“Where there is no vision, the people perish . . . –Proverbs 29:18 (KJV)

“Where there is no vision, the people find another parish.”  --Anonymous 

When you read the book of Acts and the letters the apostles sent to the various churches that were spreading like wildfire across the known world, it’s pretty clear those churches had more in mind than raising money for building programs or worrying about Sunday school attendance.  Their vision was far bigger than that.  They pictured entire cities coming into the kingdom of God.  And it’s a good thing they did because if they had been self-focused, money-minded, or culturally timid, none of us would know Christ today.

When we read Paul’s letters to the church in Galatia, the church in Corinth, the church in Philippi, the church in Rome, it’s evident that those churches understood God had huge plans for their cities.

Two thousand years later, the vision of many of today’s church leaders has shrunk down to surviving financially or maintaining a few ministry programs in a neighborhood or two.  Unfortunately, it would be all too easy to write a book called: Honey, I’ve Shrunk the Church!  And, while it might get a laugh, it would be heartbreaking to read.  Instead of analyzing the systemic faith problems that are shrinking the Church’s vision, we’d rather focus on solving them.  We’d like every church leader—and for that matter, every followed of Christ—to view the city, town, or metro area in which they live as their own personal parish.

It’s time for every Christian to begin connecting with God’s heart for the area he or she lives and begin feeling his compassion for the people there.  Pray that God will open your eyes and ears to the people who live in your city—but pray even harder that God will give you his compassion for your city.  It’s out of this compassion that a true vision will crystallize.

Listen to the compassion of Jesus as he laments over Jerusalem in Matthew 23:37: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones God’s messengers!  How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings ..” Notice Jesus doesn’t gloss over the city’s faults, and yet Jesus still hungers to gather its people to himself.  Whether you live in Calcutta, Kalamazoo, Cambridge, or any of the thousands of cities and towns that lie in between, Jesus desires the same thing for the people who live there.  And the Holy Spirit has a compassionate vision to make that happen in your city.  And it’s tailor-made to fit your particular culture and situation.

Discovering God’s Vision for Your City

One of the best vision clarifying questions is, “What would be happening in my city if Jesus showed up here and all his followers actually started doing everything the Holy Spirit asked of them?”

Don’t generalize by saying, “It would be great!” or “Lots of people would be converted.”  Visualize the specific things you and the other Christ-followers in your city would be doing if the Holy Spirit has his way.

When Steve’s [Sjogren] family first moved to Cincinnati, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of very quiet, very conservative, and very inhibited German immigrants dominated the city’s personality.  Many Cincinnatians had been culturally programmed to focus on their families and avoid talking to strangers—especially strangers from California!  Fresh from the West Coast, Steve and Janie experienced a certain cold, standoffishness that helped inspire a powerful vision.

As our mental picture of what God desired for Cincinnati began to take shape, we got the idea God wanted to use us to help transform our seemingly cold and unfriendly city into a place known for its openness, kindness, and generosity.  We began to envision a city full of friendly, openhearted Christ-followers who loved reaching out to strangers.  In fact, you’d run into them everywhere you went!  If you went to the gas station, they’d be offering to wash your windshield or pump your gas for free.  If it snowed, they’d show up on your doorstep to shovel your walk.  Or you’d find them handing out free hot chocolate to shivering shoppers.  And they’d do it all in the name of Jesus with no strings attached!

Over the 20-plus years we’ve lived here, my wife and I have seen this vision take shape and become more reality than desire.  These days, on any given day in Cincinnati, you’re likely to find teens, young families, and even those of us over 50 doing acts of kindness in Christ’s name.  And these people aren’t just from our church; they’re from scores and even hundreds of other local congregations who’ve grabbed on to the vision.

Anticipate What God Will Do

Perhaps you’ve heard it said that, “We tend to reproduce what we anticipate.”  The way to gain vision is through .  . . anticipation!  We’ve seen it over and over again.  It really does work this way.  Steve was amazed to find that at Kathryn Kuhlman’s monthly healing gatherings he attended back in the 70’s, more people were healed waiting in line at the Shriner’s Auditorium in Los Angeles than during the actual meetings.  It was a clear case of anticipation and faith in how God’s Spirit was about to move in their lives.  In fact, anticipation and faith go hand in hand.  When you have faith that God can do something, you anticipate it.  You don’t doubt it.  You don’t think, “Well, maybe … it could happen I suppose.”  No—you wait eagerly, knowing God’s going to do it.  Anticipating his movement.  Shivering with excitement because you’re about to witness a miracle.

But the thing is, we tend to anticipate results like those we’ve been “raised in.”  If you’ve been in an environment that was dynamic, one where exciting experiences were the norm and where numbers of people came to know Christ on a regular basis—it’s likely you have faith that God can do amazing things, and you’ll just naturally anticipate and reproduce a spiritual environment just like that.  Unfortunately, anticipation can also work against you.  If you’ve come from an environment where the norm is not quite like that—where not much ever happens in the way of spiritual change, where few to none ever come to know Jesus—well, guess what?  That’s what you’ll tend to reproduce.  You’ll have a barrier of doubt and skepticism to overcome.  But nothing is impossible with God.  Even if you are someone who grew up without ever experiencing much miraculous change in those around you, God can still create in you a sense of anticipation and faith.  God can “biggy-size” your vision!

One of the prime reasons we tend to settle for mediocre spiritual results in our own lives is that we gravitate to the level of vision we feel comfortable with.  We seek comfort by nature.  Just as some of us are attracted to restaurants that specialize in “comfort foods,” we’re also drawn to churches that specialize in serving up “comfort spirituality.”  Maybe this is obvious, but having a vision big enough to encompass your whole city is anything but comfortable.  In fact, if you’re thinking on a city-wide scale, we can pretty much guarantee you’ll feel overwhelmed a great deal of the time.  In our experience, real growth and deep spirituality rarely take place inside your comfort zone.  Big visions drive us to our knees and compel us to recognize we can’t possibly fulfill them on our own.  In other words, if God doesn’t show up, we’re in a heap of trouble.  But we anticipate and have faith that he will show up—and in even bigger and more powerful ways than we could think of ourselves.

Take a Risk

You may be distressed by four-letter words, but here’s one you need to make friends with risk!  Jesus spoke about it frequently and modeled it wherever he went.  When he spoke to the woman at the well, and healed sick people on the Sabbath, he was risking his reputation.  In Luke 10:1-4, when he sent 72 disciples out to proclaim the kingdom of heaven without any money or bags or even extra sandals.  Jesus warned them saying, “I am sending you out as lambs among wolves.”  In other words, the challenge and the risk were very real—and it’s no different for those of us who follow Jesus today.

In Luke 10:17, the 72 returned with joy shouting, “Lord, even the demons obey us when we use your name!”  They’d made friends with the risk of hardship and rejection, and they were rewarded with tremendous success.  They’d come to anticipate that when they stepped out of their comfort zone and beyond their ability to control things—God showed up.

To the non-risk-taker, the specter of catastrophic failure seems huge.  It’s like stepping out onto an “invisible bridge.”  It’s like the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indiana is reading from his father’s handwritten codebook explaining how to go forward.  He comes to a huge, seemingly bottomless chasm and the book says to step forward.  Indiana thinks it’s all a little crazy—until he tosses some dirt onto the invisible bridge and . . . bam!  It appears clear as day before him.  The impossible was suddenly possible.

In your case and ours, it’s experiencing faith that makes the invisible bridge visible.  Though the gap between God’s vision for your city and what’s happening there today may look impossible now, you can trust in your Father and in his vision for your city.  As Hebrews 11:1 puts it, “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.”  The more we step out on the invisible bridge of faith and find out God is dependable and trustworthy, the more confidence we’ll have in the reality of his vision for our cities.  So go ahead and throw some dirt out there—test it out and see what happens!

Praying for Vision

One way to get a vision for your city is to walk around its various neighborhoods and pray.  To experience the heart of God for the city in which you live, it’s necessary to do some significant walking around.  Though you can cover lots of geography in a very short time by driving, walking and praying allows you to slow down and catch a much better sense of what the Spirit is saying about your town.  In our travels we’ve noticed that God seems to speak different things about different parts of any given town.  As odd as it may sound, by just walking a few blocks from one part of town to another the spiritual “atmosphere” can change dramatically.

One place where we’ve had tremendous success is in Cincinnati’s Tri-County Mall.  There are nearly always families with children out for some leisurely shopping, retired folks out for a stroll, and teenagers hanging out with friends.  Spiritually speaking, it has also turned out to be a very open place for outreach.  It’s nearly perfect for all kinds of practical acts of service like wrapping shoppers’ holiday presents for free or providing “umbrella service” from the parking lot to the main entrance on rainy days.

But less than half a mile away, there’s an area packed with poor families living in government-subsidized housing.  Police have found methamphetamine labs there and fatal shootings are commonplace.  It’s actually a fairly nice-looking neighborhood on the outside, but spiritually it’s an extremely oppressive environment.  So in gaining a vision for reaching the people of our city, we’ve had to think differently about reaching residents of this neighborhood.  We have to break through levels of fear and mistrust that are far more intense—but God is not about to abandon this neighborhood.  He’s just called us to reach out to it in different ways.  Things like offering free bread and bags of groceries have opened many doors and hearts to Jesus in this community.

Within another half a mile there’s a different community called Glendale.  Glendale is one of the most affluent areas per square foot in Cincinnati.  Many homes there are large mansions built in the 1800s by wealthy industrialists and their families.  The people living in them now have completely different spiritual needs from those in the neighborhood just down the street.  Their wealth and social positions have left many of them feeling empty, hungry for authentic friends, or exhausted from a stressful life in corporate America.  In many ways, wealth and social position can be even more spiritually oppressive than poverty—and we had to notice that before we could begin reaching that area of town with Jesus’ love.  That’s right; our vision for reaching our city had to include them, too.  God had not abandoned them any more than he had abandoned the neighborhood down the street.  We organized business and family-oriented outreaches and short-term mission trips to places like Mexico City.  These efforts proved life changing for many of the people in Glendale.  Though few of them would have considered themselves as “needy,” getting them involved in helping others often opened a door to their own spiritual poverty.

Obviously, the kind of neighborhood-by-neighborhood vision we’re talking about doesn’t spring into existence fully formed in a day or even a month.  It grows as the Christ-followers of your town begin to take spiritual ownership and responsibility for what’s happening in your city.

It’s Not About Your Church, It’s About The Church

There will be people who are wonderfully effective serving a particular neighborhood or population.  So it’s tempting to just let them go and “do their thing” and let them compete with each other for the money and resources to get the job done.  But that’s not the picture the New Testament gives us for reaching our cities and towns for Christ.

When the Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians who were working to reach the largest city in the known world, here is what he said:

“Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each membe4r belongs to all the others.  We have different gifts, according to the grace given us” (Romans 12:4-6a, NIV).

This Scripture speaks of different “gifts” and special “grace” being given to everyone who serves.   This means you. You have unique, irreplaceable work to do in accomplishing Christ’s vision.  The Holy Spirit can help you discover the specific gifts God wants to pour through you.  If you don’t know what your gifts are yet—or how you can use your gifts—start serving over and over in different places until you discover what you love and experience the power of God overflowing from you and your life.  As you serve and God flows through you, you’ll begin to anticipate the good things God will do through you.

But that’s not all.  Instead of just doing your thing, you’ve got to work closely with the other parts of the body to accomplish “God’s thing” in your city and in the world.  The parts of the body don’t work when they’re separated or disconnected.  The only way that you can do the huge things it takes to impact an entire city with Christ’s love, is by linking arms with lots of other individuals and churches.  It’s ridiculous to imagine for a moment that any one person, group, church, or denomination is going to accomplish the Great Commission on its own.  We need God and one another if we hope to reach our cultures.  That’s God’s vision for pouring his love out in your city and helping you overflow with his living water into the world.

Getting Your Feet Wet

Think of the needs of people who live near you in your city or town.  If you live in a rural area think about the special needs of people who live in your county.

Get a map and look at the various neighborhoods that surround yours.  If you don’t have a map, you can go online to www.earth.google.com and download free software that will allow you to type in your address and look down on your house from outer space.

Using your home as a center point, look to see the other neighborhoods within a mile, five miles, and 15 miles of your house.  Now pick an area and pray for what you know are the needs of the people who live there, and for the churches and ministries who are already sharing Christ’s love in those places.  If you don’t know enough about the needs of those areas, go there this week and find out.

The Reflection Pool

• What is it about your city that you love?  What makes your city special?  How could those special aspects of your city translate into God’s vision for your city?
• What would be happening in your city if Jesus showed up there and all his followers actually started doing everything the Holy Spirit asked of them?

What’s one way you can personally become a part of God’s vision for your city?