Urban Leadership Foundation
A hub for leadership training in cities and among the world's 1.4 billion slum-dwellers
Once
a suitable basis of understanding has been built up amongst the "agents of
change" then a broader based gathering of leaders can be initiated.
The
City Strategy Congress brings together, by personal invitation, the whole of
the recognized leaders in the city who are
strategically-oriented evangelicals.
It is a time when a vision for the city is discerned and developed as a
prophetic message to the whole church, from a unified Leadership. The purpose is the involvement of the wider
church in the process of planning and envisaging, and ownership by all aspects of the whole process.
It
should include Leadership from five main groupings; the pastoral networks, the
business Leadership of the city, the women's networks, the youth networks and
the social service networks of the churches.
Unlike
a consultation, a Congress is a large, celebrative, declarative event, based on
the shared vision and goals of the participating networks. It is a place to call the church, and
generate new infrastructure or expand existing infrastructure. It provides a context for publication of key
ideas in usable and marketable formats.
Early
in the process of initiating it, invitation to the denominational heads (the official leaders) to be involved in some
form of an advisory committee, board of reference, or in some other way to give
their blessing is an important step.
Such leaders generally cannot initiate new directions, particularly
between denominations, but they can bless or block grass roots movements. They are gate-keepers, protectors of the
larger flocks. They also are often more
strongly gifted as administrators and politicians than visionaries. The negative tendency, the opposite side of
the administrative gift is to see reasons why new initiatives will create work,
rather then to see the power of a new release of life.
During
the City Strategy Congress there should not only be a Vision Statement for use as a planning mechanism, but also the
meshing of the many visions into a Prophetic
Call to take the city into the next phase of the battle. Such a prophetic
message and its component parts should be written down into a format accessible to the whole Christian Leadership
of the city.
Over
the months between the pre-consultations and the City Strategy Consultation, as
you refine this and discuss it with various leaders in your city, patterns will
emerge of what the needs are, of what God has been doing, of what he has been
speaking. Out of the research, and the
listening to God this can be honed to a clarion call to your people to move on
into what he desires.
Visions
and messages don't mobilize unless they are converted into simply usable
formats. The
Can
these visions be integrated into a strategy, motto, vision? Slogan's are useful such as
In
the Australian Awakening, 30 different manuals were developed by groups that
had over the years found effective ways of breaking through the cultural
barriers to evangelizing Aussies. one of
them for example, is a manual on how to start an associate work connected to
the awakening. These are simple, affordable,
practical.
A
major event can sometimes catapult the churches of the city through to
effective unified strategy very swiftly. Sometimes the leaders are jolted into
working together and the people of the various congregations are shocked into
action.
The
riots of
The leader of the predominantly Anglo prayer
movement publicly acknowledged his lack of background and theology to deal with
oppression in the city and went down to sit with his black brothers in the
inner city to learn. Out of this new
coalitions were birthed, new theologies formed, new directions discerned.
The
fires and riots in
But such events may also be a carefully planned major event that instills into the churches of the city a desire to see the whole city won.
I
was in England at a Concert of Prayer in
St. Helens, England, when a
little old lady got up and told of how she had for years had cups of tea with
her neighbors but never been able to tell them of Jesus, until the Jesus March
came. It provided her an opportunity to
speak of a dramatic event and of the
A
gathering at Parliament in
© Viv Grigg
and the Encarnação Alliance Training Commission
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Last updated: 05/15/09.