Four Streams

I was in Birmingham Alabama this past week to participate in a conference jointly hosted by the National City Impact Roundtable and the Mission America Coalition. Here's the brochure.

The City Impact Roundtables (CIR) have developed out of Mission America Coalition meetings. Christian transformational leaders from cities across the world have gathered twice a year for the purpose of building relationships, sharing kingdom-sized vision for holistic evangelism and revival, and praying together for united ministry throughout the Body of Christ. They have met in the roundtable format so that participants might also be contributors to the "city-reaching" process in their area. The CIR is a peer-to-peer meeting of Christian leaders who are prayerfully seeking the unity of the Church for holistic evangelism, the revival and renewal of the Church, leading to a cultural awakening and transformation.


The National City Impact Roundtable (CIR) examined four streams of cityreaching:
► Presence-Based (creating the environment in the city through unity and persevering prayer which welcomes in the presence of the Holy Spirit bringing in revival and transformation) with George Otis, Jr.
► Christian Community Development with John Perkins and the three "R's" (Relocation - moving into the area that needs redevelopment. Reconciliation - bringing harmony and peacemaking to those who are at odds with the system and with one another [particularly along racial lines] and redistribution - returning the power and influence back to those who live in the neighbourhood so that they can say that they have done it themselves),
► Evangelism with Paul Cedar (which focuses on evangelistic activities involving a Prayer/Care/Share approach involving the whole church sharing the whole Gospel with the whole city), and
► Marketplace Ministry (encouraging those who work outside of full time ministry positions to be ministers in their workplace environment and creating ministry through the "church of your workplace") featuring a panel that included Brad Fieldhouse, Steve Capper, Kent Humphrey and Bob Varney.

David Kinnaman wrapped up the event with a presentation of the research he did connected with his book "UnChristian".

The description of the four streams is actually very helpful in understanding different ways of approaching ministry in the city (even though there are more than four - these are just the best developed). Sometimes working in a city as large as Toronto is very overwhelming. All kinds of people have ideas of how to reach the city or transform the city or win the city for Christ. Their ideas are sincere but they often work at cross purposes because they have different approaches. These approaches are not wrong - they just focus on different faces of the mission.

At MissionGTA we tend to focus more on the "presence-based" style of city reaching. As such we invest in prayer for the city and gathering Christian leaders to act together in unity. The main activities are the Toronto City Hall Pastors and Leaders Prayer gatherings, The Global Day of Prayer and occasional prayer summits and targeted prayer events.