Walking in the Lord on John Street
On the west side of Champaign, Illinois, in a brick meeting house at 1509 West John Street, the Champaign Church of Christ opens its doors every Sunday morning for a 10:30 AM Family Worship Service. The congregation has chosen the phrase "Walk in the Lord" as its banner, and the ministers put the rest of their message in plain words: "The best of us is still a mess. That's okay; it's not about us. It's about Jesus!" That tone, gentle about human failure and clear about Jesus at the center, runs through everything the church does.
The building sits in a neighborhood that the church reaches with weekly gatherings, small discipleship groups known as D-groups, and a campus ministry aimed squarely at the thousands of students who live a short walk away at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The church is small enough that members know one another by first name and large enough to draw believers from Mahomet, Champaign, Urbana, and the surrounding towns. Visitors are welcomed with an open invitation: anyone interested in learning about God and the Bible, or wanting to connect with others in the surrounding community, can fill out a brief online form and the church will follow up personally.
A Family Worship Service Every Sunday Morning
The Sunday morning service is the main gathering of the week. It begins at 10:30 AM and is called the Family Worship Service, a name that signals the expectation that every generation worships together. The service includes congregational praise, prayer, teaching, and a time of communion, and when Sunday weather turns threatening the ministers have been known to cancel in-person worship and post a digital service that begins playing at the same 10:30 hour so members can still observe communion at home.
Live and recorded services are available through the church's online platform, allowing people who travel or who cannot easily attend in person to join the same service. The church also keeps an online calendar that can be added to a phone or device, so visitors and regulars can see upcoming events without needing to check back.
One of the more unusual rhythms of the year is the Tri-City Worship Service, a tradition that brings the Champaign congregation together with two sister churches in Bloomington and Springfield. The Tri-City service typically falls on a Sunday in late September, and the meeting moves between the three cities from year to year. When the weather cooperates, the gathering is held outdoors at a lakeside campsite near Chatham, with a grill fired up after worship so members can stay for a long lunch. When rain forces the group indoors, the service is held at the John Street building. On Tri-City Sundays, the Champaign building closes for the morning so members can join the wider gathering.
"It's About Jesus": What the Church Teaches
The church's short self-description sums up its teaching center: it is about Jesus. Members are frequently referred to as disciples, a word the church uses deliberately to signal that following Christ is an ongoing relationship rather than a one-time decision. Sermons and devotionals are saturated with Scripture, and the church encourages Bible memorization, personal study, and praying the Psalms.
The leaders model the kind of Christianity that takes both the highs and the lows of life seriously. In sermons and in everyday conversation, the ministers point members back to passages such as James 1:2-4 on considering trials pure joy, Romans 12 on sincere love and overcoming evil with good, Psalm 46 on being still and knowing that God is God, and the Parable of the Good Samaritan on treating others as you would want to be treated. Communion is remembered weekly, and members are encouraged to prepare for it even when watching the digital service from home.
Church members speak openly about wrestling with doubt, depression, anxiety, grief, racial injustice, illness, and the everyday struggles of marriage and parenting, and they bring those struggles into the church's communal life. The leaders do not shy away from hard topics but address them through Scripture, prayer, and mutual care. This is a place where questions are welcome, and where the answer almost always leads back to Jesus.
The Tri-City Tradition
Every fall, the Champaign Church sets aside its usual Sunday routine to worship with the Bloomington and Springfield congregations. The Tri-City Service has become a beloved tradition, rotating among the three cities. When it lands at Lake Springfield, the gathering spills out onto the grass after worship with hot food on the grill and plenty of time for fellowship.
This tradition serves as a visible expression of the broader fellowship the three congregations share, and it gives members from each city a chance to know believers they would otherwise only hear about. For newcomers, the Tri-City gathering is often the easiest way to see the wider network of churches the Champaign congregation belongs to and to feel the warmth of a group that goes well beyond the walls on John Street.
A Campus Ministry that Reaches University of Illinois Students
Champaign is a college town, and the Champaign Church has made reaching university students a core part of its identity. The campus ministry, known around the area as Alpha Omega Illinois, is staffed by a campus minister who leads Bible studies, small groups, and outreach events for students from the University of Illinois and Parkland College. Campus ministry events often include teaching on particular books of the Bible and sharing favorite characters from Scripture, a format that has helped students new to the Bible feel comfortable asking questions.
Several of the women's ministry devotionals are written by current and former students who were involved in the campus ministry, and they reflect how deeply the ministry shaped their faith. One devotionalist wrote about preparing for her senior year internship in local elementary and high schools while working through the anxiety of an unpredictable fall semester. Another described the day her husband, an engineer, was laid off from a project and how the campus ministry community supported her family when they relocated twelve hours south to Champaign. These stories are typical of the campus ministry: young adults wrestling with real-life decisions, anchored by Scripture and supported by older disciples.
The campus ministry also serves as a pipeline for the broader congregation. Students who graduate and stay in Champaign-Urbana often join the main church, and alumni who move away frequently remain connected through the Tri-City network and online devotionals.
The Women's Ministry Minute: Daily Words from the Women
One of the most distinctive features of the Champaign Church is its Women's Ministry Minute, a daily devotional series that has been running for years. A rotating team of women from the church, including Phyllis Larr, Michelle Lutz, Angela Tomlinson, and Patty Cochran, along with dozens of guest writers, share brief meditations tied to Scripture and to what is happening in their lives.
The devotionals are deeply personal. In one, a writer named Rose tells of being a school employee whose heart ached for her students and of finding, during a long stretch at home, that the book "Jesus Calling: Enjoying Peace in His Presence" gave her a fresh vocabulary for talking with God. In another, Natalie Brand recounts the day her husband called to say he had been laid off, and how the family's subsequent move from South Carolina to Mahomet, Illinois, taught her to live without controlling the outcome. Gloria Shasteen shares how, after her husband of sixty years passed away, she followed his three-step plan: have an auction, sell the farm, and move to Champaign, and how more than twenty members of the church showed up to help her unload the moving truck.
Other devotionalists write about being bi-racial in a predominantly white community, about coping with a bipolar diagnosis during a pandemic, about losing a sister to cancer and grieving in a parking lot because no restaurants were open, about a chainsaw accident that left a young woman with nine fractures and a season of PTSD, about raising children who love Jesus more than they love comfort, about farming and prayer, about the discipline of taming the tongue, and about practicing what the devotionalists call the Golden Rule rather than the Silver Rule or the Iron Rule.
The devotionals are not theoretical. They name specific Bible verses and apply them to the writer's actual week. Many end with practical takeaways, such as taking a slow breath and saying a quick prayer when frustration rises, or studying one book of the Bible in depth rather than sampling many, or setting a phone timer to remind oneself to pray throughout the day. The Women's Ministry Minute is one of the clearest windows into how the church understands discipleship: a long, patient, daily walk with God that is shared openly with other women.
Discipleship Groups and House Churches
Beyond Sunday morning, the church's life is built around small groups. The main format is what members call a D-group, short for discipleship group, in which a small number of believers meet regularly to study Scripture, pray for one another, and work through the questions of following Jesus together. House churches follow a similar pattern but meet in members' homes and tend to include a shared meal.
These small groups are where most of the church's pastoral care happens. When a member loses a spouse, the small group is the first line of support, organizing meal trains, helping with moves, and sitting with the bereaved. When a member wrestles with anxiety or depression, the small group is the place where those struggles can be named and prayed over. One church leader put it this way in a devotional: "Don't do my fears all by myself - don't do it in isolation."
Small groups also provide space for topical studies. The church has offered a class called Spiritual Discovery, facilitated by Sarah Tomlinson, which helps women identify the difference between a personal load they are responsible to carry and a burden that needs to be shared with others. The class draws on passages like Galatians 6:2 about bearing one another's burdens and uses the Greek words phortion (load) and baros (burden) to frame the conversation.
Midweek Prayer and Bible Study
In addition to the Sunday service and the small groups, the church gathers on Wednesday evenings for a midweek meeting. These evenings have been used for working through the Psalms one prayer at a time, and they offer another chance for members to stay connected to one another and to Scripture during the week. The midweek is intentionally quieter than Sunday morning, more like a family sitting around the table than a packed sanctuary.
The midweek also serves as the entry point for people who want to learn more about the Bible before committing to the larger rhythms of the church. Visitors who come to a Sunday service and want to keep exploring are typically invited into a D-group or house church as a next step.
Serving One Another: Church Family in Hard Seasons
The Women's Ministry Minute posts make one thing clear: the church responds to hardship with concrete help. When twenty-six members helped Gloria Shasteen move into a new apartment in Champaign the day after a Sunday service, when campus students helped load a moving truck for a displaced family, when small groups organized grocery deliveries and phone check-ins during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, when leaders pointed hurting members toward professional counseling, the church was acting out of its central conviction that believers are called to carry one another's burdens.
The church's outreach extends beyond its own members. The ministers and lay leaders have partnered with HOPE worldwide, a Christian humanitarian organization, and have shared resources from HOPE worldwide's mental health advisory and SPARK disaster support teams during moments of community-wide crisis. The church has also linked to disciplestoday.org for discipleship training materials, suggesting a wider network of like-minded congregations the church draws on for resources and inspiration.
Giving and Staying Connected
The church funds its ministry through the regular giving of its members. Giving is processed through Tithe.ly, a secure giving platform that allows donations from a bank account or credit card. Givers can create an account for faster giving in the future or continue as a guest. The giving page walks first-time donors through what to expect, which keeps the barrier to participating low for newcomers.
The church also keeps an active presence on social media. Its Facebook page, Instagram account, and YouTube channel carry updates, announcements, and videos of services and special events. The church also shares a calendar that visitors can sync to their phones, making it easier to keep up with regular events without having to check back each week. A prayer request page gives members and visitors a way to ask the church family to pray with them about specific needs.
Leadership
The church is led by a small team of ministers and ministry leaders. The sermons and Sunday lessons are taught by ministers known in the devotionals as Tracy and Ron, who together provide the regular teaching at the main service and at the midweek gathering. Ron and his wife Patty lead a Bible class on grief that has been a steady support for members who have lost spouses or other loved ones. The campus ministry is led by Derek Shneider, who oversees Bible studies, small groups, and outreach events for university students.
The women's ministry is coordinated by a team that includes Phyllis Larr, Michelle Lutz, Angela Tomlinson, and Patty Cochran. Together they organize the Women's Ministry Minute devotionals, host gatherings for women in the church, and serve as the first point of contact when a woman in the church is going through a hard season. They are frequently the ones who show up at hospital rooms, help coordinate meals after a loss, and walk alongside members who are wrestling with anxiety, depression, or family struggles.
Smaller groups in the church are led by members who have been discipled and trained within the congregation over years, and leadership development is treated as an ongoing part of church life rather than a one-time event. Newer disciples are paired with more mature believers through the D-group structure so that mentoring happens naturally.
A Church That Invites You to Walk In
What ties all of this together is the conviction that church is not a building but a people walking with the Lord together. Sunday morning is the main gathering, but the rest of the week's life, the midweek prayer time, the small groups, the daily devotionals, the campus Bible studies, the prayer requests, the cross-town Tri-City gathering, the giving platform, the livestream, and the social channels, is what makes the Champaign Church of Christ feel like a community rather than a service.
For anyone visiting Champaign-Urbana, whether a university student looking for a church home, a young professional new to the area, or a family that has lived here for decades, the church's invitation is straightforward: come as you are, walk in the Lord, and find out that it really is about Jesus.