City Church is a gospel-centered, urban church led by Femi Osunnuyi in the city of Lagos, Nigeria – the commercial and cultural capital of Nigeria. After a year of pre-launch meetings beginning in 2016, City Church had its official launch on January 8, 2017!

Lagos is a strange amalgam of Western urbanized and African traditional cultures. The former has not replaced the latter, neither has the latter rejected the former. Instead, they’ve created a fusion that makes contextualized ministry quite challenging. In response to this challenge, at City Church we try, in our preaching and church practice, to actively listen to those two voices. We note how Christianity affirms and reflects them, but also how the gospel confronts them.

There is a hunger in Lagos for the gospel to be preached and Jesus’s name to be proclaimed.

What we’ve seen in our time here is that there is a hunger in this city for the gospel to be preached and Jesus’s name to be proclaimed, unburdened from anything that the culture or tradition wants to attach to it. We continue to have a unique group of people find and visit our church, people whom God has had in the city long before we started the church planting process at all. These people were aware of a gospel-centered movement through ministries with strong online presences, like The Gospel Coalition and Desiring God, and have longed for a gospel-centered church. In our inaugural worship service on January 8, a couple came to worship with us after having learned about us through an Acts 29 blog nearly 2 years ago. We are also seeing people who have abandoned the church come to find rich community centered around the gospel. A financial consultant in his mid-thirties is one such example. For many years, he had left the church due to a dearth of sound biblical teaching in churches in Lagos. Not only has he become a devoted covenant member of our church, but he has also begun to serve and lead as part of the music team. As he has sat under gospel-centered teaching, within the context of gospel-centered community, he has come to find a true sense of meaning in the gospel and in the church body.

We covet your prayers, and there are several specific ways that you can be praying for us.

First, pray for zeal and boldness in sharing the gospel with every opportunity we get, as many members are beginning to come to terms with their busyness and the imperative to be witnesses.

Second, pray for distinct holiness, humility, and love as we engage churches, non-believers, un-churched, and nominal Christians in a city where perversions of the Gospel pervade both bars and pulpits.

We are grateful to be a part of this diverse, global family of churches and eager to see how the Lord will multiply our church and the churches in our family in the years to come. Thank you for your love and support!