Wednesday, 5 April 2017

City Reaching: A Conversation with Three Leaders about a Gospel Movement in South Florida

Church United is a partnership of local churches across denominations joining together to transform South Florida.

Ed: Why are you interested in city-reaching movements?

Rob Hoskins: Serving the Global Church through OneHope, I've seen that there's a natural growth and traction around local missiology. How we reach our city is cropping up all over the world. With globalization, localization becomes more important. We're seeing churches rising up to say, "How do we unify not just around our theology for the sake of unity, but for the sake of mission?” This is a trend I see happening all over the world.

Alan Platt: In South Florida, we've adopted a model to simplify our missional engagement by focusing on three areas: the spiritual, the social, and the cultural. We ask three questions: What is the lostness of the city? What is the pain of the city? What is the brokenness of the city? After we begin to get answers, we challenge the churches that are part of the unity movement to have common outcome goals. We focus on shared outcomes, not shared activity.

Ed: What would some of the outcomes look like?

Alan: Typically, in the spiritual area, we find a baseline in terms of the Evangelical percentage and then ask the question, What is the percentage that we'd like to trust God collectively for? In the social area, we see that we might gravitate in some regions to family, so we measure certain components of divorce, juvenile delinquency, the foster system, etc. All of these elements reflect the pain of the region.

When we talk culture or brokenness, we've gravitated towards education and the next generation. We ask, How can we help failing schools? How can we invest in the educational space in each context?

Ed: Why do you focus on these other things? Why not just make them all spiritual metrics?

Rob: We believe that ...

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