Thinking Well About your City

Posted on November 11, 2009

Eric Swanson is speaking on cities this morning. Drawing from Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City, he avers that we should understand contours of our cities in order to renew it.  Five areas to fill in.

  1. Paths – streets, walkways, transport
  2. Edges – boundaries that shape the city landscape
  3. Districts – neighborhoods
  4. Nodes – gathering points in the city
  5. Landmarks – clearly marked areas

Do you know your city? Do you know how to engage the nodes and districts in order to renew it. Or are we haphazzardly on mission? How can we make a sustained social and cultural impact in our cities?

Check out Kevin Cawley’s talk right now for more nuts and bolts on this topic.

Missional Network Gathering & Savvy Core Team Training

Posted on November 10, 2009

I am off to the Missional Network Gathering in Kansas City tomorrow with Brad Brisco as my host. I’ll be speaking on two main topics:

  • Planting to Movement: Forming City Networks
  • Best Practices of Missional Communities

Afterwards, I will be coaching the Watershed Church Planting team on Missional Core Team Development. They have developed an interesting approach, really savvy, as I have reflected on it. This team invited me to do customized coaching and teaching for their church plant.  Here’s why I think they came up with a savvy idea:

  • Contextualized Training: Instead of generalized training at a bootcamp, they get both general and specialized training, for their context.
  • Method-specific Training: They get to select a particular church planting model and go deep into it with an experienced planter.
  • Cost Effective Training: They save a little money by not paying for hotel, airfare, meals for the whole core team or leaders. They just pay the trainer/coach.