As the champion of your city, we want to equip you with the following set of tools so that you can learn about it, love its people, and make it your life’s work to see the gospel multiply among it. Check out the individual sections below t get started.
The first piece of the toolkit entails getting to know your city through the historical and current lens of what God has and is doing. How you collect and visualize some of this data is up to you, but spending time praying through what’s come before and looking for trends – both challenges and victories – is a necessary part of the task for any city strategist.
- Work through the GRID-8 questions
- Explore the current work that is going on in/near your city to learn from existing practitioners: https://www.namb.net/send-network/where-we-plant
- Explore the churches in your area for potential partnership: https://churches.sbc.net/
Read DM Collective’s “City Lab” playbook to begin to engage the city, make disciples, and plant churches in your city.
1. Determining the city makeup and demographics
Use the Diaspora Collective’s Dashboards to find the people groups in your city:
2. ESRI Map Gallery “Living Atlas”
This gallery includes powerful maps of ethnographic data, etc.
3. Setup a system for real-time mapping using GAPP templates
GAPP (https://thegapp.app) allows you to track all gospel activities among the people groups and places within your city, region, state, country. If you don’t yet have access to the GAPP app, you can test drive the software here.
a. The “Research” tab includes the Places map, which shows population data and publicly available church data across the US.
b. The People and Places Survey template in GAPP allows you to begin mapping the people groups, their population, and the places in your city that you find them.
c. The Place of Worship Survey template in GAPP similarly allows you to map out all the places of worship within your city.
4. Determine partnerships and existing work
Using the Other or non-partner work template in GAPP, you can catalog and record the legacy and/or existing Missionary Task work that have happened or is happening in your city.
5. Segmenting your city
Throughout the expansion of the church in the New Testament, we see am emphasis for planning for and engaging city segments. [PPT on segmenting]
The first and most important core element of your strategy is to plan and mobilize prayer.
1. Appoint a city-wide prayer strategist to keep prayer at the heart of your strategy. Empower them to develop tools and initiatives to lead.
2. Develop city-specific strategic prayer tools:
a. Use the segments of your city to denote prayer points for your partners or cultivate a prayer partner network for each segment.
b. Ask US church partners to “adopt” a segment of your city for specific prayer (and giving, going, and sending!)
c. Develop a “prayer profile” using your previous research and GAPP data with brutal facts, current work, etc. to specific target your segments. (See attached example)
If you are using GAPP, access your GAPP dashboard (“Activities” tab) to identify all of the activities going on within your city. These real-time reports help you see into how your plan is working. If you don’t yet have access to the GAPP app, you can test drive the software here.
Evaluate: Send Network Missionary Task – Stuckages and Solutions
Identifying Stuckages
Cities have unique challenges, including (and especially) in Core Task activities. From receptivity issues to availability of time and many other reasons, here are a few questions to ask about what we call “stuckages” – those areas where you are getting stuck or represent challenges to the work. Consider the following steps to discover and strategize for these stuckages.
1. Which component is it in?
Determine which Core Task component and which segment of your city the stuckage relates to. (Ex. Evangelism among the “elite” is leading to few follow up conversations.)
2. What is the stuckage?
Name the stuckage and what you goal is that is being prevented by it. (Ex. There is low receptivity to our team’s existing gospel sharing tool [hand gospel] among the upper-class of our city, and it is the main gospel tool we use.)
3. If I don’t know what the stuckage is, what and who do I need to ask?
a. Consider talking with other practitioners from similar contexts (like other urban leaders) who may be of assistance.
b. Talk with your team and ask them what stuckages they are seeing. Check out Stage 1 of the “Church Planting Stages” guide.
c. Ask your city partners to identify stuckages they see in their ministry.
4. Overcoming Stuckages
a. Is there a case study or best practice for overcoming this stuckage?
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- Is there any encouragement or example from the Word you can find as you pray through this stuckage?
- Consider an “iron on iron” with another city leader to talk through it.
- Talk with your team and other trusted GCCs or city partners to gain possible solutions.
b. GAPP provides tools to help you overcome some of the stuckages in your cities. Here are a few useful ways you can use the tools:
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- Use GAPP to diagnose and discuss Evangelism goals for your city.
- Use GAPP for Qualitative Church Health assessment in your city and follow up further with the Healthy Church Mapping exercise for leaders.
Discovering a passion for cities:
- Dr. Michael Crane has written a wonderful booklet that communicates the passion for cities. Read it now and discover all the Lord wants to accomplish in your city!
- Check out this Bible Project page about the role of cities in Scripture, along with specific case studies from the Word.
- Explore more information about your city’s demographics and other information using the Kearney Index.
- The Global Cities Index is a resource from Oxford Economics about some demographics of major world cities.
