Can a single church reach a whole city? Can it do that by themselves? There may be some dynamic and confident leaders and church planters who begin their ministry with a confident ‘Yes’. I suspect that even for the most fruitful church planting church after a while the only honest answer will be ‘no’. And no is the answer that Neil Powell and John James give in Together for the City¹

But answering no does not mean that a city cannot be reached and that the local church has no part to play in reaching the city. Their answer to that is through the forming of citywide movements. Their experience is grounded in Birmingham (UK) in partnership with City to City Europe.

In essence this book is an extended argument and plea for evangelical churches to work together across denominational lines for in supporting church planting for the sake of the gospel in their local context. I’ve personally long been persuaded of this so much of the first half felt somewhat repetitive and laborious as they worked through the ‘why’ of it all. However, it seems that they have met, in some evangelical circles, a fair amount of instinctive resistance to inter-church collaboration and making the case remains a necessary task.

The three Cs of Core, Cause and Code though is a helpful and easily memorable explanation. The Core is the Gospel and we can only truly form partnerships where churches agree on what that Gospel is. The use of an Evangelical Statement of Faith is a helpful and necessary guardrail to ensuring cooperation is one rooted in the Gospel.

The Cause is to reach a city of lost people and the realisation that the bigger city the greater the necessity that churches work together to bring new churches to neighbourhoods and parts of the city that have lost their gospel witness. This can be done through revitalization, through re-planting or a new church plant.

And the third C is the Code of the movement, which in this case is collaborative church planting. What that means is not necessarily mixing everyone together in a new church plant but creating a forum where church planters get support, prayer and training because all though we may have our doctrinal differences the experience of church planting raises similar questions, challenges and struggles no matter what your theological convictions.

All three are necessary – it is not enough to share a cause but not share the core or it is not enough to share the gospel but not be convinced of the need to collaborate. Or even to share the same convictions around the gospel and the need but not the answer of planting churches.

This is not the most exciting read ever, there’s far too much belabouring of points considering figure 7.3 to set anyone’s world on fire but it is a helpful resource that gives real world examples of evangelical churches, with differing theological convictions on secondary issues, working together and as a result they have seen many more churches planted and a genuine movement begin to form.

1. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. [↩]