Reaching Cities

Matt Perman post:  To Transform a City: Tim Keller on How to Know if You are Reaching Your City

Tim Keller has an excellent article at Leadership Journal on what it takes to transform a city through the gospel.

Let me highlight two things.

First, one of the core ideas of the article is that reaching a city takes more than just one or two flourishing churches. It takes a “city-wide gospel movement.” Here’s what what he means by that:

What it takes to reach a city is a city-wide gospel movement, which means the number of Christians across the city is growing faster than the population, and therefore, a growing percentage of the people of that city are connecting with gospel-centered churches and are finding faith in Jesus Christ. That will eventually have an impact on the whole life of the city. That’s what I mean by a city-wide gospel movement.

A city-wide gospel movement is an organic thing. It’s an energy unleashed across not only the city but across the different denominations, and therefore, there’s no one church, no one organization, no one leader in charge of it all. It’s bigger than that. It’s the Holy Spirit moving across the whole city and as a result the overall body of Christ is growing faster than the population, and the city is being reached. And there’s an impact for Christ made in the whole city.

 Second, one of the things that needs to be at the core of this movement is a contextualized, biblical, gospel theology. Here’s a highlight on that:

The church loses its life-changing dynamism to the degree that its theology goes off to this side or that side—into either uptight legalistic moralism, or into latitudinarianism, broadness, not believing the Bible, licentiousness, relativism.

By saying the biblical gospel is in the middle, that’s not saying “moderation in all things.” Jesus wasn’t moderate in anything. He was radically gentle and radically truth loving at the same time. The gospel isn’t a kind of middle-of-the-road, lukewarm thing. But the gospel is neither legalism nor licentiousness. And to the degree we lose the biblical gospel, we’re never going to be a movement that reaches the city.

 
 There is much, much more in the article that is worth checking out. Read the whole thing.