Transcript: Keller on Gospel “Eco-Systems”
Posted on June 10, 2010 by R. Scott Clark
Thanks to Bill Schweitzer for transcribing this talk by Tim Keller that was given recently to at Renew South Florida. Thanks to Jon Payne for sending it along. Lots of good, interesting, and thoughtful stuff here but can you find the missing piece?
OK, the subject is, creating gospel eco systems, what is that? A physical eco system, is, we know, a biological eco system, is where you have a set of forces that sustain each other, interact with each other, stimulate each other. So organism A eats organism B, and it’s a good thing for organism C, because if organism B’s numbers weren’t tamped down, organism C wouldn’t exist because organism B eats C. And, organism A eats C, which means, if there wasn’t enough organism C there wouldn’t be any organisms A, but because they are all eating each other, because they are all, you might say, in a sense sustaining each other, you’ve got an ecosystem. So an ecosystem is a dynamic balanced set of forces and energies that grow each other. Now the question I want to talk to you about today, is how do you start a gospel movement in your city, or how can you see a gospel movement develop in your city? I’m not talking about how you and your church and your network can become a movement, only, that would be a different talk, and maybe if you want to ask me, I could at least give you, if you want this, I have a little list of things that I would say, here are these five, six, seven things are necessary if your own church is to become a moment, so it grows, and it develops, and it just keeps on growing and expanding. I’m actually thinking beyond that.
A gospel movement is this: a gospel movement happens in a city when across churches, across multiple denominations and networks, and beyond any one key leader or any one command center, or any one denomination, you actually have the body of Christ in the city geometrically growing, not just reconfiguring. The vast majority of what we consider, you know, “good things happening in that city,” is a reconfiguration of the body of Christ, not an actual growth of the body of Christ against the overall population. When the body of Christ is growing from 1% to 5% to 10% of the population, because its growing faster than the population, its actually growing. Usually what happens in most cities, when something that happens is reconfiguration. A new church grows, or a new network of churches grow, and what they do is, largely, pull Christians out of less effective ministries into their ministry. And that can be a very good thing, if they are utilizing them better, training them better. So very often what happens, you get a really dynamic, big church growing, and they start churches, and they start churches, and they say “great things are happening,” what’s really happening, mainly, is 90% of the growth of that network is the reconfiguration, its just pulling Christians from other places, now deploying them better, and certainly people are becoming Christians. But overall, the body is not growing, its reconfiguring. That’s not a movement.
A gospel movement is across multiple denominations and networks, beyond any one command center, any one key leader, any one key church or network, the body of Christ is spontaneously growing, its growing against the population, and its becoming bigger and bigger part of the city. The city of God is growing inside the city of man, and becoming more and more, you know, becoming larger and larger in the city of man. More effective and so on.
What does it take for that to happen? What does it take to have a gospel movement, in the city? And I think the answer is: the, an eco-system has to be put into place. An eco-system is a set of forces, a set of energies that interact with each other, and therefore create this growth that is beyond, its beyond any one program, its beyond any one leader, its beyond any one church.
So what’s that ecosystem, what is it? Now if I was, diagramming it, I would diagram it as a core, and around the core a second layer, and around the two inner layers, a third layer. And I want to describe that to you, right now, bang, bang, bang, quickly, but then I want to come back and talk about the core. So I’ll start with the core, so A, B, around the A core, and C, and I’ll list all the elements. If they are all in place, I think, they sustain each other, they stimulate each other, they just build each other up, and it goes; it self-propagates. The body of Christ grows, you have a moment instead of just a reconfiguration.
What’s the core? At the core is A, this: an effective, contextualized way of communicating and embodying the gospel for center city residents. If you have an effective, if you have a contextualized, effective, contextualized way of communicating the gospel and embodying the gospel for center city residents, you’re actually going to win large numbers of them, its just going to happen. If you get that right, its gonna happen. And if you don’t get that right, then you, really just kind of re-circulate the saints around. So first of all, you got to have to have that core. Now we’ll get back to that, because obviously, you say, “ whoa, whoa, what’s that?”
But B, around that core, there have to be at least, or I’m going to say, a whole series of church planting movements. At least 5 or 6, I would say—depends on the size of the city—of different denominations and traditions, that are using the core, you know the contextualized ministry model, they are using the core but are using it within their tradition. You know, whether its Anglican, Episcopal, whether its Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Pentecostal, so on. They’re using the core inside their tradition, and there’s at least 5 or 6, and they’re Church Planting Movements. What’s a Church Planting Movement? A Church Planting Movement: if a half to 2/3rds of all the churches in a group are planting a daughter church within 5 or 6 years, and then when those daughter churches, if, you know, half or 2/3rds of them plant a daughter church within 5 or 6 years, that’s a moment, its just, its growing. And, if those networks have some common vision of love, you know for reaching the city, and a certain generosity toward each other, you’ve got the second layer of the gospel movement. It can’t just be one network, it can’t just be Presbyterians or Baptists or whatever. There’s go to be, that core has to be embodied in a number of different traditions, and those traditions have got to be all, a good number of them, doing church planting. So that they’re, just expanding, expanding. That’s the second.
Now around them, you have to understand that, for all this, for the kind of spontaneity that actually grows the body of Christ from 1% to 3% to 5% to 10%, takes a lot. And even though the church plating is the core, and the local church is the core, there is another, third layer I put out here of other systems or networks, that are, somehow rooted in the churches, in some ways founded on the churches, at the same time going out beyond the churches, and in another way, stimulating the churches. And that’s these seven things. Here they are:
1. One is, kingdom-centered, united prayer. Prayer across the churches and city. I mean, there’s no way for the churches of the city to unite, and Christians to unite across churches to pray for the city, unless you go outside the local church, right? So you have to have prayer movements, or a prayer movement, or you have to have some kind of united, Kingdom-centered vision for the city movement. This is not easy. And frankly, in most situations, one church or one pastor gets a vision, and starts to say, “lets all come together over here and pray for the city” and its perceived as being that church’s, a way to enhance that church’s tribe. So, “that church is sponsoring, so we don’t do that.” And so you fail to get the movement, the movement dynamic, because you don’t have this united prayer across the churches. So first of all, there has to be a kind of this vision-casting, kingdom-centered prayer movement of some kind.
2. Secondly, you have to have lots and lots and lots of specialty evangelistic ministries. There’s just way too many people groups that very often have to be reached by specialists. I mean its very hard to reach Muslims, sometimes you just have to have someone who just gives their whole lives to reaching out to Muslims, and very often there is no one local church that can do it. Now when I say specialist ministries I’m thinking about all kinds of people, but I want to give pride of place to campus ministries, or, and also youth ministries. Because unless a city has got just masses of younger people coming to faith, from the campuses and from the youth groups, you know, from youth coming in, and very often that takes specialists too. You know, the very big churches, very often, can have their own campus ministries, can have their own youth ministries. But by in large, for a whole city to reach, you know, to be, for the body of Christ to be growing, you really need to have great ministries on the campuses and great youth ministries and so forth. That’s number two. Number three. Now, in other words, without strong churches those ministries don’t work, but without those ministries, the churches can’t do everything. So you see what I mean by saying there is an interaction, this third layer? So number one on there on that third layer is the prayer movement, number two is the specialist evangelism, especially campus and youth.
3. Number three, Justice & Mercy initiatives. On the one hand, I do believe that the local church certainly has to be very, very committed to justice and service in its neighborhood. I didn’t mention this on, someone asked me about this so I think ought to mention it, didn’t mention this two days ago, but, for example when we started to, Redeemer’s getting a building, not building a building, renovating a building on the west side, so we began, just beginning, we went to visit the city councilman over there, and the manger that works under her, we went to the local community board, and the community board is usually the business owners, and we just show up at these meetings, saying, “we want to be good neighbors, what are the issues? What are the problems? What can we do to make this area a better place to live?” And I remember, our community board, the business owners in upper west side, community board seven I guess it was, they practically fell off their chair. They came after, after the meeting, they came up to us and said, “you have to understand, churches and synagogues stay away from us. They’re afraid that we’re going to do something to them, that we are going to stop them from doing something.” And maybe, in other words, they just try to run, they never come and ask questions like that. The civic leaders are just amazed when the church comes and says, “what can we do?”
However, having said that, I’m a believer in Kuyper’s “sphere sovereignty,” Abraham Kuyper, who did say, that in the end, if you want to stop sex trafficking, or if you really want to, really, really make a big difference to poor inner city schools, you are going to need, not the church under the elders or the officers doing that, but you’re going to need Christians banding together into voluntary associations, 501c-3s, you know, community development corporations that go after that, that are not just run by the pastors and the elders, but lay people come together and they bring their expertise and they say, as Christians, “we’re going to, we’re going to lift the test scores of all the students in this school district over the next 5 years.” And there needs to be, if the Word of God’s going to multiply in a city, if the city is going to be, if the gospel’s going to really to convert a lot of people in the city, generally speaking, I think, the city has to look at the churches and say, “I don’t believe maybe what they believe, but I don’t know what we would do without them here, they are putting so much value into the neighborhoods, they are doing so much for us, its amazing.” And the only way that happens is not just churches, but actually, a kind of, a whole raft of what I call justice and mercy initiatives. In fact, in the 1830s, when evangelicalism was at the height of its cultural power in the history of America, there was what was called the Benevolent Empire, and the Benevolent Empire was this enormous, enormous army of benevolent organizations and charities and boards that were started by evangelical Christians across the country to just deal with absolutely everything. Slavery of course is the most, you know, famous one, but child labor, and, all kinds of things. They’re just after everything, I mean helping the blind, orphanages, hospitals, you name it, and that was very, very important, and that’s what has to happen in the city.
So OK, the prayer movement, specialist evangelism, especially campus and youth, third, justice and mercy initiatives everywhere.
4. Fourth, faith and work initiatives. Which is, to say, again, the very big churches might have 200 artists in them, but by and large, if the Christians who are artists in the city are going to, resource each other, help each other, get together, they’re going to have to usually going to get together in various sorts of initiatives, the artists have to get together across the churches, and they have to be in supportive networks and organizations, then all kind of stuff come out, ideas come up. That’s how art happens by the way, it happens at parties, the artists go to parties, and then they get their ideas, and then they, you know, I read an article not too long ago, remember, about the, you know, the artists who say that everything, pretty much everything that happens, happens at parties. So Christian artists have to have parties, very important. You’ll never have a movement, you’ll never win your city to Christ, unless the artists, Christians artists are having lots of parties. Write that down, twitter it, whatever. So you have to have faith and work initiatives.
5. OK, fifth, educational and family support institutions. Cities are not perceived as being easy places for families to raise their children. I think that’s not true, but there certainly disadvantages and difficulties. And you need schools, counseling centers, and the kind of institutions that make families feel like life inside cities is sustainable.
6. Sixth, you need your own leadership development systems. And this is a very, very complicated issue. By in large, an organic leadership development system means, you not only attract potential leaders, but you have ways of identifying leaders, you have ways of, in other words, leadership potential naturally shows up in different ways, you see them, and then there ways of bringing people through stages into leadership maturity. Sometimes these things are more informal that you know. The Church of Scotland for years had a tremendous leadership system that basically evangelicalized the church for about 20, 30 years. The number of evangelical Christians in the Church of Scotland, the number of evangelical churches just grew and grew, the number of evangelical ministers grew and grew, and everyone saying were really having renewal here, but it was mainly because there were two or three churches in university towns where the pastors had tremendous hearts for campus ministry, and as a result, those churches had lots and lots of university students. A significant percentage of the university students got a vision for evangelical ministry from the church, and went immediately off to the local university where they trained for theology, and they stayed at the church. So in other words, there were two or three ministers, without knowing it, essentially produced about, you know, 40 or 50 new ministers per year, when you are the size of church of Scotland, which isn’t very big, that was significant. And when those ministers retired, and their successors just didn’t have the same charisma or interest in working with university students, about 20 years later, they suddenly realized that the entire pipeline of evangelical leaders had dried up, and nobody realized it was a system. They didn’t even realize they had it, until it was actually too late. And they really don’t know how to get it back. It was a very, vey interesting story; its happened over my career, because I remember, I basically had a 40 year career as a pastor, and I remember the first 20 years, the church of Scotland, the evangelical wing, was just growing like this, and then the last 20 years, its just gone down like this. And when they look back, they now realize they had a system, they let it fall apart, didn’t know they had one. It was organic, that’s the reason why, it was movement, you see. It wasn’t just a school that got started, it wasn’t an institution; it was organic and they didn’t realize they had it. And if your city doesn’t have something like that, you’re not going to be a gospel movement.
7. And then, seven, last, the last element in, this last part of the layer, that has to be there interacting with the churches, is overlapping leaders, overlapping leaders who come together, and they’re not kingdom, they’re not just so oriented around their own turf, and developing their own kingdoms, but they really have a heart for the whole city and they get together and talk. And what I mean by overlapping is, you have to have your business leaders, they’re the wealthiest. You have to have your arts leaders, they’re the wildest. You have to have your tech people, they’re the wired-est. You have to have your pastors, they’re the weirdest. So when the wildest and the wealthiest, and the wired-est, and the weirdest are getting together and saying, “what are we going to do about our city?” instead of just always being in their own little turf networks, and concerned only about their tribe increasing, that’s kind of the capstone, the cherry on the Sunday.
And when those elements are in place, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a high profile pastor and then he dies, you know, or gets run over by a bus or retires or something like that: on it goes. And we have, what we think, we have identified as two tipping points. The first tipping point is what we call movement tipping point. And that means, you see good growth, and then at a certain point, the tipping point is where enough of the eco-system is in place, that the growth begins to be, that you can’t account for it just by one or two churches or one or two networks, its just starting to happen all over. And when that growth becomes spontaneous, and is not subject any longer just to one command center, you’ve hit the movement tipping point and you’re on your way. And the sign of it is, that the, if you are able to do the study, which is not easy to do, its when the percentage of Christians in a city is growing because the Christians is growing faster than the population.
The second tipping point, however, is a city tipping point. And what Chuck Colsen says, that there’s a, that when more than 10% of the population of a prison get involved in Christian ministries, get converted or get involved Christian ministries, he says that before that 10% place, obviously people’s lives are being changed, but you don’t seen much different in this prison, the prison doesn’t look any different than any other prison. But when you get to a certain spot where, there’s maybe 10%, its not a science, its not wooden, but there’s a spot at which the whole prison begins to change. The relationships between the guards and the prisoners begins to change, the culture of the prison begins to change, and even the look of the prison begins to change. And we also know it’s the same thing with neighborhoods, by the way. Neighborhoods, you know, could be, you know, Italian, Italian American, and its becoming Hispanic slowly, at a certain spot there’s enough Hispanic in it that the neighborhood looks different, and people can see it’s a mixed neighborhood, its no longer just, you know, an Italian American neighborhood. What happens when you get to that point in a major city? As far as I know, even in the cities of the world, even cities in the places of the world where the population is growing 7 to 10 times the population, Christians are growing 7 to 10 times the population rate, like Africa, Latin America, some parts of Asia, even those places, their core central cities are still very secular pluralistic. And we don’t know of any place where the number of Christians in the core of the city, in the very center of the city, where it’s the most complex and most sophisticated, and most, you know, hostile, and the most secular, and the most mobile, we don’t know of any place in the world actually where a movement is growing and getting to the tipping point. But for example if in New York City, we got to 10-12% of the population that were in, you know, vital people in orthodox churches, it would really make a difference. It would change the city, and if you change a place like New York City, or any major city, you start to change the way the world thinks about things.
So, that’s a vision for gospel movement. And I’m just trying to have you to raise you eyes beyond the current horizon where your eyes are fixed. Because right now, in some of your cases, you just want to survive. In other words, you just don’t want, in other words, when you first start a church, your first horizon is, I don’t want five years from now for me and everybody I know to think I’m a failure. That’s your first horizon, OK. And maybe that’s as far as you can go at first, really. Then next horizon is, “Oh, were doing OK, I would like to start another campus, I would like to start a network, I’d like to start other churches,” and so maybe you get a vision for your own church becoming a movement. I want you to never forget there is a higher horizon, and that is a gospel movement in the city.
Posted on June 10, 2010 by R. Scott Clark
Thanks to Bill Schweitzer for transcribing this talk by Tim Keller that was given recently to at Renew South Florida. Thanks to Jon Payne for sending it along. Lots of good, interesting, and thoughtful stuff here but can you find the missing piece?
OK, the subject is, creating gospel eco systems, what is that? A physical eco system, is, we know, a biological eco system, is where you have a set of forces that sustain each other, interact with each other, stimulate each other. So organism A eats organism B, and it’s a good thing for organism C, because if organism B’s numbers weren’t tamped down, organism C wouldn’t exist because organism B eats C. And, organism A eats C, which means, if there wasn’t enough organism C there wouldn’t be any organisms A, but because they are all eating each other, because they are all, you might say, in a sense sustaining each other, you’ve got an ecosystem. So an ecosystem is a dynamic balanced set of forces and energies that grow each other. Now the question I want to talk to you about today, is how do you start a gospel movement in your city, or how can you see a gospel movement develop in your city? I’m not talking about how you and your church and your network can become a movement, only, that would be a different talk, and maybe if you want to ask me, I could at least give you, if you want this, I have a little list of things that I would say, here are these five, six, seven things are necessary if your own church is to become a moment, so it grows, and it develops, and it just keeps on growing and expanding. I’m actually thinking beyond that.
A gospel movement is this: a gospel movement happens in a city when across churches, across multiple denominations and networks, and beyond any one key leader or any one command center, or any one denomination, you actually have the body of Christ in the city geometrically growing, not just reconfiguring. The vast majority of what we consider, you know, “good things happening in that city,” is a reconfiguration of the body of Christ, not an actual growth of the body of Christ against the overall population. When the body of Christ is growing from 1% to 5% to 10% of the population, because its growing faster than the population, its actually growing. Usually what happens in most cities, when something that happens is reconfiguration. A new church grows, or a new network of churches grow, and what they do is, largely, pull Christians out of less effective ministries into their ministry. And that can be a very good thing, if they are utilizing them better, training them better. So very often what happens, you get a really dynamic, big church growing, and they start churches, and they start churches, and they say “great things are happening,” what’s really happening, mainly, is 90% of the growth of that network is the reconfiguration, its just pulling Christians from other places, now deploying them better, and certainly people are becoming Christians. But overall, the body is not growing, its reconfiguring. That’s not a movement.
A gospel movement is across multiple denominations and networks, beyond any one command center, any one key leader, any one key church or network, the body of Christ is spontaneously growing, its growing against the population, and its becoming bigger and bigger part of the city. The city of God is growing inside the city of man, and becoming more and more, you know, becoming larger and larger in the city of man. More effective and so on.
What does it take for that to happen? What does it take to have a gospel movement, in the city? And I think the answer is: the, an eco-system has to be put into place. An eco-system is a set of forces, a set of energies that interact with each other, and therefore create this growth that is beyond, its beyond any one program, its beyond any one leader, its beyond any one church.
So what’s that ecosystem, what is it? Now if I was, diagramming it, I would diagram it as a core, and around the core a second layer, and around the two inner layers, a third layer. And I want to describe that to you, right now, bang, bang, bang, quickly, but then I want to come back and talk about the core. So I’ll start with the core, so A, B, around the A core, and C, and I’ll list all the elements. If they are all in place, I think, they sustain each other, they stimulate each other, they just build each other up, and it goes; it self-propagates. The body of Christ grows, you have a moment instead of just a reconfiguration.
What’s the core? At the core is A, this: an effective, contextualized way of communicating and embodying the gospel for center city residents. If you have an effective, if you have a contextualized, effective, contextualized way of communicating the gospel and embodying the gospel for center city residents, you’re actually going to win large numbers of them, its just going to happen. If you get that right, its gonna happen. And if you don’t get that right, then you, really just kind of re-circulate the saints around. So first of all, you got to have to have that core. Now we’ll get back to that, because obviously, you say, “ whoa, whoa, what’s that?”
But B, around that core, there have to be at least, or I’m going to say, a whole series of church planting movements. At least 5 or 6, I would say—depends on the size of the city—of different denominations and traditions, that are using the core, you know the contextualized ministry model, they are using the core but are using it within their tradition. You know, whether its Anglican, Episcopal, whether its Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Pentecostal, so on. They’re using the core inside their tradition, and there’s at least 5 or 6, and they’re Church Planting Movements. What’s a Church Planting Movement? A Church Planting Movement: if a half to 2/3rds of all the churches in a group are planting a daughter church within 5 or 6 years, and then when those daughter churches, if, you know, half or 2/3rds of them plant a daughter church within 5 or 6 years, that’s a moment, its just, its growing. And, if those networks have some common vision of love, you know for reaching the city, and a certain generosity toward each other, you’ve got the second layer of the gospel movement. It can’t just be one network, it can’t just be Presbyterians or Baptists or whatever. There’s go to be, that core has to be embodied in a number of different traditions, and those traditions have got to be all, a good number of them, doing church planting. So that they’re, just expanding, expanding. That’s the second.
Now around them, you have to understand that, for all this, for the kind of spontaneity that actually grows the body of Christ from 1% to 3% to 5% to 10%, takes a lot. And even though the church plating is the core, and the local church is the core, there is another, third layer I put out here of other systems or networks, that are, somehow rooted in the churches, in some ways founded on the churches, at the same time going out beyond the churches, and in another way, stimulating the churches. And that’s these seven things. Here they are:
1. One is, kingdom-centered, united prayer. Prayer across the churches and city. I mean, there’s no way for the churches of the city to unite, and Christians to unite across churches to pray for the city, unless you go outside the local church, right? So you have to have prayer movements, or a prayer movement, or you have to have some kind of united, Kingdom-centered vision for the city movement. This is not easy. And frankly, in most situations, one church or one pastor gets a vision, and starts to say, “lets all come together over here and pray for the city” and its perceived as being that church’s, a way to enhance that church’s tribe. So, “that church is sponsoring, so we don’t do that.” And so you fail to get the movement, the movement dynamic, because you don’t have this united prayer across the churches. So first of all, there has to be a kind of this vision-casting, kingdom-centered prayer movement of some kind.
2. Secondly, you have to have lots and lots and lots of specialty evangelistic ministries. There’s just way too many people groups that very often have to be reached by specialists. I mean its very hard to reach Muslims, sometimes you just have to have someone who just gives their whole lives to reaching out to Muslims, and very often there is no one local church that can do it. Now when I say specialist ministries I’m thinking about all kinds of people, but I want to give pride of place to campus ministries, or, and also youth ministries. Because unless a city has got just masses of younger people coming to faith, from the campuses and from the youth groups, you know, from youth coming in, and very often that takes specialists too. You know, the very big churches, very often, can have their own campus ministries, can have their own youth ministries. But by in large, for a whole city to reach, you know, to be, for the body of Christ to be growing, you really need to have great ministries on the campuses and great youth ministries and so forth. That’s number two. Number three. Now, in other words, without strong churches those ministries don’t work, but without those ministries, the churches can’t do everything. So you see what I mean by saying there is an interaction, this third layer? So number one on there on that third layer is the prayer movement, number two is the specialist evangelism, especially campus and youth.
3. Number three, Justice & Mercy initiatives. On the one hand, I do believe that the local church certainly has to be very, very committed to justice and service in its neighborhood. I didn’t mention this on, someone asked me about this so I think ought to mention it, didn’t mention this two days ago, but, for example when we started to, Redeemer’s getting a building, not building a building, renovating a building on the west side, so we began, just beginning, we went to visit the city councilman over there, and the manger that works under her, we went to the local community board, and the community board is usually the business owners, and we just show up at these meetings, saying, “we want to be good neighbors, what are the issues? What are the problems? What can we do to make this area a better place to live?” And I remember, our community board, the business owners in upper west side, community board seven I guess it was, they practically fell off their chair. They came after, after the meeting, they came up to us and said, “you have to understand, churches and synagogues stay away from us. They’re afraid that we’re going to do something to them, that we are going to stop them from doing something.” And maybe, in other words, they just try to run, they never come and ask questions like that. The civic leaders are just amazed when the church comes and says, “what can we do?”
However, having said that, I’m a believer in Kuyper’s “sphere sovereignty,” Abraham Kuyper, who did say, that in the end, if you want to stop sex trafficking, or if you really want to, really, really make a big difference to poor inner city schools, you are going to need, not the church under the elders or the officers doing that, but you’re going to need Christians banding together into voluntary associations, 501c-3s, you know, community development corporations that go after that, that are not just run by the pastors and the elders, but lay people come together and they bring their expertise and they say, as Christians, “we’re going to, we’re going to lift the test scores of all the students in this school district over the next 5 years.” And there needs to be, if the Word of God’s going to multiply in a city, if the city is going to be, if the gospel’s going to really to convert a lot of people in the city, generally speaking, I think, the city has to look at the churches and say, “I don’t believe maybe what they believe, but I don’t know what we would do without them here, they are putting so much value into the neighborhoods, they are doing so much for us, its amazing.” And the only way that happens is not just churches, but actually, a kind of, a whole raft of what I call justice and mercy initiatives. In fact, in the 1830s, when evangelicalism was at the height of its cultural power in the history of America, there was what was called the Benevolent Empire, and the Benevolent Empire was this enormous, enormous army of benevolent organizations and charities and boards that were started by evangelical Christians across the country to just deal with absolutely everything. Slavery of course is the most, you know, famous one, but child labor, and, all kinds of things. They’re just after everything, I mean helping the blind, orphanages, hospitals, you name it, and that was very, very important, and that’s what has to happen in the city.
So OK, the prayer movement, specialist evangelism, especially campus and youth, third, justice and mercy initiatives everywhere.
4. Fourth, faith and work initiatives. Which is, to say, again, the very big churches might have 200 artists in them, but by and large, if the Christians who are artists in the city are going to, resource each other, help each other, get together, they’re going to have to usually going to get together in various sorts of initiatives, the artists have to get together across the churches, and they have to be in supportive networks and organizations, then all kind of stuff come out, ideas come up. That’s how art happens by the way, it happens at parties, the artists go to parties, and then they get their ideas, and then they, you know, I read an article not too long ago, remember, about the, you know, the artists who say that everything, pretty much everything that happens, happens at parties. So Christian artists have to have parties, very important. You’ll never have a movement, you’ll never win your city to Christ, unless the artists, Christians artists are having lots of parties. Write that down, twitter it, whatever. So you have to have faith and work initiatives.
5. OK, fifth, educational and family support institutions. Cities are not perceived as being easy places for families to raise their children. I think that’s not true, but there certainly disadvantages and difficulties. And you need schools, counseling centers, and the kind of institutions that make families feel like life inside cities is sustainable.
6. Sixth, you need your own leadership development systems. And this is a very, very complicated issue. By in large, an organic leadership development system means, you not only attract potential leaders, but you have ways of identifying leaders, you have ways of, in other words, leadership potential naturally shows up in different ways, you see them, and then there ways of bringing people through stages into leadership maturity. Sometimes these things are more informal that you know. The Church of Scotland for years had a tremendous leadership system that basically evangelicalized the church for about 20, 30 years. The number of evangelical Christians in the Church of Scotland, the number of evangelical churches just grew and grew, the number of evangelical ministers grew and grew, and everyone saying were really having renewal here, but it was mainly because there were two or three churches in university towns where the pastors had tremendous hearts for campus ministry, and as a result, those churches had lots and lots of university students. A significant percentage of the university students got a vision for evangelical ministry from the church, and went immediately off to the local university where they trained for theology, and they stayed at the church. So in other words, there were two or three ministers, without knowing it, essentially produced about, you know, 40 or 50 new ministers per year, when you are the size of church of Scotland, which isn’t very big, that was significant. And when those ministers retired, and their successors just didn’t have the same charisma or interest in working with university students, about 20 years later, they suddenly realized that the entire pipeline of evangelical leaders had dried up, and nobody realized it was a system. They didn’t even realize they had it, until it was actually too late. And they really don’t know how to get it back. It was a very, vey interesting story; its happened over my career, because I remember, I basically had a 40 year career as a pastor, and I remember the first 20 years, the church of Scotland, the evangelical wing, was just growing like this, and then the last 20 years, its just gone down like this. And when they look back, they now realize they had a system, they let it fall apart, didn’t know they had one. It was organic, that’s the reason why, it was movement, you see. It wasn’t just a school that got started, it wasn’t an institution; it was organic and they didn’t realize they had it. And if your city doesn’t have something like that, you’re not going to be a gospel movement.
7. And then, seven, last, the last element in, this last part of the layer, that has to be there interacting with the churches, is overlapping leaders, overlapping leaders who come together, and they’re not kingdom, they’re not just so oriented around their own turf, and developing their own kingdoms, but they really have a heart for the whole city and they get together and talk. And what I mean by overlapping is, you have to have your business leaders, they’re the wealthiest. You have to have your arts leaders, they’re the wildest. You have to have your tech people, they’re the wired-est. You have to have your pastors, they’re the weirdest. So when the wildest and the wealthiest, and the wired-est, and the weirdest are getting together and saying, “what are we going to do about our city?” instead of just always being in their own little turf networks, and concerned only about their tribe increasing, that’s kind of the capstone, the cherry on the Sunday.
And when those elements are in place, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a high profile pastor and then he dies, you know, or gets run over by a bus or retires or something like that: on it goes. And we have, what we think, we have identified as two tipping points. The first tipping point is what we call movement tipping point. And that means, you see good growth, and then at a certain point, the tipping point is where enough of the eco-system is in place, that the growth begins to be, that you can’t account for it just by one or two churches or one or two networks, its just starting to happen all over. And when that growth becomes spontaneous, and is not subject any longer just to one command center, you’ve hit the movement tipping point and you’re on your way. And the sign of it is, that the, if you are able to do the study, which is not easy to do, its when the percentage of Christians in a city is growing because the Christians is growing faster than the population.
The second tipping point, however, is a city tipping point. And what Chuck Colsen says, that there’s a, that when more than 10% of the population of a prison get involved in Christian ministries, get converted or get involved Christian ministries, he says that before that 10% place, obviously people’s lives are being changed, but you don’t seen much different in this prison, the prison doesn’t look any different than any other prison. But when you get to a certain spot where, there’s maybe 10%, its not a science, its not wooden, but there’s a spot at which the whole prison begins to change. The relationships between the guards and the prisoners begins to change, the culture of the prison begins to change, and even the look of the prison begins to change. And we also know it’s the same thing with neighborhoods, by the way. Neighborhoods, you know, could be, you know, Italian, Italian American, and its becoming Hispanic slowly, at a certain spot there’s enough Hispanic in it that the neighborhood looks different, and people can see it’s a mixed neighborhood, its no longer just, you know, an Italian American neighborhood. What happens when you get to that point in a major city? As far as I know, even in the cities of the world, even cities in the places of the world where the population is growing 7 to 10 times the population, Christians are growing 7 to 10 times the population rate, like Africa, Latin America, some parts of Asia, even those places, their core central cities are still very secular pluralistic. And we don’t know of any place where the number of Christians in the core of the city, in the very center of the city, where it’s the most complex and most sophisticated, and most, you know, hostile, and the most secular, and the most mobile, we don’t know of any place in the world actually where a movement is growing and getting to the tipping point. But for example if in New York City, we got to 10-12% of the population that were in, you know, vital people in orthodox churches, it would really make a difference. It would change the city, and if you change a place like New York City, or any major city, you start to change the way the world thinks about things.
So, that’s a vision for gospel movement. And I’m just trying to have you to raise you eyes beyond the current horizon where your eyes are fixed. Because right now, in some of your cases, you just want to survive. In other words, you just don’t want, in other words, when you first start a church, your first horizon is, I don’t want five years from now for me and everybody I know to think I’m a failure. That’s your first horizon, OK. And maybe that’s as far as you can go at first, really. Then next horizon is, “Oh, were doing OK, I would like to start another campus, I would like to start a network, I’d like to start other churches,” and so maybe you get a vision for your own church becoming a movement. I want you to never forget there is a higher horizon, and that is a gospel movement in the city.
http://heidelblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/transcript-keller-on-gospel-eco-systems/
