FAQ

There is a lot of good urban ministry happening, and it does not all look alike.  Free clinics are good.  Social justice is good.  After school programs are good.  Worship services for the homeless are good.  This ministry, honestly, is not very different from what churches have already done, but the church ministries that look most like what we do are not the ones following recent trends of urban ministry.  This particular ministry looks more like what John Wesley started at the beginning of Methodism.

John Wesley’s time was one of great social division.  The Industrial Age had come, and the depression of factory work and mining had led to poverty and alcoholism.  There was a great gap between the wealthy and the poor.  The Enlightenment had come over the horizon.  New questions were being asked of our understanding of the world.  There were great shifts in the way people thought, what they thought about, the methods of interpreting that thought, and what they did with that thought.  The Anglican church continued to press forward in the same way it always had, but Wesley noticed that there was a lack of real understanding of the gospel.  The way people had spoke of it in the past did not make much sense in the new culture that was developing around them.  It was not that the old gospel was bad, or that it had even changed.  The people around it had changed, and that made a difference.  Wesley, along with many others, started figuring out ways to explain the gospel in a way that was understood better.  There were small groups, Bible studies, and conscious ways to meet the very present hurting in the world around them.

Our time is a similar time.  This is not just about postmodernism, or environmentalism, or globalization, or technology, or urbanization.  It is about all of that, combined, and more.  The language and explanation that Christians have been accustomed to using to explain the gospel no longer bear meaning in today’s urban culture.  We have to learn how to explain it better, and understand it better in the context of today’s changing world. 

As Christians, we grow more and more like Christ in wisdom, strength, grace, love, and purity.  God’s church goes through the same thing.  It is time to gain wisdom, strength, grace, love, and purity in this new age.  It is time to relearn how the good news translates for people in globalized, postmodern, post-Christendom cities, and how to communicate that gospel in word and deed.