Jesus Cropped from the Picture

Jesus Cropped from the Picture

plant healthy churches in a variety of cultural environments in urban America. Second, I am a member of a suburban evangelical church. This “double life” has allowed me to experience a world of dynamic and invigorating Christian living in my urban context, while observing a precipitating sense of boredom, discouragement, and shallowness in my suburban church setting. In recent years I have talked with other church leaders and researched as much as I could to discover the underlying causes of these two opposing experiences. I have been eager to identify why one world is characterized by courage and spiritual vitality, while the other is descending into boredom and lethargy . My concern was this: if there is something inherently unhealthy in America’s suburban (and rural) churches, the mentors they send to The Urban Ministry Institute might be exporting that same spiritual identity into the training we are offering urban church leaders. I wondered if the message they were bringing with themwas defective in some way. As Rick Wood said, “This would be like Bill Gates sending out the latest Microsoft operating system which after installed for a year deletes all the files on the computer.... If the Gospel we proclaim will self-destruct once installed on the hard drives of people’s hearts, then much of our work among the unreached peoples could be in danger of collapse as it has in much of Europe.” 1

This concern grew into a passion that motivated me to uncover the sources of this “two-world” phenomenon. Jesus Cropped from the Picture is my attempt to help inner-city pastors avoid the boredom and lethargy of

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