What it’s about:
After doing mission work in Paris for three years and being
frustrated by the methods we were using, this is the city-strategy book I needed.
Center Church is not a how-to manual
for Christian ministry in cities but rather a guide to help the city pastor,
church planter, and missionary think through the issues important to their
specific context. Keller, as is customary for him, commends balance in all the
issues he discusses, urging ministry to stay in the center of the road and to
avoid ditches that can be found on either side. This book also can be seen as
an apologetic for the strategic importance of cities to global Christianity, a
cause that needs to be emphasized to evangelicals today.
Why this book is
important:
There are so many reasons why this book is important, and
I’ll try to highlight a few of them. First, this book seeks to place the gospel
at the center of all ministry. In order to do that, the gospel must be
biblically defined, and its implications must be applied in every area of our
ministries. The gospel is the death and resurrection of Jesus, and this message
makes people right with God when they trust it in faith. This must be
remembered in order to avoid a works-based righteousness that becomes the
default for people when the gospel is not preached. If the gospel is not
continually put before the people in preaching, in teaching, and in the vision
of the church, people will start believing that they relate to God based on
their performance and not his grace. The gospel is the seed by which all fruit
grows. To quote Keller, “Because the gospel is endlessly rich, it can handle
the burden of being the ‘main thing’ of a church.”
With the gospel established as the lens by which all things
are viewed, Keller writes sections on gospel renewal, contextualization, city
vision, cultural engagement, missional community, integrative ministry, and
movement dynamics. Each of these sections has 3-5 chapters, and I found each to
be insightful. With there being so much to say, I’ll limit myself to comments
on three of my favorite sections.
The issue of contextualization is important for all
ministers, especially those doing ministry cross-culturally. Keller defines
contextualization like this: “…giving people the Bible’s answers, which they may not at all want to hear, to questions about life that people in
their particular time and place are asking, in
language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even if
they reject them.” The job of ministers is to communicate the gospel, and
therefore the minister must consider how best that message will be received by
those who hear. This issue, however, can become tricky in urban contexts, as
often the congregations are filled with multiple cultures (mine can have over
40 countries on an average Sunday). Keller’s section on contextualization is
helpful both in terms of understanding your own culture and helping you think
through how to bring the gospel to other cultures simultaneously in an
understandable way.
I mentioned earlier about how this book is important for
promoting ministry in cities. A section of four chapters is given to this end.
I served in Paris, and a few years ago I went back home to Alabama and spent a
lot of time speaking to churches and Christian schools about missions. I found
that, while many of these Great Commission Christians had partnerships with
missionaries and ministries, nearly every time these partnerships were with work
in rural areas. As Keller points out, the world is urbanizing quickly. Cities
attract the younger generation, assemble the nations in one area, and influence
the world in a way that rural areas don’t. While I do not want to discount
ministry in rural areas, there needs to be a bigger influx of missions to
cities in the 21st century. Keller’s arguments to this end need to
be considered, especially if you are a student who is trying to find out how to
give your life to the Lord. Perhaps God has called you to a secular vocation where
you will intentionally live in a city for the sake of the gospel.
A third section that I found especially helpful was on
Cultural Engagement. Christians throughout history have had many differing
views on how a Christian relates to a secular culture. This is a pertinent
issue for any church, especially one in a city. Keller presents a helpful
history of Christian thought on this topic and wisely encourages us to stay
balanced. As is the norm for this book, rather than telling us what to do or
think, he gives us the factors that we must consider in coming to a stance on
our practices in cultural engagement. In a previous blog post, I made reference
to one of these factors, namely, knowing the season of a culture concerning
where it stands in relation to the gospel. You can read that post here: http://parkerwindle.blogspot.fr/2012/11/is-europe-post-christian.html
.
Criticisms:
I don’t have any serious criticisms with this book. I go
through Center Church with Interns who come to do mission work in Paris, and
often I don’t have time to go through the whole book with them. There aren’t
any chapters that I consider to be unimportant, so it becomes difficult for me
to make decisions on what to leave out.
As with any book, I have minor disagreements here and there,
but I don’t consider those worth mentioning. I will say that the book is
written from a western, American perspective. While I agree with Keller when he
says, “World cities are more connected to others around the world than they are
to their own nations,” we must still understand that there is a difference
between London and New York and Tokyo culturally. Keller is fighting the
tendency to emphasize the discontinuity between these cities rather than how
they are alike, and I believe this is much needed today. At the same time,
there will be times that the New York perspective that he comes from may not be
a perfect fit if you are serving in Beijing or Rome.
What this book did
for me personally:
After I finished seminary I began a short-term (3 years)
mission stint in Paris. My ministry was people group focused and was using a
strategy that had been developed (and been very successful) in rural China.
Exploding with seminary training and a desire to reach the nations for Christ,
I launched myself heart and soul into this work. It didn’t take long, however,
before I became strongly critical of our methodology in my mind. I was trying
to be a good follower and didn’t rebel against my leadership, but I must
confess that little about our approach made sense to me. We were people group
focused; yet most of the growing churches I saw were multicultural. We were
trying to start house churches, yet most of the different ethnic groups seemed
to have their own particular problems with having church in their homes. We had
a strong emphasis on evangelism; and while that is good, we emphasized it to
the point that we often neglected ministries that would impact the larger
culture as a whole. In short, my frustrations were by and large due to the fact
that we were approaching missions in Paris the same way missions is approached
in rural third-world situations.
When I read Center Church, I found myself constantly
shouting a mental “YES!” Coming from his New York perspective, Keller was able
to identify many of the issues I was having in Paris and to help me to think
through it. We would all like to have a trump card methodology of missions that
will work in every culture and context in the world, but this does not exist.
Center Church does not attempt to provide a methodology for you; rather, it
wants to give you a framework for thinking through your cultural context, your
church, and biblical theology in order to help you determine how to faithfully
accomplish the great commission where you are.
After my mission stint, I came back to Paris to serve in a
local international church. I love every minute of serving here, yet the issues
in an urban multicultural church have not gotten any simpler. Serving the Lord
in a city church is exciting, rewarding, and complicated. Center Church has
been invaluable for me in thinking through ministry in the context where I am
called.
Conclusion
When evangelicals talk about missions, often the first thing
that pops into our heads is unreached people groups and the cause of global
evangelism. This is not bad; however, I believe this can sometimes lead to an
extreme emphasis on doing missions in rural hard-to-reach areas to the neglect
of cities. True, cities are more expensive, complicated, and busy. But they are
also more multicultural, as many unreached people groups find their ways to
these major urban centers. They attract the young, and are therefore important
in reaching the next generation. They are more influential, as the cities seem
to dictate the direction that the culture of the whole country takes. They have
a higher concentration of the poor, giving the church a great opportunity to
bear witness through social justice. And, on top of all this, the world is
urbanizing quickly. This is the direction the world is going in. Christians
must take seriously the call of cities and provide a strong and faithful
witness there. Center Church is an important contribution to this cause.
