By Jeremy Del Rio
March 3, 2010
The Information Age has changed the cultural landscape, and our models for ministry must change along with it to stay relevant -- and raise more effective urban leaders.
As I watched countless groups of white kids invade our inner-city neighborhood to do "missions," I grew to depise the idea of "drive-by" urban missionaries. But years later, God gave me a new perspective. How I learned to love short-term missions.
Our spiritual restlessness is often a precursor to something big God wants to do in the world -- and in us.
How many eighth-grade Bible studies lead with Lamentations? Or Leviticus? Not many that I'm aware of.
Yet last I checked, Lamentations and Leviticus are part of the biblical canon, along with Romans and Revelation and lots of other heady reading material.
Should it matter to pastors, then, that the average graduate of America's city schools reads at an eighth-grade level and that many high school graduates don't even rank that high?
"He who sings prays twice." -- Saint Augustine
"What's going on?" -- Marvin Gaye
The soundtrack of the 1970s still speaks to us. Life, as many had known it, was rapidly changing back then. A generation had found its revolutionary voice and was confronting oppression domestically and abroad. Disenchantment with status quo Americanism had sparked the nation's social consciousness. And from the center of this whirlwind emerged a cry for deep justice.
If spiritual renewal breaks out in a forest and no American Christians are around to witness it, does that mean it never happened?
Pardon the paraphrase of the old philosophical riddle, but this probably sums up the thinking of many in the evangelical community in years past. But the times are a-changin'. According to Soong-Chan Rah, author of The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity (IVP), if the American church is going to be a relevant participant in the future of global Christianity, it had better recognize the church's new multicultural reality. And the future is now.
Greetings from Brooklyn, the most populous borough in New York City. Birthplace of Jay-Z. Home of the integration of Major League Baseball. And site of the largest battle of the Revolutionary War. If Brooklyn were its own city, it would be the fourth largest in America.
My name is Jeremy Del Rio, and I'm an addict -- if you can call ministry to young people an addiction. Or if you can call city life addicting. Either way, I'm hooked.
Ministry has its up and downs. Such is life. But one of the joys of planting and pastoring Quest Church is that it's one of the most unique and diverse communities I have ever been a part of.
This isn't meant to be a slam against homogeneous churches. In fact, I believe that every community is multicultural on some level (hint: think beyond race). While I very much miss the uniqueness of my experiences in Korean American churches -- food, generations, languages, etc. (and still am involved in Korean American/Asian communities) -- I now understand why God called my wife, Minhee, and I to venture out from our homogeneous suburban church into the city to plant Quest and Q Cafe.
There's no shortage of talk these days about a "new Black Church" led by a dynamic movement of anointed, intelligent, and innovative up-and-comers. At the same time, many contemporary scholars are debating the question of whether there's such a thing as a "Black Church" in the first place. Though often portrayed as a singular, monolithic entity, the constituent congregations of the "Black Church" often share little more in common than the Christ they preach and the skin color of their members.
Shortly after noon on January 20, the history-making President Barack H. Obama reminded the world during his inauguration: "It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things ... who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom."
As a veteran urban youth worker for more than 20 years, I've heard lots of self-serving rhetoric--trash talk--from people whose game fails to measure up.
As our country sinks further into uncertainty about its economic future, I find hope in the fact that some of us have been down this road before and lived to tell about it. In 1999 I was laid off from the company I'd poured my life into, my wife and I had just welcomed our second child, and I was struggling to figure out exactly how God was ordering my steps. To be honest, I didn't see it. For six years, I had been teaching youth how to start and operate businesses, and now I had to put those lessons into reality for the sake of my family -- and to see if I could live out what I had been teaching for years.
