Church Your City, Shape the World

Many denominations, movements, and networks have embraced a focus on planting churches in major centers around the world. There are almost as many methodologies as there are movements, networks, and denominations, it seems. Some succeed, others don’t. Some embrace a healthy methodology and others have an unhealthy dependency on personality, brand, or experience.

I love planting churches, in fact, one of the greatest joys of my life is being involved with church planting/church planters through GlocalNet, where we teach church planters how to do ministry primarily in the public square, not simply a Sunday event. I believe that we need to embrace a Kingdom framework of church planting that pays special attention to the domain of God’s reign—the whole earth! Our charge is to fully utilize all that has been made possible for us by Christ (the new accessibility of the Kingdom) to affect change in ourselves and our society to more explicitly align with the values of God’s Kingdom.

If we are called to church our city, it means that we need to engage with those living in the city in meaningful and creative ways. I’ve always said that we are not planting better churches, we are planting different churches. As a result, our churches have disproportionate influence locally and globally. We start churches for the world. The most important measurement for us is not how many show up on Sunday, but what is the aggregate of all the churches that have been planted. We’ve consistently taught others to church their city, not just become the biggest church in the city. Does this honor the Lord and His mission? You bet!

Church our city?

How should we go about churching our city? In order to become increasingly effective in our church planting efforts one of the first values we need to embrace is Kingdom Centrality. At first, this seems pretty simple (and it is), but in practice, this is very hard to embrace fully as there is an evident tension between kingdom-centricity and church-centricity.

Consider for one moment how far the Western church has wandered from God’s intention for the church. If there’s anything 2020 has taught us, it is that we should be honest in our evaluation and fluid in our approach, right? If we’re honest, there’s a number of reasons why the Western church needs reorienting toward a Kingdom paradigm of ministry (now more than ever):

1. We became lost in modernity
2. We became lost in consumerism
3. We became lost in ‘success’
4. We became lost in mega-mania
5. We lost the Spirit to Industrialization
6. We lost our leadership from Great Souls to Great Stars
7. We became lost in the culture and lost our voice
8. We lost our mission to bureaucracies – from institution to denomination
9. We lost intimacy to religion

Each of the above realities describes the context so many of us have come to be frustrated with. How does this all play itself out in practice? Have a look at the table below and you will see the key difference between a church and Kingdom framework of church planting and ministry. The realities we have so often embraced require the recalibration of a Biblical, Theo-centric approach.

Want to hear more about the Kingdom framework and how you can make shifts toward that in your church? Check out our Online Turbo which is a one-hour course on our Kingdom DNA at GlocalNet. Use the coupon code APRIL and get this course for FREE!