To Transform a City — The History
by Eric Swanson and Sam Williams
The Transformative City Network movement is a gift from God for church leaders. It is the principal place where the reforming of church leadership will occur. And in our role as wise change stewards, we need to find ways to ease those we care about into change. Participating in these networks is theologically, practically, and contextually aligned with being Church. It can provide the missional imagination to energize those willing into action, seeding communitas.
To Transform a City is a beautiful resource. It is quoted extensively in Leading with Diligence, and its co-author, Eric Swanson, was interviewed for the book. It has provided many leaders called to this movement a pathway forward. While written in 2010, it has a history before it and a legacy after it.
This is a brief look back at history.
In the interview, Swanson grounded the movement in the Biblical narrative that starts in the Garden but ends in the City. He notes markers such as John Wesley’s call “to redeem the nation” and “to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land” in 1730 England. “So, Wesley planted churches, founded universities, and built hospitals.” William Wilberforce’s Clapham Sect showed how the power of diverse perspectives patiently united around a common cause can create positive social change, ultimately ending the slave trade in England in the 1830s.
As for North America, Swanson identified the 1970s as the decade that sparked Transformative City work. This included The Lausanne Covenant, the Seven Mountains of Social Influence, and the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation (one of the first practical expressions of the Church making a long-term commitment to a city). Soon after, the CitiReach organization, the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA), the Lighthouse movement, and many other local and regional expressions began to find one another. Ray Bakke, who consulted with over 500 of these City movements in 1997, wrote Theology as Big as a City, followed up City Reaching by Jack Dennison in 1999. Dennison wrote, “City reaching is the ongoing process of mobilizing the whole body of Christ in a geographic area to strategically focus all of its resources on reaching the whole city with the whole gospel resulting in the transformation of the city and its societies.” These books both moved the focus from the Church being against the City to the Church being for the City.
The movement grew big enough that in 2000 the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) added City (Gospel) Movements as a category, noting at least 63 of these types of organizations. They cited the New York City Leadership Center and the Luis Palau Association as examples. Significant one-day all-city events, such as CityFest in Portland and ShareFest in Little Rock, AR, emerged to catalyze the movements within a city across all sectors, presenting the Church as a united witness.
In 2003, Bakke Graduate University (BGU) emerged from the 50 years of educational work of a global network founded by Billy Graham called the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism. It includes the College of Christian Theology, which focuses on Movements; the College of Urban Studies, which focuses on relief, development, and advocacy in cities; and the College of Business, which includes an MBA for sustainable business entrepreneurship.
Swanson, a graduate of BGU through Leadership Network, hosted a series of year-long learning communities called the Externally Focused Church, bringing together leading churches from across the country to foster innovation in this area.
He, with Rick Rusaw, wrote The Externally Focused Church in 2004. In it, Bishop Vagh McLaughlin of The Potter’s House. Jacksonville, FL, shares his challenge to those he mentors by asking them, “If you picked up and left, how would the city feel? Would your city weep? Would anybody even notice? Would anybody even care?” The last chapter, entitled The Best is Yet to Come gives a nod to this early stage of the movement at the local church level.
Over the years, Swanson has gathered leaders of these organizations worldwide for a time of community building and shared learning about their call to Transformative City Networks. It has been an informal incubator of practices and leadership development, validating the emerging call with many leaders otherwise pursuing this work alone. They met and continue to do so away from all disturbances at Lost Antler Ranch in Colorado. Kindred spirits are working out the theology and tackling the challenges of this movement.
More formal national organizations such as GoodCities, Leadership Foundations, Movement.org, and Redeemer City to City have emerged and equipped leaders.
All this to say, 2010’s To Transform a City was written with a strong heritage undergirding its theology and practice. Since then, the practitioners have been building a legacy, which we will explore in To Transform A City — The Legacy.
