Building a Great City Through a Gospel Movement

This last Sunday we met again at a community center in West Los Angeles, and I got a chance to talk about the vision for Cityscape. This is our new vision/mission statement for the church:

Cityscape exists to build a great city for all people

through a Gospel movement

that is producing individual transformation, community restoration,

holistic peace, cultural renewal

and world wide impact in and through Los Angeles.

Over the past several months, I've been actively seeking to discover what exactly God has called us to in Los Angeles, and what I've found is that vision can't be developed but only discovered. In other words, God's already given us all the vision we need in the Bible, and I think we simply need to be open to discovering what that vision is as we come to a deeper understanding of Christ and the Gospel.

That being the case, I've researched literally dozens of different church's vision, and as much as I love many of the directions a lot of churches are going, I'd have to say that Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City is the most compelling and inspirational vision I've seen on the present cultural landscape of the church in America.

Tim Keller and his theology of the city and his Christocentric expositional preaching (another way of saying he likes to use the Bible to give people a deeper understanding of Jesus) have had a huge impact on me over the past several months.

I highly recommend checking out this link to a page with many of his best sermons, articles, and blog posts.

http://www.stevekmccoy.com/reformissionary/2005/07/tim_keller_arti.html

I never want to over exalt one person or one church, but frankly, Redeemer's situation in NYC is so close to our situation in LA that I'm really hard pressed to not follow in their footsteps. Their vision is to not only be a church of small groups but to actually participate in hard core urban cultural renewal in the middle of Manhattan. In other words, they have a vision for not only influencing NYC but actually helping to build it's physical, cultural, and spiritual landscape.

I want the same thing for Cityscape. We don't only want to influence Los Angeles, but through a movement of the Gospel, we want to help build the emerging physical, cultural, and spiritual fabric of this great city.

But remember, though the product is a "great city," the means to building a great city is EVERYTHING! It's only through a Gospel movement that we can accomplish our vision.

Over the next several weeks, we'll be going into greater detail on what exactly we mean by a Gospel movement in LA, especially in the context of the globalized, post-secular, post-Christian, urban centric world we're living in today.

I'm working hard on adding more and more to our church website. Keep checking it out when you get a chance.

www.cityscapechurch.org