18th Street Church

06/01/2026

A Sunday Night Prayer for the Week Ahead

Lord Jesus Christ —
Son of the living God —
have mercy on us.

We come to you at the hinge of the week, at the threshold between Sabbath rest and Monday’s labor, between the gathered Table and the scattered street.

We have been with you today.
We have broken bread and remembered.
We have sung and been formed by singing.

Father, we do not enter the week as those without a King. We are not adrift in the noise and the urgency and the algorithm.

We are held. We are named. We are loved.
That changes everything — or it should, and we ask that it would.

Forgive us for the ways we will forget you by Tuesday. Forgive us for our anxious grasping,
our small kingdoms, our relentless performance.
Teach us again what it means to be human beings rather than human doings.

This week the summer asks something of us —
its long days and slow evenings, its invitation to notice the world you have made and called good.

Give us eyes to see it.

Give us the unhurried heart that finds you in the ordinary — in the heat and the laughter, the table and the backyard, the neighbor and the stranger.

We are people of the Resurrection.
We live on the far side of Easter.
Nothing is without hope.
No Monday is godless.

So we go, Lord.
In your name.
In your peace.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Amen.

05/30/2026

The Church wasn't built on programs or buildings—it was built on people devoted to Jesus and living out His way in the world.

Join us TOMORROW as we explore Acts 2 and uncover the original blueprint of the CHURCH.

“For the first 3 centuries the primary magnet of the Church was not their worship gatherings, their societal celebrities, their intellectual acumen, or even their evangelistic fervor. It was how they loved each other and their enemies.” -Alan Kreider

+ Summer in the Psalms: 9:00AM 📖
+ Worship Gathering: 10:00AM ✝️
+ Baby Dedication 👶
+ Coffee & Donuts ☕️🍩

05/24/2026

“As we cease from our steady toil, we learn the valuable lesson that the whole of creation does not exist exclusively for us and to meet our desires."

― A.J. Swoboda, Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World

“As we cease from our steady toil, we learn the valuable lesson tha...

05/24/2026

A Prayer for Sabbath

We come to this moment,
O God of the seventh day,
breathless and grasping,
our hands still full of the week’s producing, our minds still churning with the metrics of our own importance.

We confess that we have forgotten how to stop.

We have made of ourselves little pharaohs, driving our own bodies like slaves, convinced that if we cease, the world will come undone.

But you, Holy One, you rested.
You, who need nothing, stopped.
You, who hold the stars in their courses and the seas in their boundaries, declared: Enough.

It is very good. Now — rest.

And so we dare, against all the anxiety of our age, to imitate you.

We release the spreadsheets and the strategies. We lay down the performance of our productivity. We refuse, just for this hour, this day, the seduction of usefulness.

Remind us, O Sabbath God, that we are creatures, not creators —
that the world was made before us and will flourish after us, and that our worth was never located in what we could accomplish by sundown.

Let this be a day of subversive rest, a small act of resistance against every empire that says: produce, consume, repeat.

Let the candles burn.
Let the bread be broken.
Let silence be speech enough.

And when the stars come out
and we must return again to the week — send us back changed,
knowing again who we are:
beloved, finite, free.

Amen.

05/18/2026

A PRAYER FOR THE FINAL WEEK

Lord, we are almost through.

The notebooks are thinning, the pencils worn to stubs, and we are tired in that good way—the way of people who have actually done something.

We confess we did not always love the hard things.

There were mornings we came dragging,
afternoons we watched the clock like it owed us something. And yet you were present in the long division, in the essay we rewrote three times,
in the book that cracked something open in us
we didn’t know needed opening.

Forgive us for the days we were unkind to the ones beside us, for the times we were too proud to say I don’t understand, for the energy we wasted wishing we were somewhere else
when this—this ordinary, fluorescent, chalk-dusted place—was exactly where you had put us.

We thank you for the teachers who showed up even when they were tired, who learned our names and meant it, who cared more about our becoming than our performing.

Now send us into summer not as escapees but as people who have been formed a little further
into who you made us to be.

Let us rest without wasting it.
Let us play without guilt.
Let us be slow and curious and present.

And when September comes cold at the door again, let us walk in ready—still a little unfinished,
still being made.

Amen.

05/17/2026

Join us tomorrow and learn about LightsOut, a ministry that Dave + Emily Decker have founded to minister to those who serve under the lights.

Check out the comments for the link to their website.

10am! 2400 W. 18th Street

05/11/2026

A prayer for Sunday night.

God:

Calm my wandering mind.
Anchor me in what you’ve promised.
Direct the next step that I take.
Remind me how I was carried last week.
Instill in me a heart and mind like yours.
Help me to remember that this life is a gift.
Call me closer to your side.

Amen.

05/09/2026

Celebrating ALL the ladies in our house tomorrow as carriers of the divine image.

10:00am | 2400 W. 18th

O God of love, it is such a joy to bless our moms—those who have carried us in their bodies, and in their hearts, and in their minds, and all those who have mothered us in some form or fashion. We thank them and honor them all, those we can hug today, and those who are now gone or distant from us. We ask Your blessing too on those for whom mothering is complicated, difficult, heartbreaking, or incomplete. Bless and heal and restore and rebuild all generations, forwards and backwards in time. God, with all the genius of Your creative power, rain down Your blessing upon the mothering we give, and that which we have received. Be to us the nurturing embrace we need to lead us to eternal life.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

+ Kate Bowler +

05/04/2026

“A primary task of the community of Jesus is to maintain this lifelong cultivation of love in all the messiness of its families, neighborhoods, congregations, and missions. Love is intricate, demanding, glorious, deeply human, and God-honoring, but — and here’s the thing — never a finished product, never an accomplishment, always flawed in some degree or other.”

Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

05/02/2026

Tomorrow we're handing out Bibles to our 2nd graders, and we're celebrating our High School Graduates! We'd love to have you be a part of us blessing them as they step into what God has next for them!

10am
2400 W. 18th Street