City Ministry

A Pilgrimage into Service is a resource for those discerning or undergoing an immersive service experience or post-graduate volunteer service program. It utilizes recent Catholic social thought, Scripture, an Ignatian paradigm of service-reflection, and Christian spirituality.

In 1977, David and Anna Teis moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, to plant a church in the city where David had grown up. Among all the "usual" fears, questions, and concerns a young couple beginning ministry together would experience, the Teises grappled with questions related to raising a family in the place infamously known as "Sin City". Well-meaning friends even cautioned against it. But David and Anna knew this was God's leading in their lives. They saw a city with people who needed Christ, and they knew that if God's principles for raising children were true, they could work anywhere.

In the campaign leading up to the election of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate frequently discussed the importance of moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. For many conservative Christian Americans and Israelis, this was tantamount to the United States agreeing to Jewish control over Jerusalem. As it stands now, the US has a consulate in Jerusalem, yet no country houses their embassy in Jerusalem due to the conflicting claims of the Israelis and Palestinians.

It was a Roman historian and writer, St. Augustine, who coined the phrase "City of God" in a book of the very same title. But the city of God that Augustine was referring to was not in Jerusalem. When Augustine wrote his book, it was hundreds of years after the Jewish city of Jerusalem had been overrun and destroyed by the Roman legions; he was writing of Rome as the city of God and the center of the Roman Catholic faith.