Blog
our context
Fri, Apr 10th
Urban Chicago is among the most diverse population centers in the country, even the world. Yet it remains a largely fractured and divided society. Within particular neighborhoods, people of various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds cluster among their own, often harboring sentiments of mistrust or animosity toward other clans. This splintered makeup contributes to dramatic social inequity and all manner of other ills, including poverty, violence, illiteracy, and urban decay. In the gentrifying neighborhoods of Chicago's near west side (the target zone for our initial plant), hostility between longtime resident immigrant families and newly arriving young educated whites often prohibits community relations. Many people live in isolation from their neighbors, afraid or unwilling to work together for renewal.
Tragically, the most favored solutions for these problems wholly discount the role of personal sin in perpetuating them. The majority belief among residents is that institutional systems are solely to blame for the city’s issues. The propensity to point fingers out and up the stream of political and civic power is rampant. Few groups, organizations, or individuals are demonstrating the courage needed to point fingers in, to take responsibility for the sins of racism, classism, selfishness, and pride. Even churches, by and large, have abandoned their prophetic edge, leaving behind the Bible’s calls for personal heart transformation to join the chorus of blame game.
These neighborhoods need the blunt force of the Gospel to confront people’s hearts and provide a new unifying identity in Christ. But just seven percent of the current population is Protestant Christian, and only a fraction of that evangelical. We must plant Bible-teaching, Jesus-loving, sin-debasing churches. Only through a blood-painted doorway will people enter true, reconciled community. Only in recognizing our shared spiritual poverty will we find the cross-cultural commonality to dwell together. And only there, in that place of mutual brokenness and dependence, will the church incarnate God to a city in desperate need of him.