Redeemer City to City Conference Report

Roger Morey and I attended the Gospel in the City conference at St Phillip’sYork St, Sydneyon 15-17 November. The conference presenters were from Redeemer City to City, an organisation that has sprung out of Redeemer Presbyterian NY, and her church planting ventures. I thought I’d post the report I wrote for those interested.

The mission of Redeemer City to City (RCTC) to help gospel leaders build movements in cities. They seek to impart to local leaders the Redeemer Gospel DNA, which is a vision for effective gospel-shaped ministry in an urban environment.

The foundation of this DNA is the conviction that the gospel changes everything – i.e. the gospel brings change in all spheres – personal, social and cultural. The hope and prayer of RCTC is that this Gospel DNA might spread widely and see hearts, churches and eventually whole cities renewed as a Christian movement grows and takes hold in each city.

The Conference aimed to expose church leaders and potential church planters to this Redeemer Gospel DNA through sessions on its elements, namely:

1/ Gospel Theology – emphasising a redemptive historical way of reading the Bible, and the gospel as a multifaceted reality which may be briefly outlined using the headings incarnation, atonement, resurrection.

2/ Gospel Renewal – emphasising a presentation of the gospel as one of three ways to live. The gospel is neither religion nor irreligion, but grace for sinners. This grace produces personal change and heart renewal, not through fear and pride, but through gratitude and new affections.

3/ Gospel Contextualisation – we must express gospel truth in a way that is coherent and persuasive to our target culture – with the gospel we must first enter the culture, then challenge the culture and lastly console the culture of those we seek to evangelise.

4/ Gospel Preaching – the gospel is news to be told, from the Scriptures, about Christ, that he might be trusted and adored, by both Christians and non-Christians.

5/ Church, Culture and Mission – If Christians hope to see the culture influenced by the gospel, Christians will have to live counter-culturally (separation from neighbour), for the common good (solidarity with neighbour). The city is the most effective place to grow this influence on the culture.

6/ City Vision – God loves cities and cities have a special place in his plans for humanity. Cities are forges for culture and thus help fulfill our God-given cultural mandate. They are strategic for ministry, for ‘as goes the city, so goes the culture’. Never truer. City ministries must be city positive. Christians should live in, love and serve the city.

7/ Integrative Ministry – ministry must go forward on four fronts: Connecting people to God (evangelism and personal conversion); connecting people to each other (formation of deep Christian community); connecting people to the city (social justice and mercy); connecting people to the culture (integrating faith and work for cultural renewal by Christians).

8/ Movement Dynamics – It takes a gospel movement to reach and renew a city. A movement is bigger than any one leader or organisation, but is an organic thing where independent groups align around a shared, compelling vision of the future presented in digestible big ideas, to which movement participants make a sacrificial commitment.

Stephen Um and Tuck Bartholemew were the presenters from RCTC. Tim Keller has a book forthcoming called Centre Church, in which he gives his own exposition of the Redeemer Gospel DNA. If you want to make sense of the concise, perhaps cryptic summaries above, you might like to read it when it comes out.

I was personally familiar with the Redeemer approach before the conference, through reading and hearing (usually via MP3) from Tim Keller and others at Redeemer, so this conference was not brand new to me. I think we do some of these things consciously already, e.g. 1/. I think we are working consciously at a staff level on 2/-5/. I think that points 6/ and 7/ contain some things that we might debate, and I think that the detail about gospel movement ecosystems presented under 8/ is worth comparing with Perth today.

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