Somewhere in our thinking about loving and serving people in the city we’ve defaulted to dishing out helpings of instant potatoes at bread lines. While this is indeed a worthy (and godly) endeavor it is only the tip of the iceberg. I would venture to say that most feel a love for their city but it is usually accompanied by guilt because you’re not feeding the homeless on Thanksgiving, nor volunteering at an inner-city after school program, or helping out with a Habitat for Humanity housing project. How did we become so myopic in our thinking?
Maybe you need to ask yourself this question, “What needs to take place for my city to be better?” Yes, I know the temptation is to simply blurt out “get everyone saved” but that’s too simplistic and shallow of an answer. The problems aren’t always spiritual in nature and may have to do with issues like affordable housing, branding a city, redeveloping the central business district, retaining college graduates and so on. Maybe the reason why you have so much violence in your city is that because it has a horrible economy with a high employment which means many men are at home instead of at work which means domestic violence escalates through the roof. While salvation is indeed life-transforming on the personal and familial level what about saving the city as well?
There’s been much written about how cities prosper and advance simply because they’re able to retain their college students. If you show me a city who’s losing college graduates (talent) in huge numbers you’ll see a city that has a struggling economy. A city needs to not only retain but attract these grads that make up part of the “knowledge economy.”
“What are the things that cities have to be really good at to be successful in a knowledge economy? We concluded that cities had to be really good at talent, connections, distinctiveness, and innovation. A strong city core was an accelerator of all four of those dimensions.” (Carol Coletta in Next American City magazine)
So what do you do if you love and care for your city and want to get involved? Maybe you can begin but taking a deeper looking at the four things listed in the quote above … “Talent, connections, distinctiveness, innovation.” What can you do, or what can your church do, to contribute to one of those areas? For example, how can you / your church be apart in revitalizing and stabilizing your downtown core?
“A strong core is proving to be valuable in ways we never imagined. We learned, for instance, that metro areas with a strong core, a strong central business district, hold their real estate values throughout the metro area better than those metro areas with weak cores. So those cities that have invested in the core and been judicious in the planning and development of the rest of the metro area, I think, have been very well served.” (Carol Coletta)
Love your city and give yourself the freedom to serve it in ways that makes sense to you that goes with the way God made you. There are many ways that you can be involved in serving your city. The church needs to simply give itself permission to be innovative in this way and once you blow the lid off your creativity then there’s no telling how the church can truly impact and influence entire cities. Think about it …
