Is your mission to fulfill God’s purpose? Or is it your fame within God’s purposes?
This is a valid question for every Christian leader, but as Dhati Lewis states in his book, Among Wolves: Disciple-Making in the City, it’s especially important for leaders in the urban context.
What is Urban?
As sociologists Gottdiener and Hutchinson explain,
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than 3 billion persons—about half of the world’s population—lived in urban areas. By 2030, this number is expected to increase from 3 to more than 5 billion persons—some 60 percent of the total world population. This will be the first urban century in human history.
In the face of this emerging reality, Dhati and his team—through the church he’s planted, and the ministry he leads—have developed a strategy for indigenous disciple-making in the urban context. They’ve done this by embracing both density and diversity in the city context, and by creating a culture of effective disciple-making.
Urban ministry is not the same thing as inner city ministry to the homeless.
Ministry to the homeless that happens in the inner city is definitely urban, but there are other dimensions that must be taken into account. For example, when a neighborhood is undergoing gentrification, you’ll have a ton of socioeconomic diversity.
Extreme poverty can be right beside extreme wealth.
For example, a family who has owned their house for generations may be forced out of their gentrifying neighborhood because they can’t pay the rising property taxes. Sure they might make a lot on the sale of their home, but where will they move? Their life and community are right there…and it has been there for decades. Is that fair just because some developer wants to build condos and make a quick buck?
Complex issues like gentrification and the mixing of socioeconomic classes are one of the many reasons Dhati defines urban as a combination of two words: density and diversity.
His goal is simple—to be the last generation forced to leave the urban context in the search of solid discipleship—and this is the focus of Among Wolves: Disciple-Making in the City.
Unity versus Uniformity
One church cannot do it all. One ministry cannot either. In the dense and diverse urban context, many churches and ministries are required to accomplish the breadth of needs that exist in any particular neighborhood or city. But there’s a big difference between unity and uniformity.
I love the way Dhati distinguishes the two:
Uniformity is a group of people pursuing a common purpose with only one strategy. This is when a person thinks that unity is assimilation, where the goal is to make look-a-likes of whomever the strongest or most prominent person in the room is. Uniformity kills true diversity in the body because it reinforces parroting, inauthenticity, and outward conformity.
Unity, on the other hand, is a group of people banding together for a common purpose, in their own unique strategies. Unity looks like a football team. You have a group of people with different positions and different responsibilities, but they are all trying to achieve the same goal. And that goal is what drives them. In unity, there is dignity, empowerment, and trust.
The key difference between the two is that uniformity shrinks the beauty of our complexities, and shrinks it to simple outward conformity. Unity reinforces mutual solidarity—rallying us around a common vision and goal.
Let’s be co-laborers in Christ because Jesus said that the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Let’s band together and take up the charge to be the last generation forced to leave the urban context in the search of solid discipleship.
Next Steps:
- Pick up a copy of Among Wolves
- Watch or read the behind-the-scenes interview I had with Dhati on Urban ministry.
- Learn about BLVD, the urban church planter training that Dhati leads.