PREFACE

For many years, our friends have encouraged us to write a book together. When we first met, almost twenty years ago, Bill was a seminary-trained urban practitioner known for his Bible teaching and understanding of the history of the greater Philadelphia area. I wasn’t much of a reader. I was more identified by my no-nonsense, boots-on-the-ground approach to life and ministry in an urban setting. Our common love for the city of Philly and passion for incarnational urban ministry drew us together, and our differing gifts have challenged us both and helped us grow together as we lived among and served people in our local communities.

Over the last century, the American church has moved from a parish ministry to a regional, building-centered, program-focused ministry. The result is that people often worship in locations somewhat distant from their own neighborhoods, and local communities are left without a vital incarnational witness to the transforming gospel of Jesus Christ. But the local community around a church actually matters! If we as believers can understand our own communities, we can build connections to effectively carry out God’s calling in them.

As we studied trends and noticed this growing problem, we decided to start a ministry in 2009 called Common Grace Inc. with our friend Nes Espinosa. Our goal was to understand and nurture Christianity in Philadelphia by building partnerships between churches and ministries across neighborhoods. In the past eight years, we have interacted with many ministry models, watched as trends came and went, and witnessed communities transform. All of this has reinforced our belief that place matters.

My wife, Joyce, and I have lived and served in north Philadelphia for almost two decades. I am an Australian and have served with Young Life, Bethel Temple, and Wyoming Avenue Baptist, where I ministered with youth and led economic and community development. Joyce is a Pennsylvania girl. A graduate of Eastern University, she served as a school teacher in southwest Philly and the Dominican Republic before landing in north Philadelphia. She has been a pioneer for women coming into the community, worked extensively in children’s ministry, and now focuses on mentoring women. We have three daughters—Saiyeh, Melanie, and Emma—and a son, Tony David Luis. Each of our kids has a growing love and understanding of Philadelphia, its poverty, and its special place in God’s kingdom.

—Coz

I have been involved in Philadelphia urban ministry for forty-four years. Born and raised on the north side of Chicago, I came to Westminster Seminary in 1965 with the intent of eventually returning to my hometown. But in 1967, Jack Miller challenged me to take up urban ministry in Philadelphia. So following an internship at Tenth Presbyterian, I moved with my wife, Mary, to south Philadelphia to plant Emmanuel Chapel as an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation. All five of our children were born during these years. Early on, I got involved in a prayer group of Philadelphia pastors, who initiated the Westminster Saturday Seminar. That became the Center for Urban Theological Studies (CUTS) in 1978, where I served as executive director for nearly twenty years. I have also served as the pastor of Pilgrim Church in the Roxborough/Manayunk section of Philadelphia and been executive director of CityNet Ministries for planting churches in our city and region. Now in my retirement, I serve as a senior research fellow for Common Grace.

Both of us are often asked to help people understand the communities in Philadelphia, and other cities in the United States and around the world. Whether we have worked with new church planters, seasoned pastors, relocating families, or academic students, we have seen a need to help people understand the community where they are or will be ministering. We have at times been heartbroken, watching individuals and ministries fail in the mission to make disciples because they had little understanding or connection to the place where they are located. We have also been encouraged and challenged by unlikely people serving in unlikely places all around the world. Their work should inspire us all.

In this book, we lay out a theology of place, the foundation from which all ministry flows. We give examples of how we have seen people living intentionally in their places, and we offer long-term analysis of what works and what doesn’t. We also give tools and techniques to take these ideas from theory to reality. We can say with full confidence that incarnational living really does work.

Our central passion in writing this book is to encourage churches and church planters to engage their surrounding communities with the gospel. This book isn’t for someone looking to grow numbers in their ministry, as there are plenty of books out there on how to attract people. It is for people who want to see kingdom growth—new disciples being made rather than Christians simply moving from one church to another.

This book does not stand alone. We are always encouraged to see what an incredibly diverse range of people and ministries have been effective in community-based ministry—people not restricted by a particular doctrine or stylized practice but motivated by a commitment to love every person as Christ has called us to.

—Bill

No one church has all the gifts and resources needed to transform the communities of Philadelphia or any other city. Philadelphia is a city of 1.5 million people, made up of hundreds of microcommunities, each functioning as part of the whole yet still distinct from each other. Each of these communities must be reached by local churches if we are to see transformation happen. It is only as we work together as the whole body of Christ that we can carry out the Great Commission in our local communities. This is why we assist ministries in their work to cooperate with each other and reach the urban community by connecting, supporting, and mobilizing church and community leaders as they seek to spread the gospel and address the needs of their communities. We encourage you to read broadly and, even more, to visit and engage with others in ministry in your area. Don’t consider just the new and flashy work or the pastor on the speaking circuit, but dig deep into your community to find those serving without attention.

This book is a mix of strategic principles for engaging in community-based ministry and biblical exposition on key passages related to the incarnational ministry modeled by Christ. We use stories to illustrate the outworking of these principles and passages. We have been effectively teaching these techniques (Bill for more than fifty years, Coz for not quite so long) and applying them in a diverse range of communities. We hope we can impart some of this knowledge so that you, in turn, will be better equipped to do the most blessed work of loving those around you.

Ultimately, our hope is that whether you are a church planter, a pastor, or a ministry leader, you will be challenged to lead your church to connect with your surrounding community in multiple ways. We look forward to hearing your stories of community engagement. Please email your stories to Commongracephilly@gmail.com. Our heart’s prayer is that every man, woman, and child in your surrounding community will have multiple opportunities to see, hear, and be touched by the powerful, life-transforming gospel of Jesus Christ.

PART 1

THE CALL—LIVING THE GOSPEL IN OUR COMMUNITIES

1

BEING CHURCH IN THE COMMUNITY

When you think of your calling and vision for ministry, what comes to your mind? Do you think of your microworld—that is, those in your local church—or do you look more broadly at the macroworld made up of your neighborhood, your city, and your personal world where you live every day?

Christ calls us to look not just at those who attend our local churches but also at the people we rub shoulders with on the sidewalk in front of our houses, in our neighborhood grocery stores, in the local parks where our kids play. When we stop and take a good look at our own communities, we realize that we are looking at a world that is lost, broken, and largely forgotten by the church.

This brokenness is why Jesus sent His disciples out into the communities around them.

The Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. (Luke 10:1–3)

Our local communities are vast, rich harvest fields. But this crop cannot be harvested without workers, many more than we have. We must pray to the Lord of the harvest to send workers into the harvest field. God wants a multiplicity of workers putting their lives to work, and the vision is larger than any one person or even one church can accomplish. God wants every man, woman, and child in the world around us to have multiple opportunities to hear, see, and be touched by the powerful gospel of Christ.¹ This is the message of our book.

As coauthors, we also live and minister in Philadelphia, a city of 1.5 million people within a larger metropolitan area of 6 million.² Someone who knows the statistics might say, Your region has more than four thousand churches—one for every 1,500 people. But it is estimated that the average church in the United States has only 178 people in attendance on any given Sunday.³ In Philly, that translates to only about 12 percent of the population. The harvest field is vast and ripe not just on the foreign mission field. It is vast and ripe right here in our Western communities. Who will work to harvest those in the areas directly around us?

That’s the challenge and the opportunity, and they’re bigger than any one of us. We need all the partners we can find and we need to work in concert with one another to engage in this harvest ministry. Are you ready to join the battle for the world?

KNOWING OUR COMMUNITIES

Whether you live in a challenged urban neighborhood, an expanding suburban community, or an area swarming with new city gentrifiers, we have to understand our local communities and the changes taking place in them if we want to have any chance of reaching them with the gospel.

I have lived in my neighborhood, northeast of Center City Philadelphia, for more than a decade. My local community, Frankford, is quite diverse, both ethnically and economically. And like many of Philadelphia’s communities, it’s changing.

When my family first moved here, we lived next door to a Grace Brethren church. Its building had once been a veteran’s hall, although originally it had been one of the Frankford mansions. I’d walk past the back of that church, down through the park, and turn left onto Orthodox Street, and on the corner was Seven Up—the Seventh United Presbyterian Church. On the next corner was the large Methodist church and opposite that another old stone church. Then I’d pass the Quaker meeting hall, dating back to 1775. A block down and I encountered the El, Philadelphia’s elevated transit line. Under the El in Frankford (never a pleasant place, especially after dark) were more large church buildings—Episcopal, Presbyterian, Baptist. Also nearby was the local Catholic church, boasting a large modern building with the requisite school attached.

Ten years later (years that don’t feel as long as they were), the lot where the Methodist building stood is now vacant, the building having fallen down. Seven Up houses a small congregation from a Word of Faith church. The Brethren have shut down. The Catholic complex, including the school, was sold at auction. The Quakers run a school, Frankford Friends, but most of its students now come from outside our community. One stone church is occupied by an Indian Malankara congregation. Although our community is culturally diverse, this particular congregation drives in from other areas and they have put their building up for sale. You could take all the people who attend church on Sundays at the other traditional churches and fit them all in one small building. A really small building.

Frankford is a historical community. Frankford Avenue was once part of the King’s Highway, one of the oldest ridge roads in America, and played a part in national history, including the Underground Railroad. Frankford has also been home to some of Philadelphia’s historically significant black churches and white churches.

Today most of the churches in Frankford are quite small, sharing space with other churches or housed in storefronts. The huge old stone churches were built big, with parsonages attached or nearby, because they once had large congregations housed inside them. They didn’t have parking lots because when they were built, their members walked to church. These churches anchored the community through growth and change and challenge. Now they are monuments or memorials to a time long past.

In the thirteen years or so that I lived in Kensington, a neighborhood about a mile south of Frankford, I saw almost every mainline denominational church close down or merge. On Allegheny Avenue, where I lived, every church building except the ones owned by the Catholic churches changed hands, some more than once.

WHAT’S HINDERING US?

The idea for Common Grace Inc. started when Bill imagined a group that could strategically work to facilitate church unification. Instead of coming to join, people would go out and see what God was already doing in urban communities and bring people together to reach those areas for Christ.

As we work with groups in Philadelphia and beyond, we are often amazed at how little local churches know about one another and especially how little new church planters know about the communities they have targeted for church plants. It’s a given that people plant churches because they believe there is a need in a community. They can usually cite some statistic about the lack of a real gospel presence there, but few know the real story of the community and the church there.

This happens for many reasons. One is that pastors and church planters tend to be busy, driven by the needs they see in front of them and inspired to reach new people with the gospel. Another is that most church plants are given a three- to five-year window to be up and running and financially independent—a challenging goal to achieve, especially in complex and diverse communities—so church planters aren’t easily afforded the time to settle into the community. Sometimes it is because people are arrogant in thinking that God talks only through them, their denomination, and their theological perspective.

The major reason, though, is that too often existing churches and church plants see themselves in competition for the small pool of existing believers who already attend church services. Church planters also compete for those who can be leaders and financial givers and help the churches grow and move forward. They often do this without intent, though at times it is purposeful. They may think the existing churches are irrelevant, ineffective, not real Bible churches, or not missional enough. Instead of becoming strategic allies in the Kingdom with a common mission of reaching every man, woman, and child with the transforming gospel of Christ, churches and church planters often function as independent tribes, appearing at war with one another and failing to reach out to the people around them.

In the midst of this tribalism is the disturbing fact that fewer and fewer people are attending church in the United States. As we noted earlier, on any given Sunday in Philadelphia, Common Grace estimates that about 12 percent of the population is in church. That leaves 88 percent of the population outside the church. This is the dominant market share, so to speak. And these are the people we are called to reach.

Many blame the decline of the church on how we have entered the post-Christian age, or on the fact that millennials don’t share the values of their parents, or that immigrants from non-Christian countries are coming to the West in far greater numbers. All these factors may be contributors to the decline of the church; but without a doubt, a large part of the problem is that local churches and church planters are woefully underprepared to understand the changing demographics of our communities, cities, counties, and country as a whole. When we don’t understand who lives in our communities, we have little chance of reaching those people and that is when the statistics play out. Despite the waves of church planting that many are embracing today, there are more