This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.
John 15:8
New York disciples its people through ambition. Etched into the walls of Moynihan Train Hall, the newly renovated front door to the city, is a single word from the New York State seal: Excelsior. It’s Latin for “ever upward,” and while meant as civic pride showcasing New York’s history of excellence, said honestly, in the context of most people’s lives in the city, “ever upward” feels more like a mandate than a cheer.
Most people here live pinned between two unsatisfying options—apathy or ambition—with both ending in defeat.
Jesus offers a third way: fruitfulness. He makes the uncomfortable contrast between what a person produces and what a person’s life produces in somebody else, and in turn, the Kingdom. Over eleven weeks, we will hear about the 100x life God intends to cultivate in His disciples.
A Manifesto of Fruitfulness: Stories
For the New Yorker who has done everything right and still feels the ambition running dry, or the one who gave up trying and started calling it peace: there is a third way.
A Manifesto of Fruitfulness invites you into real conversations with people from Church of the City New York who are learning what it means to bear fruit. Not in what they produce, but what their lives produce in someone else—in a marriage, a friendship, a block, a job.
This is not a highlight reel of the successful. It is an honest account of what fruitfulness costs and what it grows.
Welcome to A Manifesto of Fruitfulness Podcast.