Urban Centers as Renewed Cultural Magnets

Interesting post here regarding contemporary trends of “urban inversion” as opposed to suburban sprawl.  Here’s a brief quote:

Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that’s starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for ever increasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.

Another Good Conference

This looks like it will be a really great conference.

Check it out here.

I will actually be helping and serving at this, so if you’re planning on coming, let me know.

Live from New York, its…Thoughts on Thursday (On “Excellence”)?

Well, I just wrapped up my half-week in New York attending the Dwell Conference, and I hope to post some thoughts and refelctions from that time. In the meantime, here is a excellent and challenging quote I just read off of Tullian Tchividjian’s blog (someone I saw at the Conference, but didn’t happen to connect with, unfortunately - as I have been really enjoying his blog lately.  You should check it out here).  

This quote comes from a longer quote dealing with the question of “Educational Excellence” in our American Educational system.  I found it extremely challenging and provocative, especially as we, the church, need to think very long and hard about what it will take to gain an influential hearing with the world around us.   As always, thoughts, comments and other provocations are greatly welcomed and encouraged.

“If the evangelical church is to have any meaningful voice in the circles of elite global influence, then it will need to do more than address its latent anti-intellectualism. It will have to make the life of the mind a spiritual responsibility of faithful apprenticeship to Jesus.”

What does it mean to be “the Church”?

Anthony Bradley has got some good thoughts and a great quote over on his blog The Institute about being the church, and having more of a gospel-centered, “revolutionary” mindset regarding where and how we live as Christians in the world.  I always appreciate the way Bradley challenges me with his thoughts, but even more so, I love it when anyone draws my attention to the fact that Christianity is a “forward” religion - its meant to be lived out on the “offensive” rather than the “defensive” end (for more thoughts on this, check out The Prevailing Church by Randy Pope).

Here’s a quote from a missionary that Bradley includes in his post, and I think it sums things up quite nicely (but do go check out his blog to get the whole sha-bang!):

We need to recover the grand, cosmic significance of Jesus’ saving activity that moves the gospel out of the narrow realm of our self-preoccupation…The gospel properly understood, is much broader than our concerns for personal survival, security, significance, success, or even self-centered sanctification. The gospel presents us with a Jesus, not meek and mild, but One come to set the world on fire. It presents us with a plunderer, and it bids us to throw ourselves away in the pursuit of this new world order. –Bob Heppe, Missionary

2008 Resurgence Conference - Video w/ Driscoll and Piper

National Resurgence Conference 2008: Text & Context

This really looks like it will be a good conference. I hope to make it out there, but if not, the uploaded resources should be very useful in ministry and thinking about the role of preaching in any given context.

Reading Reflection - The Urban Face of Mission

I’m reading this book for an upcoming weekend calss on Urban Church Planting. I’d like to from time to time offer some good quotes and some of my reflections on what I am reading. I welcome comments on this stuff, just know that most of is written in the form of journal-thoughts, not really completely formed, but in process. Here’s something that got my mind going from Raymond J. Bakke, “Urbanization and Evangelism: a Global View”, The Urban Face of Mission, ed. by Harvie Conn

“Today over 50 percent of this earth - over three billion people - lives in world-class cities. We aren’t prepared for that. Most of our mission industry, most of the ministries that many of us represent, are still thinking in terms of tribal world, a world where we cross oceans and deserts and jungles to get to the lost groups of people. There are, indeed, still about a billion people who are geographically distant from existing churches, so we will need traditional ministries on into the future. But far more than two billion of the world’s nonchurched people are no longer geographically distant from the church’ they are culturally distant. They live in the largest cities of the world.” p. 29

The way we should think about “missions” in this non-traditional sense, is less in terms of geography, and more in terms of culturally.

Categories of Thought:
Geographically Distant, Culturally Distant -> Traditional Missions
Geographically Distant, Culturally Close -> Traditional Missions
Geographically Close, Culturally Close -> Traditional Evangelism
Geographically Close, Culturally Distant -> Missional Intentionality

- Who are those people who are culturally outside the church and in need of the redeeming power of the gospel? I think, if we were to ask this question, our conversations about contextualization would be properly subsumed under the aim of missions, and that is to bring all of God’s creation into a right relationship with Him (God <–> Man <–> Creation).

Golden Gate Bridge at Night

Golden Gate Bridge at Night

Originally uploaded by gensheer

My wife Maggie and I are planning on taking a trip for a couple of days out to San Francisco. We have never been, and looking forward to it. This has been a long year for us…really a long 4 years…and we are in need of a small break before the school year starts up. I’ve been scanning the internet for pics of the city, and just love this one. There’s something about cities that just energize me, and this particular one has a certain allure to it. Even though we like to attach alot of baggage to cities here in the U.S., in a perfect world, the combination of density and diversity is absolutely beautiful. We can’t wait to experience the city of San Francisco.

Does anybody out there have some thoughts on how we should spend some of our time, based on your previous experience? We’d love to hear them.