Check out the new Resurgence website.
A City Renewing Church
These are exciting days in Austin City Life as we work out our vision to be a church that exists for the social, spiritual, and cultural renewal of the city with the Gospel of Jesus. This vision culminates in our mission to be a city renewing church, locally and globally. Our past two messages on Why Renew a City? and How to Renew a City have been very fruitful in clarifying vision, equipping for discipleship, shifting paradigms, deepening the gospel conversation, and promoting mission in our great city.
Resources on the City
I haven’t been alone in formulating this city renewing vision. Many great leaders, scholars, pastors, and urbanists have gone before me. I’m deeply grateful for their help. Right now, I’m about knee-deep in books about the city and discipleship. Urban studies, missiology, best practices. Here are some books I have found helpful. I have deliberately left out domain specific resources, i.e. books on poverty, creativity, economy, arts, and so on. These books have helped me better grasp the power and nature of cities like Austin.
The City: A Global History – Kotkin’s historical study of cities has become a modern classic. This short but dense work argues that all great cities combined three essential elements–the sacred, the safe, and the busy. Enduring cities have been cities with a strong spiritual-moral center, robust security and governance, and a teeming economy. He sprints through history with these lenses making it a fascinating read.
To Transform a City – This is an explicitly evangelical attempt to understand what it takes to transform a city. I had the pleasure of speaking with Eric Swanson at a conference and was impressed with his facility and experience with city renewal. Swanson uses the Lausanne aphorism to chart his approach to city renewal: The Whole Church, Taking the Whole Gospel to the Whole City. It is littered with great quotes, insights, and ideas. He practices city renewal in Boulder, Colorado.
Weird City: Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas – This is a very helpful book for locals, but also for people who live in Creative Class cities. Joshua Long is a professor of Social Sciences in Switzerland but lived in Austin for a number of years. He blend anthropological reflection, sociological analysis, economic trends, and geographic importance. He draws on the concept of topophilia (“sense of place”) to explain the unique blend of urbanization and deep resistance in cities like Austin. People in San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Raleigh-Durham, Portland, and Minneapolis should not overlook this book.
Author of Weird City, *Joshua Long* will address Austin church planters at our next PlantR meeting. You won’t want to miss it!
The First Urban Christians – an academic treatment of the shift of early Christianity from a village based religion to a urban movement, particularly through the lens of the ministry and times of the Apostle Paul.
Cities of God – Rodney Stark does great sociology. This book traces the movement of early Christianity into its urban expressions and offers compelling reasons why Christians have historically been at the center of city building.
To Change the World -Â This is an excellent sociological analysis of the polar ends of American Christianity (conservativism and liberalism) and their attempt to change the world through political power. Hunter avers that political power is the last thing that Christians should be using to change the world, and questions whether or not we should set out to change the world at all. His solution to this dilemma is a call to faithful presence of Christians in all realms of life embodying the message of Jesus in the new city commons.
Urban Tribes – a good look at the practice of community, commitment, and family in cities. Insightful, readable, distressing, important.
All Tim Keller’s Writings & Redeemer’s City t0 City Documents on the City
A City Group leader and all-round enjoyable guy, Dave Hampton, produced this video for our Renew the City with 11 City Groups in 2011 Vision. It’s raw, real, substantive, fruit of the gospel in the lives of Ginger, Rita, Nate, & Wheels.
I love this quote: “The Gospel is when Jesus pursues me even when I don’t feel like I deserve to be pursued.” – Rita
9/11 is a day of mixed emotions for me. On the one hand, it is a day of celebration—my birthday—but on the other hand, a day of mourning, the anniversary of a national tragedy. This morning my family prayed for all the surviving families who grieve today. May you find comfort, peace, and purpose in your loss and tragedy.
9/11 Questions
We are still searching for peace and purpose in the wake of 9/11. I believe this is a healthy sign. There are too many pieces that cursorily mention 9/11 as a chronological and cultural benchmark without seriously engaging the deep personal, social and theological issues surrounding our national tragedy. Serious searching for answers persists. Some have tried them in bigoted anger and Quran burning.
Ironically, questions can be just as helpful as answers when looking for purpose in suffering
Ironically, questions can be just as helpful as answers when looking for purpose in suffering. Don DeLillo offers those questions in his fictional account of 9/11 called Falling Man. The anniversary of 9/11 is a good time to pick up this book and reflect on the personal and cultural impact of Twin Tower shrapnel. Falling Man helps us ask better questions by offering its reader an experience of 9/11. By affording us an opportunity to feel, in limited measure, the pain and confusion of this tragedy, DeLillo puts the reader in touch with the inner struggles of a 9/11 survivor and his attempt to make sense of his outer world. DeLillo writes:
It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.
The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.
Things inside were distant and still, where he was supposed to be. It happened everywhere around him, a car half buried in debris, windows smashed and noises coming out, radio voices scratching at the wreckage. He saw people shedding water as they ran, clothes and bodies drenched from sprinkler systems. There were shoes discarded in the street, handbags and laptops, a man seated on the sidewalk coughing up blood. Paper cups went bouncing oddly by.
The world was this as well, figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free space, and the stink of fuel fire, and the steady rip of sirens in the air. The noise lay everywhere they ran, stratified sound collecting around them, and he walked away from it and into it at the same time.
This narrative helps us empathize with the confusion and weightlessness of a 9/11 survivor, and perhaps identify an echo of the meaninglessness that we have all suppressed in our own souls. Life crumbles around us as we long for purpose. In the “ash and night” of suffering we long for peace and light.
Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.
A Deeper Source
Interestinlgy, Kevin Neudeckor walks out of fallen ash and near night and into this thought: Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be. Another Falling Man character comments, God used to be an urban Jew. He’s back in the desert now.
The search for purpose in suffering and a God who can explain the meaning of life are natural outcomes of tragedy. Tragedy has a way of arresting our conscience and calling us to account for what we do and why we are doing it. The question raised here is an important one-has God left the city to roam the desert? Or is he present in our sufferings, speaking through them in order to gain our attention?
To get at the answer, is it a force or a Person that forms that deeper source? What can bring comfort, joy, and purpose? Last time I checked, the force of gravity hasn’t been much of a friend. If it is a Person, what is he saying through our suffering. In Christ, he is an urban Jew, taking on our flesh, our suffering, our circumstances and experiencing incalculable pain. But he tells us that he did it “for the joy set before him. What joy? The joy of redemption, of rescuing us from our pain and proclivity to inflict pain on others. Christ is not in the desert; He is near, calling out to us, inviting us into the joy of redemption. Will we continue to walk the night or receive the light of his love, the depth of his joy, the strength of his redemption?
