Are City Groups Missional Communities?

Posted on February 24, 2010

The short answer is yes, with a gospel center. The long answer is the book I am writing right now. Here’s an excerpt from the book that addresses this question:

Contextualization and “City Groups”

Missional communities are also referred to as: Clusters, Gospel communities, or even Trash Groups. Missional community, however, is the term has become most common in Missional Church literature. If this is the case, why invent yet another name? The primary reason we chose to call them City Groups was due to a principle of missional community called contextualization. Contextualization is the intentional process of communicating the historic gospel and teachings of Jesus Christ in contemporary cultural forms.

In order to best communicate the gospel in our urban, post-modern, creative class context, we discerned that the term “missional community” would be a hindrance not a help to mission. The population of Austin, Texas is highly “unchurched” and, in some sectors, resistant to the gospel. Therefore, new and technical church terminology is unfamiliar at best and off-putting at worst. As a result, we decided to select a term that could preserve the meaning of missional community, but articulate it in contemporary cultural language.

The use of “city” communicates an outward, urban focus while “group” communicates the gathering of people who share this focus. In short, the particularly urban context of our mission (and the name of our church, Austin City Life) lent itself to the name City Groups. They are groups that are for the city, communities that are on an urban mission.

Cities that Thrive (according to history)

Posted on February 23, 2010

In his helpful book, The City: a global history, Joel Kotkin traces the rise and fall of the great cities of history. In his analysis he detects common factors that make or break a city. Whether it is the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia or the modern metropolis of Manhattan, New York, all thriving cities are safe, sacred, and busy. He writes:

Three critical factors have determined the overall health of cities—the sacredness of place, the ability to provide security and project power, and last, the animating role of commerce. Where these factors are present, urban culture flourishes. When these elements weaken, cities dissipate and eventually recede out of history”(xxi).

If we are to build and renew thriving cities, we will have to engage these three spheres of urban life—security (safe), economy (busy), and religion (sacred). Kotkin has given us a great template for urban renewal—safe, sacred, and busy. Are you engaging your city on these levels? What role should the church play in taking up this template? How the sacred, safe, and busy interplay can be awfully complex, but gospel of Christ call us to think of the city as a whole, not just in evangelical bits and pieces. Only then, can the church recover the bold reputation of the early Christians who made cities better not worse.

This recent sermon, Renew the City (part 5), takes Kotkin’s template and runs it through a Gospel Grid.