Another Audacious Hope: 100 Churches Planted in 7 Years in One City

"Should I not be concerned about that great city?"  Jonah 4:11

Austin, Texas, like Nineveh, is a great city--Live Music Capital of the World, voted Most Creative City in North America, 300 sunny days per year, California-like ambiance, the home to movie stars, Tour de France champions, a plethora of Olympic champions, and the University of Texas.   "What starts here...changes the world," croons Walter Cronkite.  And he is spot on.  God has sent the world to a city that is an epicenter of culture shapers, thinkers, artists, engineers and business leaders. 

As stated in Wikipedia, there is an emerging "Creative Class arguably constituting a distinct social class that economist and social scientist Dr. Richard Florida, a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, believes are a key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the USA."

Florida describes the 'Creative Class' as 40 million workers - 30 percent of the U.S. workforce, and breaks the class into two broad sections:

• Super-Creative Core: This comprises about twelve percent of all U.S. jobs. This group is deemed to contain a wide range of occupations (e.g. science, engineering, education, computer programming, research) with arts, design, and media workers making a small subset. The Super-Creative Core is considered innovative, creating commercial products and consumer goods. Their primary job function is to be creative and innovative.
• Creative Professionals: These professionals are the classic knowledge-based workersand include those working in health care, business and finance, the legal sector, and education. They “draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems” using higher degrees of education to do so.

Additional to these two main groups of creative people, the usually much smaller group of Bohemians are also included in the creative class.  Florida concludes that the creative class is the core force of economic growth in our future economy, and is expected to add more than 10 million jobs in the next decade.

However, also like Nineveh, Austin is pretty Bohemian!  In fact, Austin is a convergence of Super Creative Core, Creative Professional as well as Bohemian .  Austin's beauty belies her disinterest in the gospel.  Church planters are first seduced by her charm, ride into town dreaming Mark Driscollian dreams of inventing the Mars Hill of the Southwest, but mostly they crawl out of town.  They step into the "church planter chipper shredder" of dog-loving, tree hugging, Obama devotees, and wonder why their Republican, suburban church planting orientation fails them.  These New Ninevites are not ambivalent about the gospel.  They tend to be hostile towards it. 

The reality is, my suburban cohorts and I do not fully have our heads around what it means to creatively engage the Creative Class or meaningfully contextualize the gospel in a way that makes sense to them. 

However, I believe that Jonah didn't know how to engage Nineveh, but God did!  Although we might have the visceral urge to run from our own Nineveh, the thought of winding up in the belly of a big fish gives us pause! 

To coin the now famous title, we have the Audacity of Hope, the audacity to believe that every man, woman and child in our great city should have the gospel declared to them in a way that makes sense to them (what they do with it is their responsibility; our responsibility is to declare and demonstrate the gospel).  This audacious hope is that we would foment a movement in the next seven years wherein we recruited, equipped, coached and resourced one hundred gospel centered communities of faith where the beauty and glory of Jesus Christ would be seen incarnated and declared in geographically dispersed areas of the city, focusing on unreached people groups in the city.  The first big shift our planting efforts has taken is sending planters away from the more receptive suburban areas and toward the less receptive areas of the city. 

How could this audacious hope become a reality?  Our threefold strategy involves making robust disciples, planting churches and partnering with like minded ministries in the city. 

To that end, we first work hard to develop robust, spiritually vibrant Christ followers in our own context -- people who love Jesus and are willing to move out of the comfort of the megachurch for the more humble, but incendiary environment of a church plant; Second, we are aggressively recruiting in order to plant five churches per year -- that would be thirty five in seven years.  How do we see another sixty-five faith communities planted?  We plant multiplying churches (we already have a a third generation church incubating with a resident who is planting this year).   Third, we partner with other gospel centered churches.  As hard as it may seem, we wish to stop competing for market share.  After all, according to demographer David T. Olson, only 8% of Austin is evangelical.  83% is "absent."  That's a lot of people we don't compete with other churches for!

So that's the dream:  we are praying that we could plant thirty five, that our spiritual descendants would plant another fifteen to twenty, and the rest would be gospel partners -- faith communities with whom we would seek to find the common ground of the great commission and the glory of Christ.  I know it sounds audacious, but God invites us into his audacious dream for a city resting under the waterfall of God's amazing beauty and grace. 

Comments

[Denny]

I love that ur blogging.

Denny

[Craig]

Great post! Even better vision! Hoping to be be one of those partners that helps see this happen.

[chris]

Great job John. This is great material for me to show possible recruits as we join in accomplishing our vision for the city

[Jonathan Dodson]

Hey John!

I liked this sentence: "They step into the "church planter chipper shredder" of dog-loving, tree hugging, Obama devotees, and wonder why their Republican, suburban church planting orientation fails them." Not only is the politicized, suburbanized methodology failing planters, so is a malnourished gospel. Failure to understand the infinite translatability of the gospel and it three-dimensional content (doctrinal, personal, missional) is also an issue.

Love the vision. Let me know if I can help.

PS: Will you change the link to my blog to my church planting blog? There are a lot of resources there for planters: www.churchplantingnovice.wordpress.com

Hope to see you soon..maybe next week!