And why we can reach cities. It was more of a what is our motivation? What is our reasoning

for reaching cities? We said – I said that night that even though you need churches everywhere

there is people, the fact is that people are moving into cities much faster than the church

is moving into cities. The church has got to go where the people are. That just makes

sense. And the city is underserved by the church. So we talked about the reasons why

but what I want to do now is talk about what I mentioned very briefly that night and that

is how.

How do you reach cities? I would like to suggest two ways, one through planting and renewing

churches that are contextual to the city, and then secondly by establishing city-wide

Gospel movements. Contextual churches and city-wide Gospel movements.

Now, by contextual churches I mean this, there is China and urban China. There is America

and then there’s urban America. The differences between America and urban America are enormous

and yet it’s typical in most, I think, parts of the world for Christianity to be forged

in the non-urban parts of the country and so there is a way of speaking, a way of communicating,

a way of living together and a way of organizing the church that fits perfectly that part of

the world, that part of the country. And then what typically happens is people just pick

those churches up and set them down in the middle of cities in a completely urban context

and they don’t seem to be effective and everybody says what’s wrong, it must be

the awful city dwellers. They just don’t love Jesus.

When actually it’s because we haven’t created contextual churches. Let me give you

a quick list of ten things that would be some examples of what I mean by a church that is

contextualized for the city. None of these, well, I would say most of these things are

not – none of these things are unique all by themselves. I would say many churches outside

of cities might be characterized by these things as well, but churches in the city have

to be characterized by them. Here is what they are.

Number one, I mentioned about half of them on Wednesday night very briefly. Number one,

churches that are contextualized for the city have to be extremely culturally sensitive.

Here is why. Our culture is largely invisible to us. So many of the ways in which we act

and think are really unique to us culturally and they are kind of invisible to us. Therefore,

when you start a church in a more homogenously monocultural place, people come together and

they communicate with each other and they talk with each other, they plan events, they

make decisions and nobody even sits around and says how should we do that because everybody

in that culture does it in a certain way automatically.

When you go into cities you are going to be uniting people from different cultures in

the same church. You can’t reach cities, you can’t reach center cities unless you

are bringing people together from different cultures. And as a result, there is going

to be tension because all kinds of things that – how you make a decision and how you

even organize events and how you communicate and how you preach and how you do discipleship

and how you do pastoral care are different in different cultures and in order to create

a multi-cultural church, a church committed to combining the various people of the city,

the different cultures in one church, it is going to create – it’s going to take a

lot of ingenuity and creativity but most of all it’s going to take a lot of discussion

and it’ll probably take a lot of debating.

Let me put it this way. An urban church has to expect constant complaints of racial and

cultural insensitivity. It has to expect them. It has to be patient with them and it has

to expect them never to really go away. If you have a multi-cultural church very often

when you’re forming it you’re excited ant get everybody together and then there

are a lot of fights and you get through them and say now we’re one people and everything

is fine.

And five years later, six years seven years later you’re still having regularly disagreements,

misunderstandings, charges of racial or cultural insensitivity and they will never go away

if you are a church that is committed to being an interracial multi-cultural church and churches

in the city almost always have to be that and therefore you say that’s the price we

pay to do something the Gospel wants us to do. There will always be difficulties. There

will always be a struggle. We’ll always be working on this. We’ll never get it right.

We’ll always have to be patiently listening to each other. That’s the first mark of

an urbanized, contextualized church. It’s multi-cultural. It knows there is going to

be friction and it knows that’s just the way it’s going to be. It’s not upset.

The leaders aren’t saying ‘oh my goodness if we’re going to be dealing with charges

of racism, I don’t want to be dealing with these people.’ As soon as you say that that

shows you’re not ready to be a leader of an urban church. So, the first mark of these

churches is that they are very culturally sensitive.

Secondly, as we mentioned again on Wednesday night, they have to be churches that help

their people integrate their faith in their work. Work is more important to people in

cities in general than it is elsewhere. People go to cities very often to get work, to be

in work or to be in their careers. And yet most churches really don’t give people in

secular, what we call secular vocations, much guidance for how they’re supposed to conduct

them.

We have a tendency in churches to disciple people by bringing them more and more out

of their jobs, into the church and if they’re really, really, really dynamic disciples they’ll

leave their jobs and go into ministry. For example, I’ll give you one example. At Redeemer,

my church in New York City, some years ago we established something called the Entrepreneurship

Forum. And it was largely due to the fact that people noticed that when folks in our

church sometimes rose up through the ranks, became staff members, became ministers of

the church, sometimes we gave them money to go off and start their own churches and somebody

said what about the rest of us? What about the 99% of us that aren’t ministers?

So we started the Entrepreneurship Forum. And the Entrepreneurship Forum is several

more successful entrepreneurs put money into a fund and then we have a business plan competition

for Christians. And we ask people to give a business plan for a for-profit, a non-profit

and Arts initiative. And every year we give startup money to help people get a for-profit

started or non-profit started, which usually helps the poor, or an Arts initiative started.

And the business model has to show Gospel thinking. It has to show Christian thinking

in conceiving of this new business or this new initiative.

And then we give seed money to it. What’s that? That’s in a sense church planting

for everybody else who is not actually a church planter. For all the other Christians in your

church who are lay people. You have got to lift them up and affirm them in their secular

vocations. You’ve got to show them how to think Christianly about their vocations. You’ve

got to celebrate and affirm them. If you don’t do that, you’re not really an urban church.

Thirdly, in general urban people versus suburban or rural people, are edgy. That is, they are

– they like cutting edge things, they like change. They like sometimes disorder, they

like diversity. People outside of cities like order. They like stability, they like safety

and therefore there is an urban sensibility that is very important for your church to

have because if you want it to be – if you want to be a successful church leaders in

an urban situation, you have to be comfortable with disorder. You have to be comfortable

with change. You have to be comfortable with urban sensibility. That’s number three.

Number four, evangelism. In cities, evangelism is complicated. There is different kinds of

people. If you go into – if you go into London, for example, you have many, many Muslims

who think that Christians are way too loosey goosey morally. I don’t know how you’ll

translate that, I’m sorry. In other words, way too loose morally. On the other hand you’ve

got the secular Brits and they look at Christians as way too narrow-minded. Way too moralistic.

You can’t possibly, therefore, come up with a little Gospel presentation that works beautifully

well with the Muslim neighbor and beautifully well with a secular neighbor. They’re very

different.

In cities evangelism has to be a high priority for a church. You can only really grow in

cities through evangelism. The only other way to grow in a city besides evangelism is

to suck Christians out of the other churches in the city which doesn’t help the body

of Christ in the city very well at all. You have to be intensely evangelistic but in the

cities the kind of research you have to do and apologetics and understanding the things

that the popular culture or the things that the different people groups, understanding

their worldview and coming up with very different kinds of evangelistic approaches for very

different kinds of people that’s all the kind of work in an urban church you have to

do.

Sixth, along with intense evangelism your church needs to be famous for its care for

the poor. If the city sees you only evangelizing and growing that way, they will assume you’re

just out for power and money because you’re just trying to increase your tribe. But if

the city sees you caring about the poor, caring about issues of justice in the city, then

they’ll say well, maybe these people really do – maybe they really are characterized

by Jesus’ love. You have to be famous for your love for the city.

What you really – a good urban church is a church in which the neighbors around look

at that church and say I don’t agree with many of the things they teach. In fact, some

of the things they teach offend me but I don’t know what this city would do without that

church. If that church went away we’d have to raise taxes because they’re pressing

so much value into the city. That’s the kind of urban church you need to be.

A couple more. In most churches artists, musicians, visual artists are hired hands. We have things

that we want to do and then we go out and we hire the artists and we ask them to do

it. But in cities artists are part of your constituency. They’re kind of an ethnic

group. They have their own culture. They have their own way of thinking about things. When

artists come in and listen to your music they hear it very differently than the way most

people do. And if you want to have an artist-friendly church you have to empower the artists. You

have to bring them in and say what do you think of the music, what do you think of the

way in which we do things? The Arts have to be taken very, very seriously by an urban

church.

And one more thing. Relationships are probably more important in doing urban ministry than

anywhere else. Things happen in cities through relationships. And it takes years and years

and years to develop those relationships. The worst thing you can do is to take an urban

leader who has grown up in a city and take them away to give them theological education

somewhere else. You pull them away from all their networks, you pull them away from all

their relationships, you take them over here and put them in another city and you give

them theological education and then what? What you really need to do if you grow up

leaders who can really do urban churches is you have to find indigenous urban people who

are potential leaders and you have to give them theological education on the ground.

Now, lastly, I don’t believe a city can be reached strictly by one church or even

a big church or even a church planting network. I would like to talk to you just for one minute

or two on what a city reaching movement really is.

To me a city reaching movement is when the body of Christ is growing faster than the

population of the whole – of the city. So when the number of Christians is going from

1% to 3% to 5% to 10% of the population every 10 or 20 years, now you have a movement. You

don’t just have a few churches planting churches, you have a movement. What creates

a movement?

Number one, what creates a movement is five or six church planting movements in different

denominations or traditions. I know I’m going to sound facetious here. I’m a Presbyterian

and I like being a Presbyterian. I enjoy my Presbyterian heritage and my Presbyterian

distinctives. For reasons that escape me, not every person in New York City who wants

to become a Christian wants to be a Presbyterian. I’m still doing the research on it and I

haven’t found out the reasons for it.

I do know that Pentecostals and Anglicans and Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians

tend to reach different kinds of people and in different sorts of – if I’m caring

about increasing my tribe and not really caring about reaching the whole city for Christ,

then all that matters is I plant Presbyterian churches. But it’s my job if I love the

city to make sure that church planting movements are going on not only in my own denomination

but to help them get going in the other ones. We need four, five, six, seven church planting

movements going on. That means if you have 10 churches and five of them are planting

another church every five years and half of them are planting a church every five years,

you’ve got a movement.

And unless there is five, six, seven or eight of those kinds of vital church planting movements

going on you do not have even a chance for a city-wide Gospel movement. But then around

those churches you need several things. You need a network of prayer in which the churches

are coming together to pray. You need evangelistic specialists that are reaching especially campus

college students and youth.

Number three, you need all kinds of justice and mercy initiatives where Christians are

coming together outside the churches coming together to combat this or that meeting this

problem, this social issue, helping people in this needy neighborhood and so forth.