“God plants churches to reach cities.”
Roger Valci

“God plants churches to transform cities.”
Ross Chapman

“To make cities—that is what we are here for. To make good cities—that is for the present hour the main work of Christianity. For the city is strategic. It makes the towns; the towns make the villages; the villages make the country. He who makes the city makes the world. After all, though men make cities, it is the cities which make men.”
Henry Drummond, Scottish Pastor, 1893

Unless you love the place you live, you can never be an agent in its transformation.

ISAIAH 65:17-25
The city is a delight (v.18)
Its people are a joy (v.18)
Children are valued, protected, and nurtured (v.20)
Elderly are living long and full lives (v.20)
Housing (v.22)
Food (v.22)
Justice of sowing and reaping (v.22)
Meaningful work (v.22-23)
Intergenerational family support (v.23)
Hopeful future (v.23)
Connected to God (v.24)
Absence of violence (v.25)

“Shalom is the webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight—universal wholeness and flourishing”
Cornelius Plantinga

Union: Genesis 1-2
Disunion: Genesis 3
Reunion: Old Testament
Reunion: New Testament
Perfect Union: Revelation 21

Work is about survival.

“A very able surgeon put it to me like this: "What is happening," he said, "is that nobody works for the sake of getting the thing done. The result of the work is a by- product; the aim of the work is to make money to do something else. Doctors practise medicine, not primarily to relieve suffering, but to make a living—the cure of the patient is something that happens on the way. Lawyers accept briefs, not because they have a passion for justice, but because the law is the profession, which enables them to live.”
Dorothy Sayers

Work is about status.

Work is about significance.

“Of Jesus’ 132 public appearances in the New Testament, 122 were in the marketplace; of the fifty-two parables that Jesus told, forty-five had a workplace context.”
R. Paul Stevens

“[The Church] has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as result, the work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion. But is it astonishing? How can any one remain interested in a religion, which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life?The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.
Dorothy Sayers

“God is not served by technical incompetence; and incompetence and untruth always result when the secular vocation is treated as a thing alien to religion.”
Dorothy Sayers

“God could easily give you grain and fruit without your plowing and planting. But He does not want to do so.”
Martin Luther

God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does.
Martin Luther