BRAVE CITIES…The archaeology, artistry and architecture of kingdom ecosystems
An Ancient option for modern problems of church planting
Inklings
It was 2016, I had just turned 50 and my wife and I and our adult children with their spouses were relocating to our 3rd city to plant another ‘something.’ We had previously planted in Portland Oregon and Denver. But this time was different which I’ll explain in a few paragraphs.
Why were we going? Well, the simple answer is that we had sent our son Ryan to live in an adult facility for folks that live with severe physical disabilities. For several years we had been visiting him 3-4 times a year and slowly we found ourselves curious about all the brokenness we saw as we drove around Alton Illinois. For a town of roughly 40,000 people there was a beautiful downtown but 2/3 of the buildings were boarded up and houses that would cost a million dollars in Denver were selling for $75,000. This town was just north of St Louis, and like many rust belt towns, had lost 2/3 of its industry over the last 50 years. The average family income was $22,000 and 65% of its youth were fatherless. There was very little life in the downtown corridor and something beyond just wanting to be with our son seemed to loom over our hearts.
We knew Ryan was nearing the end of his short life so it didn’t make sense to move there just to be near him. But we sensed that something beyond him would emerge. It all came to a head one night in an Italian bar. We met a waitress by the name of Sasha. About half- way through our meal I asked “So Sasha, what do young people do in this town?” She quickly said, “Oh my friends just do drugs.” I’m not sure why I said this but I pressed a bit. “Sasha has that been a struggle for you as well?” “Yessir it has but I’m doing much better now that I have this job.”
That was the point something shifted in our hearts. I like to say evangelism is falling in emotional love with complete strangers and both Cheryl and I were in love.
After we finished we tipped her every dollar we had left and began to walk out of the restaurant. We were stopped buy an older well to do looking couple and they asked if were moving to Alton. I laughed, “oh no sir, we were just trying to learn a bit more about it. They said they had overheard our conversation and his wife said, “All this town needs is a little encouragement so it would be so great if you ever considered moving here.
With that my wife said on the way walking to the car, “Seriously, why don’t we move here and see if we can do something to help the town out?” And so we did. Our adult kids wanted to come too so we left Denver cold turkey and 3 months later we started to get our feet wet. We bought an abandoned crack house for $12,000 to fix for my daughter and son in law, a second home for our other daughter and her husband, and Cheryl and I bought a house right in between. There we were, all downtown, with no plan but with some inkling that God would show us soon enough what we could do to help the town.
Church Planting Should be about the town, not the church
Why didn’t I want to plant another church? Well, we had done that twice and no matter how incarnationally we got started in homes, crossfit gyms, living rooms, and coffee shops, it always ended up being about the church. Once there was enough people, it seems everyone just starts wanting more church, church services, church stability, church staff, etc. So this time I think we wanted it to always be about the town not about the church.
Personally I wanted to stretch beyond ecclesial expectations and formulas. I didn’t want to do what I knew how to do. I didn’t want to follow some pre-prescribed equation and get the same results. I didn’t want to come in with an agenda even if it was a good agenda. I didn’t want math, I wanted music. I wanted to see God do something totally different something akin to ‘binding and loosing’ as Jesus foreshadowed his followers would do. I wanted to see if it was true as Proverbs 11:10 says that ‘when the righteous prosper..the city rejoices.” I wanted to see if Isaiah was laying down an ancient pathway for the true metrics of the kingdom when he wrote, ‘you will be called repairers of city streets.” And for me personally, I had a private request I made to God. I didn’t want to try to pester grown adults to do things they didn’t want to do anymore. I didn’t want to provide a weekly church service where consumers could get a weekly fix. I didn’t want to work hard and hope some mud would stick on the wall. So I prayed every morning as I walked the city. “Lord, mentor me in how to only do what I see the Father doing.” And then I’d always say, “Bring it to me…put bread on the trail so I know its you.”
I was looking for a life of manna, where I could say at the end of the story…Jesus planted me and he showed me exactly what he wanted to do for and in this town.
Bread on the Trail
And so it started to happen. 6 months later a gentleman I had only met once before gave me a prominent building in the center of downtown that had been boarded up for 60 years. That was a big chunk of bread but we knew it was a starting point. That turned into ‘Post Commons’ with the goal to become the living room for Alton. It started with coffee, then brunch café, then it became a premier event space, co-working location for the locals and pretty much the center of community life downtown. Then other people started to ask us to help them start their new businesses. We set up a central admin/finance team to help folks start good things. Our non-profit holding company’s purpose statement was to ‘incubate good works.’ And it happened. Within this first 8 years 9 for-profit businesses had begun, two non profits, a youth basketball league, 80 acre equine therapy farm and a handful of other unique kingdom ‘tables’ formed, all from a small, committed neo-monastic band of apostolic and prophetically oriented entrepreneurs.
Modern Day Trappists
Sometimes when people come to see what is happening and ask what we are doing, I say we are like a ‘neo-monastic’ community. No we don’t live in a commune but most of us live within a mile of each other. We see each other almost daily in the businesses we have started and we have rhythms of life and works we all ‘work’ on together. No one is paid for ministry because we all do the works of ministry for free. We get paid through our labor in the ecosystem of business. Monastic? No not in the traditional sense but we take our cues from early Benedictine and Trappist servants whose 6th century motto was “ora et Labora.’ Which meant ‘to pray is to work and our works are our prayers.’ Interestingly and historically all other monastic orders would ask and beg for money, somewhat like a local church might, but the Benedictines were the enterprisal order and never had to ask for funding because they made all they needed from their works. For them mission and the church and the needs of the cities they served in were all intertwined but their unique economy allowed them serve in the margins of human suffering and forge incredible durable and longstanding faith community. It was church for them , it seems like this was church in the book of Acts, and it is church for us now.
Apostolic Rivers vs Shepherding Ponds
I bring up the ‘apostolic and prophetic’ because the scriptures teach that the church would hinge upon the entrepreneurial and streetwise trubadours? The Apostolic and prophetic ones operate and orient different than the pastor/teacher orientation that has been leading the prevailing model for the last 50 years or so. All the gifts and leadership orientations are identical in need and importance but in the world of church planting, where we press and extend the movement forward, the pastor/teachers just don’t seem to be able to move it forward. They have a natural orientation toward care, control, sustainability, depth and faithfulness to the system or as some would call the ‘pond.’ They like to pool the water and keep it contained, planting beautiful things along the serene path making a meaningful space for people to enjoy and get what they need.
The Apostolic and Prophetic folks enjoy the enclave but they can’t settle for it. Like the master who leaves the 99 they fall in love with waitresses in Italian bars down below the pond. The prophetic cry out and call out the brokenness that needs attention and the apostolic grab pick axes and start ripping small ditches all around the pond so that the water keeps flowing downstream to the gates of hell.
The Gates of Hell, the place Jesus always plants on
Remember when Jesus first mentioned his ‘church?” In Matthew 16 Jesus is talking to his young disciples and he tells them that he is going to build his church ‘here.’ Where was he standing. On the rock that all the people called ‘the gates of hell.’
What does it mean for us? I think it means Jesus likes to establish his reign where dark dominions have taken hold. Where people lack access, where they grasp to find any hope at all and where most people would chose not to plant because it doesn’t offer much financial sustainability. I think this is important because after watching the American church planting focus the last 50 years it seems like we prioritize sustainability over brokenness. We raise capital up front and try to go into cities fully funded instead of going in broke and broken as Jesus sent his friends.
Entering Cities the way Jesus would
In Luke 10 Jesus sends 72 people into a town. This should be a plumbline passage for every planter. As you read it seems like a divine progression that could apply to any planter and any town. First go with nothing up front. Go unfunded “Don’t take your pack with you.” Why? Most likely so that they would be dependent upon people and not go in like saviors bringing all the goods the town-folk needed. Jesus knew to win souls, you have to first win hearts and to win hearts you have to find or create an atmosphere of peace.
Next Jesus says find ‘peace.’ Peace is the secret sauce. Its like tilling or ground prep before planting is to be done. Peace can be one guy named Tom who seems to open doors or it can be a coffee shop that God prompts you to start to bring a place of peace to others. It doesn’t really matter who or how, but Jesus knew peace proceeds everything else. Church services don’t always bring peace. Christians don’t always bring peace but creating a ‘living room’ for a downtown core of a city or starting basketball leagues for fatherless kids or helping start a warming center for the homeless or providing free workspace for 300 people a week in your building all brought us incredible peace with our city.
Archaeology and Artistry
Now after roughly a decade since we landed in Alton people come for day long immersions to see all the different ‘tables’ that have been created. Often someone will say, ‘I’m just not as creative or knowledgeable as your network seems to be.” My response is to remind them that either were we. Remember bread on the trail. All we did was ask God to show us what He wanted to do in this town and then we would learn how to do what he was doing.
All good missionaries (church planters) must dig before you create.
The subtitle of Brave Cities book, Is the archaeology, artistry and architecture of kingdom ecosystems. The archaeology is all the work that goes into digging for where the brokenness is. Its not a programmatic offering, nor is it a quick demographic study. It is an incarnational commitment to live among the context you hope to plant seeds in. It’s the tilling season, listening season, looking around, asking good questions, feeling the pain because its your pain too. Its life in the gates of hell.
Once you live among those you hope to help then the ideas and visions will start to come as to what song God wants you to sing. What table he wants you to build and what issue He wants you to address. The artistry is what you do as a response to what you’ve dug and found. Its like pulling the vines off of Babylon while you forge a creative, artistic response the brokenness you see. When I was given the building you could see the kingdom of God all over it. Its location was central, its where the entire town used to come every day because it was their post office. It was beautiful, perfectly positioned and historically important to the vibrations of city life. But the vines of Babylon had covered it up. This is an important understanding. We don’t build the kingdom. The kingdom of God is already established through the resurrection of Jesus. But its hidden and covered like this old building was. The artistry is to uncover it and make it accessible again.
A Brave City within the city you are called to
This is why we view church and church planting as building a kingdom city in the middle of the city you live in. We don’t think we can change Alton but we can build a city that reflects the culture of the kingdom right in the middle of it. This is an important nuance because often in church planting we try to fix things like poverty, homelessness, loneliness, etc. But Babylon rules on earth. So you can try to fix the homelessness of Portland Oregon but you’re going to lose because the forces at play are not working with you. So you don’t quit and leave Babylon, nor do you have to partner with Babylon.. Instead you create an alternative community of good works, and good people that bravely live against the currents of the world and slowly cherry pick people out of darkness.
We can’t fix fatherlessness in Alton but when we start a basketball league for these boys, we can tell them that they now have fathers.. We can’t fix homelessness for our whole city but when we take several men and women into our homes they are not homeless anymore. We can’t help every outsider to find a community but we can plant a network of vibrant people-oriented businesses all over so that its hard for people searching to miss you.
Our story may seem strange to traditional church leaders or church planters but we find this story dead in the center in the book of Acts lead by an Apostle who said, ‘he worked among them so as not to be a burden and so he could provide for himself and his friends.’
Ancient ark-like communities were the original template and if you look hard enough you’ll see them popping up everywhere. These Brave Cities always seem to create an ecosystem of benevolent businesses, justice works and intentional homes that provide not only spiritual pathways for people to find God, but they literally change the atmosphere and the soil so that long term change can occur at the deepest spiritual levels. Jesus does build his church and he asks us to bind and loosen but church services never were, and can never be the front edge of this kingdom spear. It must come through the entrepreneurial and artistic missionaries that find their sustainability and their mission through work, working, and works of the kingdom.
To find Brave Cities book go to www.bravecities.com
