowledging that every culture, our own included, requires the ongoing reform that comes only through the gospel.
The result, we hope, is a church whose witness is sharp without being partisan, faithful without being captured, and distinct without being sectarian.
VII.
Built for the city as it actually is.
City On A Hill is a church plant designed from the ground up for the moment we have just described. We are gospel-centered and holistic, with a deliberately citywide strategy. The strategy has three components, each chosen to address a specific feature of New York life.
I.
Centralized Worship
A single gathering in Midtown.
Sundays at NY City Center Studios, 130 W 56th St — accessible from every borough by subway. The geographic center is the theological center: the place where the gathered diversity of the city becomes a single body in worship, where the Word is preached and the sacraments are administered.
II.
Localized Formation
Bi-weekly groups across the boroughs.
Bible studies, meet-ups, and men's and women's gatherings distributed across Midtown, Astoria, the Upper West Side, Roosevelt Island, and beyond. The point of formation in the everyday — friendship, discipleship, mutual care — where members live and work.
III.
Attractional Conversation
City On A Hill Conversations.
Monthly events — wine, cheese, and substantive conversation hosted by Rev. Dr. Jay Harvey. A meaningful place of social engagement for New Yorkers longing for real conversation in a disconnected age. The bridge for those not yet ready for Sunday.
The combination is intentional. Centralized worship provides the theological gravity that holds the church together as a single body. Localized formation provides the friendship and discipleship that make the body real in members' actual lives. Attractional conversation provides the on-ramp for the many in this city who are intellectually serious, spiritually searching, and unlikely to walk into a Sunday service cold.
This is not a marketing strategy. It is an ecclesiology — a particular account of what the church is and how it inhabits a fragmenting city.
VIII.
Honest about the moment.
City On A Hill is a PCA church plant in Midtown Manhattan, currently operating under provisional session status as we work toward full particularization. We worship Sundays at NY City Center Studios. We have community groups distributed across four boroughs. We have a small but growing congregation drawn from a remarkable cross-section of the city — finance, the academy, the arts, medicine, law, education, and a steady stream of younger New Yorkers asking the questions this moment has put on the table.
We are at the stage of every church plant where the vision has been clarified, the strategy has been built, the early formation has begun, and the question of what we become depends substantially on whether we are partnered with at the scale the work requires. The bones are in place. The next year is the year we build out the body.
We are asking serious people to consider whether a church built deliberately for this cultural moment, in this city, with this theological frame, is something they want to see exist — and to help us make it exist.
IX.
How partners participate.
Partnership with City On A Hill takes three primary forms. Each addresses a distinct dimension of what a young church plant in Manhattan requires to become what it is meant to be.
Foundational Support
Operations & Worship.
The recurring cost of being a church — venue, music ministry, pastoral salary, operational staff. The base load that makes everything else possible.
Formation Capacity
Groups & Discipleship.
Resources for the bi-weekly groups across the boroughs — leader development, curriculum, hospitality. The scaffolding of formation in the everyday.
Public Witness
Conversations & Outreach.
Monthly City On A Hill Conversations, hospitality budget, the events that put the church in conversation with the city. The visible edge of the work.
We believe the moment before us calls the church to offer a powerful witness of gospel solidarity, and thereby provide a basis for a more common civil solidarity.
City On A Hill NYC · An Historic Protestant Church