The Bridge

City-center churches should have as equal as possible emphases on: a) welcoming, attracting, and engaging secular/non-Christian people; b) character change through deep community and small groups; c) holistically serving the city (and especially the poor) in both word and deed; d) producing cultural leaders who integrate faith and work in society; and e) routinely multiplying itself into new churches with the same vision. There are many churches that major on one or two of these but the breadth, balance, and blend of these commitments is rare in a church. Nevertheless, this balance is crucial for ministry in city centers.

1.  Engagement with secular people. The gospel removes any sense of superiority toward those who don’t share our beliefs. We respect and remember what it is like to seriously doubt Christianity. We therefore expect not-yet-believers in almost every facet of Redeemer’s ministry and life, and we make every effort to engage and address their questions and concerns. One of the main ways we do this is with the missional mindset that makes worship and small groups a place where Christians and non-Christians grow together.

In general the church’s communication and preaching must continually chip away at the main “defeaters,” the main, widely held objections to Christianity that form an “implausibility structure” keeping most people from solid faith thought because “all the smart people I know don’t believe Christianity.” Here are the main ones in U.S. cities today:

The other religions. “No one should insist their view of God is better than all the rest. All religions are equally valid.”

Evil and suffering. “A good, all-powerful God wouldn’t allow this evil and suffering. Therefore, this God doesn’t exist or can’t be trusted.”

The ethical straitjacket. “We must be free to choose for ourselves how to live—no one can impose this on us. This is the only truly authentic life.”

The record of Christians. “If Christianity is the true religion, why would so much oppression happen in history with the support of the church?”

The angry God. “Christianity is built around a condemning, judgmental deity who demands blood sacrifice even to forgive.”

The unreliable Bible. “The Bible can’t be trusted historically or scientifically and much of its teaching is socially regressive.”

Summary: A city-center church today must use presuppositional reasoning more than the old evidential approach. It has to show that all doubts and objections to Christianity are themselves alternate beliefs and faith-acts. (If you say, “I just can’t believe that there is only one true religion”—that is a faith-act. You can’t prove that.) And when you see your doubts are really beliefs, and when you require the same amount of evidence for them that you are asking of Christian beliefs, then it becomes evident many of them are very weak and largely adopted because of cultural pressure. The city-center church redundantly weaves responses to these defeaters into every area so that people “in process” will have these major barriers to faith removed.

In general the church’s communication and preaching must also continually lay down important building blocks toward robust faith. In more Christian cultures (i.e., Christendom), evangelism was simpler. Now it requires more of a process:

Deconstruct your doubts. Your doubts are really beliefs, and you can’t avoid betting your life and destiny on some kind of belief in God and the universe. Non-commitment is impossible. Faith-acts are inevitable.

Realize you already know there is a God. You actually already believe in God at the deep level, whatever you tell yourself intellectually. Our outrage against injustice despite how natural it is (in a world based on natural selection) shows that we already do believe in God at the most basic level but are suppressing that knowledge for our convenience. The Christian view of God means world is not the product of violence or random disorder (as in both the ancient and modern accounts of creation) but was created by a triune God to be a place of peace and community. So at the root of all reality is not power and individual self-assertion (as in the pagan and postmodern view of things) but love and sacrificial service for the common good.

Recognize your biggest problem. You aren’t spiritually free. No one is. Everyone is spiritually enthralled to something. “Sin” is not simply breaking rules but is building your identity on things other than God, which leads internally to emptiness, craving, and spiritual slavery and externally to exclusion, conflict, and social injustice.

Discern the difference between religion and the gospel. There is a radical difference between religion, in which we believe our morality secures for us a place of favor in God and in the world, and gospel Christianity, in which our standing with God is strictly a gift of grace. These two different core understandings produce very different communities and character. The former produces both superiority and inferiority complexes, self-righteousness, religiously-warranted strife, wars, and violence. The latter creates a mixture of both humility and enormous inner confidence, a respect for the “Other,” and a new freedom to defer our needs for the common good.

Understand the Cross. All forgiveness entails suffering and that the only way for God to forgive us and restore justice in the world without destroying us was to come into history and give himself and suffer and die on the Cross in the person of Jesus Christ.  Both the results of the Cross (freedom from shame and guilt, awareness of our significance and value) and the pattern of the Cross (power through service, wealth through giving, and joy through suffering) radically changes the way we relate to God, ourselves, and the world.

Embrace the resurrection. There is no historically possible alternative explanation of the rise of the Christian church than the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. And if Jesus was raised from the dead as a forerunner of the renewal of all the material and physical world, then this gives Christians both incentive to work to restore creation (fighting poverty, hunger, and injustice) as well as infinite hope that our labors will not be in vain. And finally, it eliminates the fear of death.

Practical points:

1) A church that continually chips away at defeaters and continually lays down the basic building blocks of faith in all its services and meetings will actually be training Christians within the basic weekly gatherings on how to do evangelism within their culture. Much evangelism will then happen naturally. Christians will talk more wisely to non-Christian friends and have the confidence to bring them to church meetings because they trust the attractiveness and intelligibility of what will happen there. Some non-Christians will always be getting converted in the ordinary meetings of the church and they in turn will bring others. Ultimately this is the most powerful dynamic for evangelism. Evangelistic programs won’t help if the church itself isn’t permeated with the missional mindset.

2) This does not preclude evangelistic programs at all! If the church’s basic ministry and mindset is missional, then specific, focused evangelistic outreaches and programs will be highly effective.

2.  Christian community which is countercultural.  God’s purpose in history is not simply to save individual souls but to create a new humanity, a people with a communal life that reflects in some degree the future kingdom of God. In Christendom, “fellowship” was basically just a set of nurturing relationships, support and accountability. That is necessary of course. But when surrounded by a very non-Christian culture, Christian community takes on additional importance.

First, we must embody a counter-culture, showing the world how radically different a Christian society is with regard to sex, money, and power. We must show sex, money, and power being used in life-giving ways, and to see people united in love who could never have been brought together without the power of the gospel to humble, affirm, and transform our identity.

With sex: We avoid both the secular society's idolization of sex and traditional society's fear of sex. We also exhibit love rather than hostility or fear toward those whose sexual life-patterns are different.

With money: We promote a radically generous commitment of time, money, relationships, and living space for social justice and the needs of the poor, the immigrant, the economically and physically weak. We also must do radical economic sharing with one another in order that “there is no needy among us.”

With power: We are committed to power-sharing and relationship-building between races and classes that are alienated outside of the Body of Christ. The practical evidence of this is that we need to be as multiethnic a body as possible.

Second, we must practice Christian unity as much as possible at the city level. In Christendom, when it seemed like “everyone was a Christian,” it was necessary (perhaps) for a church to define itself over against other churches. That is, to get an identity you had to say, "We are not like that church over there or those Christians over here."

Today, however, it is much more illuminating and helpful for a church to define itself over against “the world,” i.e., the values of the non-Christian culture. It is important that we not spend our time bashing and criticizing other kinds of churches. That simply plays into the common defeater belief that Christians are all intolerant

While we have to align ourselves in denominations that share many of our distinctives, at the local level we should cooperate and reach out to and support the other congregations and churches in our local area. This will raise many thorny issues, of course, but our bias should be in the direction of cooperation.

Practical points:

1) In the vast majority (if not all) of city-center churches, small groups or cell groups will be crucial. In such places there are fewer extended families or intact neighborhoods to provide social support.

2) Building community in a city center is the most challenging of the five ministry fronts, largely because of the mobility of the population. City centers are very expensive and difficult places to live, most people are working enormously long hours, and most people see themselves living there temporarily. This makes it difficult to build community. Some ideas:

You must find strategies to help short-term residents get into small groups quickly. You can’t leave it up to individual persistence.

You encourage Christians to settle down and raise their families in the city (Jer. 29) but to do that you must build infrastructure (schools, credit unions, housing).

The most practical way to build community is to build into people a positive view of the city. By a positive view of the city we do not mean a simple celebration of everything within it. We are neither to condemn it nor to merely celebrate it but to love it and see it as the most strategic place possible for Christians to live and serve.

3. Holistic ministry for the entire city and especially for the poor. The purpose of redemption is not just to save the individual out of the world but to renew and restore the entire creation. Therefore, God is not just concerned for the salvation of souls but also for the removal of poverty, hunger, and injustice.

God called the exiled Israelites to live in and seek the peace and prosperity of their pagan city of Babylon (Jer. 29:4ff.) Jesus likewise called Christians to be a city of God within the earthly city (Mt. 5:14-16) showing the glory of God through our deeds of service (v.16). The citizens of God’s city are to be the very best citizens of their earthly city, working not just for their own prosperity but for the common good of their neighbors and the whole metropolis.

The “Great Reversal” of the cross means that the gospel proclaims a complete reversal of the values of the world—power, recognition, status, and wealth. For example, the gospel is especially welcomed by the poor and for the poor (Luke 4:18 “He has anointed me…to preach the gospel to the poor." Cf. also Luke 7:22.)  Preaching the gospel and healing people's bodies are closely associated (Luke 9:6).

Jesus didn’t save us just with words, but mainly through his deeds, his work. And the gospel demands that every recipient of God’s grace surrender the illusion of self-sufficiency. All this equips us to use our gifts and resources to love our neighbors not just in word, but through deeds of sacrificial love. The gospel removes all superiority toward the poor. It empowers us to meet individual needs in the city and also work for justice for the powerless.

Secular people have a strong belief that religion is really just about social power. There is a need to place every church somewhere on the ideological spectrum from liberal/left wing to conservative/ right wing. But the gospel makes the church impossible to categorize: 1) Justification-by-faith brings deep, powerful psychological changes. Though I am sinful, I am accepted.  This "converts" people. "My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth, and followed Thee"; 2) On the other hand, the gospel of the cross and the kingdom brings deep powerful social changes. It defies the values of the world—power, status, recognition, and wealth. The gospel is triumph through weakness, wealth through poverty, and power through service. This changes our attitude toward the poor, toward our own status and wealth and careers. In sum, we do not want to emphasize mainly evangelism (as conservative churches do) or mainly social justice (as liberal churches do) but give a very high emphasis to both.

A gospel-centered church should combine zeals that are ordinarily never seen together in the same church. This is one of the main ways we make people look twice and take our message seriously. In “traditional values America,” a church can lack this combination but still have credibility. That is not the case on the secular mission field.  In general, holistic ministry should have three focuses:

First, within the church community itself there should be radical sharing of economic resources. We should care for one another’s practical needs—economic, social, physical, medical, emotional—with the utmost generosity and care.

Second, within the immediate neighborhood the church should show its sacrificial love by meeting the practical needs of people whether they believe as we do or not.

Third, throughout the whole city the church should seek to serve and lift up the poor.

4. Equipping people for cultural renewal through the integration of faith and work. The gospel brings us a unique perspective on God, human nature, the material world, the direction of history, the importance of community. All of these inevitably influence the way we work, whether in the arts, business, government, the media or the academy. Therefore, we help Christians integrate their faith with their work. Three aspects of equipping are as follows:

First, the laity needs theological education about how to “think Christianly” about all of life, public and private, and about how to work with Christian distinctiveness. They need to know: a) what cultural practices are common grace and to be embraced, b) what practices are antithetical to the gospel and must be rejected, and c) what practices can be adapted/revised.

Second, they need to be practically mentored, placed, and positioned in their vocations in the most advantageous way. They need cooperation with others in the field who can encourage, advise, advocate for them.

Third, they need spiritual support for the ups and downs of their work and accountability for living and working with Christian integrity.

Three components of equipping are as follows:

The theorists. Scholars and very successful practitioners in each field theorize at a high level about what it means to be a Christian in every field of vocation, including social work, community development, politics, law, government, finance, business, counseling, medicine, education, scholarship, arts, dance, literature, theater, film, journalism, media, and publishing.

The educators/mentors. Educators and practitioners in each area create materials, networks, and venues for the support, training, and positioning-leveraging of workers in each of these areas.

The church community. Christians are recruited off campuses to move into major cultural centers where they are trained, positioned, mentored, and all in the context of church communities that celebrate and support them as doing real “kingdom work” and ministry in the world.

5. A commitment to the planting of new churches constantly and routinely.  Vigorous, continual planting of new congregations is the single most crucial strategy for the numerical growth of the Body of Christ, the renewal of existing churches, and the overall impact of that church on the culture of any city. Nothing else—not crusades, outreach programs, parachurch ministries, mega-churches, consulting, or church renewal processes—will have the consistent impact of dynamic, extensive church planting. This is an eyebrow-raising statement. But to those who have done any study of the subject, it is not even controversial.

City-center churches are in the very best possible place to plant churches. They have a mobile population in that new converts are constantly moving to other parts of the city or the suburbs or other cities; churches can be planted by following them and using them as core members.

The church planting mindset means city-center churches will think of church planting as just one of the things they do along with the rest (i.e., “We do teaching, evangelism, discipling, worship and music, education, and church planting!”). Church planting should not be like a building campaign, one big traumatic hiccup and we are glad that it’s over with. Rather a church-planting mindset is to operate like Paul, who was always engaged in evangelism, discipleship, and church planting.

The greatest difficulty with church planting is being sure the churches you plant are not cookie-cutter churches (they must reflect the unique demographics of the area, the gifts of their leaders, etc.) yet still embody the basic DNA (the basic theological vision) of your church. Only then will church planting create a movement of churches related enough to one another that they can do ministries together. (Part IV will address this in greater detail.)