this is what i want to do

You absolutely must watch this. It brings together so many of my favorite things: literature, writing, neighborhood transformation, teaching kids, and pirates. Plus, it’s really important.

(ht.: jonny baker)

I want to do this on 17th Ave, by the high school, only instead of a pirate supply shop, I’d like to open Ye Ol’ Sleuth Shop, complete with varying sizes of magnifying glass, deerstalkers, cloaks, pipes, footprint moulds, etc. I’m not kidding. No, really, I’m not.

Here’s why it’s important
I picked up the essay To Transform a City by Eric Swanson and Sam Williams at a conference a few weeks back, and it has done a better job than anything I’ve yet encountered in bringing together disparate theological threads into a cohesive and implementable tapestry (dang, that’d be a good name for a church). It has helped me find symbiosis (dang, that’d be a good name for a blog). I’ve suggested our guys read it before we end our visioning process this weekend.

I love cities, especially my city, and Swanson and Williams do a great job of getting me fired up about why cities are great, why they matter, and why we should love them. They call us to love these places not primarily to make people Christian, but because we are, and, as churches, to make our host communities better places by working and praying for them. I’ve been running my mouth about this for awhile. However, they go beyond simply doing the work themselves, and dream of inspiring societies to care in the way that the church does. I love it. We might say that spiritual transformation is taking place when God’s people, the Church, begin viewing and acting toward the community as compassionately as God does and societal transformation takes place when society at large begins viewing and acting compassionately towards the community as much as the Church (and henceforth God) does. It’s from this framework that they write, Conversion is our ultimate motive but not our ulterior motive.

Sectors and Domains
So then, if this is what we want to do, what does it look like? Sociologists divide cities into sectors: private, public, and social. The Private Sector is business, the Public Sector is government, and the Social Sector is not for profits. Swanson and Williams further subdivide these three categories into smaller categories, or domains. These domains are not as concretely established as the broader categories, and may vary from city to city. Things like media, churches, families, etc. Genuine transformation of any city will then, by default, have to affect all three of these sectors, and all of their domains. Transforming a city means that for each of these domains you have a theology, a vision, invested and embedded leaders, and working examples.

This may sound daunting, and certainly it is, but the good news is that you don’t have to have it all figured out and put together up front. Swanson and Williams employ Everett M. Rogers’ now classic Diffusion of Innovations to argue for starting with what you’ve got, working with the willing, and forming the critical mass that will ultimately create momentum and change an entire city. To do this, we must unify around mission. Nothing else has the power to hold the many different churches and other domains together that are required to get the job done. Many city-wide movements have split and fallen apart because they have tried to over-organize or create a litmus test . . . to determine who is “in” and who is “out” in respect to city reaching. They want to divide churches as those that give life and those that don’t. In fact, it’s not even enough to partner with other churches. We have to partner with other agencies for the good of the city. Partnerships must take place not around common theology, but around common concerns.

The Fresno Model
This is brilliant and eye opening, because it’s the first thing I’ve seen that sets a clear path towards the church being successful in transforming a city and offering creative leadership to a culture without striving for and achieving constantinian power in the process. The Fresno model comes from a church that diagramed the different domains in Fresno, and rather than putting the church in the middle, or wanting it there, made church one of many important but periphery domains surrounding three key domains: schools, neighborhoods, and families. This freed them up to find great value in networking, enabling, forming partnerships, and generally working as ministers of peace and reconciliation. They don’t have to do what government does, but they do want to help government connected with other domains, to support them with volunteers, and to help them help schools, neighborhoods, and families.

Social capital
Social capital comes in two flavors: bonded and bridging. Churches are good at bonding capital, and this is important. Bonding capital gives people a sense of place, permanence, and belonging. Bridging capital is harder to build. It’s the kind that links various bonded groups to one another. It takes a long time. We tend to overestimate what we can get done in one year, and underestimate what we can get done in five years, write Swanson and Williams. Missional churches can build bridging capital if they will serve domains without the need to control them, and link domains to other domains as often as they link them to churches.

What’s it look like?
Watch that video at the beginning of the post for a pretty good idea, then check Once Upon a School for even more creative ideas and stories spurred by Dave’s talk. Are these churches? No. But their ability to work within a city and a neighborhood for transformation and to network various people around a central cause is what missional churches ought to be doing, if not in a city, then in a neighborhood or subculture.