Something Old. Something Real.
An invitation to Sunday evenings at Hillside Church
There's a passage near the beginning of Acts that reads almost too simply to take seriously.
They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe... They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts. — Acts 2:42–46
No stage. No program. No clock watching to see how much of the evening you have left when it's over.
Just people — gathered around food, around the Word, around each other. Learning. Eating. Praying. Doing it again next week.
We believe that model still works.
What we are
Hillside Church is a North Coast Church Gathering — a small, rooted fellowship of believers in the Southern Berkshires, closely affiliated with North Coast Church in San Diego, California.
Under Senior Pastor Chris Brown and led online by Pastor Trent Jenkins, North Coast's teaching team prepares a message every week that reaches tens of thousands of people across their campuses and partner gatherings worldwide. Sunday evenings here begin with that same message — recorded in California the night before, watched together here in the Berkshires.
It's not a compromise. It's a feature. You get a teaching team with deep roots and wide reach, delivered into a room small enough that everyone knows your name.
Hillside is its own church — autonomous, locally rooted, and self-supported. North Coast provides teaching, resources, and encouragement freely. We carry their DNA without being under their thumb. Think of it the way Cape Christian Fellowship operates in Baja Mexico: the same Spirit, the same teaching, planted in different soil, growing on its own roots.
What to expect
5:00 pm — The table is set. A real dinner, served family-style. Eating together before worshipping together changes the texture of everything that follows. By the time the dishes are cleared, you're already in community.
6:00 pm — We worship and hear from the Word. A brief time of sung worship opens the service, followed by the North Coast message. The teaching is honest, grounded in Scripture, and open-ended by design — not a tidy lecture with a bow, but a text we expect to still be talking about an hour later. Families with young children are welcome to leave at the natural close of the service.
~7:00 pm — We walk. A short walk to the fellowship hall clears the air, creates a natural exit for those who need one, and shifts everyone out of "audience" mode before the conversation begins.
7:30 pm — The table again. Dessert, open discussion about the message, and depending on the week — a game, Communion, or extended prayer. The message isn't filed away when the service ends. It's the beginning of the discussion. We wrap by 8:00 pm. Every week.
Who is this for?
Anyone looking for a church that doesn't feel like a performance. Anyone curious about Jesus but allergic to religious culture.
Anyone who has drifted from faith and isn't sure they're ready to walk back into a Sunday morning.
Anyone who already loves Jesus and just wants to do it around a table with real people.
You don't have to have all the answers. You just have to be willing to pull up a chair.
The table is long. There's room.
How it works
North Coast builds its model around three invitations: attend on the weekend, get into a Life Group, find a place to serve. Hillside takes that same framework and adds one thing for our local context: the meal. The table belongs at the front of the evening — not as a formality but as a foundation.
Attend. Eat together. Hear the Word. Talk about it. Serve. That's the whole thing.