Loving Cities Without Drifting From Mission

Cities are hotbeds of culture, for worse and for better.

The new restaurant on the corner boasts a menu of dishes from places most in the neighborhood will never visit. The local plant shop has as many signs with political statements in the windows as ferns and hostas on the shelves. The graffiti murals display the smiling town hero and the faces of kids lost to senseless violence. 

The city is not a neutral place. It’s telling stories everywhere we look.

The city is also a place of great need. The same corner restaurant has someone just outside asking for change on the curb. The plant shop has been broken into twice in the past month. More and more young faces of lives lost get added to the murals.

As Christians, how do we engage a city that is flourishing and broken? 

If we’re not careful, we can easily drift into one of two patterns: We can withdraw from the city out of fear, disdain, and discomfort. Or we can assimilate and become so much like the city that we have no distinction, and no one will even think to ask us about our faith. 

We can do this as individuals, but also as churches forming ministries and discipleship materials aimed towards serving the city. Our local outreach efforts may be effective in feeding the hungry, but without gospel proclamation, the corporation that serves food the day after will have the same measure of impact.

So how do we avoid the drift?

THE GREAT COMMANDMENT AND THE GREAT COMMISSION

The first thing is to regularly be reminded of our mission. We tend to want a clear strategy, all the answers, and the next steps, but there’s a reason God often calls his people to remembrance. When we forget, we drift, and we start forging a path from our own intuition, the best practices, or the most expedient and efficient way.

Thankfully, Scripture has made our mission plain to us. We can often view the Great Commandment to love God with all our heart and our neighbors as ourselves as the sole directive for engaging the city. Meanwhile, we reserve the Great Commission to make disciples for work in distant nations. 

But both are charges for us as individual followers of Christ and for his church. 

The mission is making disciples of Jesus and caring for them as we go. We love our neighbor, often through meeting practical needs, but always remembering that loving our neighbor can never be fully accomplished without sharing the gospel and building Christ’s church. 

Once we’re reminded of this mission, we can intentionally build practices in our own lives and church ministries that stay true to it. 

As a leader in local missions, this is my task. It’s quite simple to start signing up our people to meet needs like driving lessons for refugees or sending volunteers to the shelter. But I must consider how we’re also ensuring the gospel is being proclaimed as we go. 

This means working with partners to incorporate the gospel into programming, better training for sharing our faith with those we meet, and building roads back to the church from our outreach efforts.

Our individual lives are no different. We take a meal to the new neighbor to provide for a need as they’re buried in boxes, hoping to ultimately build relationships that will lead to telling them about our life before the Lord. We set reminders to pray for them, call them, go knock on the door, or invite them over for a coffee. 

Our practices and rhythms help us stay close to the disciple-making and neighbor-loving mission, but they are not foolproof. We must return to remembering. We go before the Lord, when we are gathered together and when we are scattered about in our city, to remember our mission and pray for his help in accomplishing it.

For God is our keeper. He is the one who keeps us from drifting.