Tim Keller discusses “City Theology,” summarizing the Bible’s teaching about cities. Andrew Katay, from Sydney, Australia, explains the missiological value of recognizing that cities are made up of smaller cultural and geographical units, each with their own unique spiritual and practical needs.
Christianity is declining in the West. How will the church respond?
Redeemer City to City's "How to Reach the West Again" podcast takes the insights of author and pastor Timothy Keller's book of the same name—and explores them in greater detail with a host of guest ministry leaders.
Join us as we examine ourselves, our culture, and Scripture to work toward a new missionary encounter with Western culture that will make the gospel both attractive and credible to a new generation.
Brandon O’Brien: Welcome to How to Reach the West Again, a podcast that aims to inspire and empower a fresh missionary encounter with Western culture. I’m your host, Brandon O’Brien.
In this season of the podcast we’re focused on cities—what are they? What does the Bible say about them? How do we plant churches there? What does it mean to love our cities?
And so today Tim Keller looks closely at what the Bible has to say about cities. He finds that the Bible offers a balanced view of cities—one that’s neither unduly pessimistic nor naively optimistic. He argues that because cities play such an important role in human culture-making, they are a critical context for God’s mission to make all things new.
Next we’re joined by Andrew Katay from Sydney, Australia, who suggests a missiological approach to reaching cities in ways that are culturally resonant with complex and diverse populations.
But first, Tim Keller.
Timothy Keller: Part of the DNA of City to City has always been what we call “city vision.” City vision is what it sounds like. It's looking at the city through the lens of the Bible, as it were, through the spectacles of the Bible and getting a vision for not only reaching cities—loving and serving and reaching cities—but even a vision of what cities are. So the Bible tells us all a great deal about what cities are and how we should regard them. And then also how to minister to people in them.
And the fact of the matter is that on different continents, cities are seen differently. So there are some continents in some countries and some regions in which the average person sees cities in a very positive way. They say, "Well, if you could live in a city, then you're important. Then you're somebody." There's also at the other end of the spectrum, there's North America, where Redeemer, the original Redeemer Church started and in North America, there's very much an anti-urban bias, especially amongst evangelicals. And therefore when Redeemer got started, I, as the pastor, had to deal with the negative attitudes that people had toward the city. The reality is that the Bible is almost perfectly balanced as we're going to show you in just a second. That the Bible is very realistic about what's wrong with the city and the flaws of it and the dangers of it, but also sees the positive, sees the blessing, sees the goodness that the city can do and bring to people.
And therefore, no matter where you are in the world, the biblical vision of the city, you can use it on your people, because if people have too naively positive view of the city, you can show them what the Bible says about the dangers, spiritual dangers of it. If, like myself, if you're in North America, where so many Christians have such negative views of the city, then you can use the parts of the Bible to talk about its importance and the positive things that can happen there. So the Bible has something for all of us. We have to contextualize it as it were. That is we have to use it in the particular way that our particular communities need. But the first thing we do is we look at what the Bible says about the city diachronically, now to read the Bible diachronically, is to read it along the storyline of the Bible from beginning to end.
That's what diachronic means. It means to read from Genesis to Revelation. And when you read the Bible like that about cities, when you say, well, what does Genesis and Exodus say about cities? What does Psalms and Isaiah say about cities? What does the gospel say about cities? What does Revelation say about cities? That's what we're doing. When you do that you'll see that in the beginning, cities are actually seen in a fairly negative light. By the middle of the Bible they're seen in a more positive light. And by the end of the Bible, they're seen in a most positive light. And that's pretty interesting. So let me explain what I mean. In the very beginning, the first city is built by Cain. Okay? That's not a great recommendation. And you see, even in Genesis 4, that the first civilization starts coming out of cities, where they develop tools and agriculture and all sorts of other kinds, and they develop art and music, but you can also see there's a violence to it, because the city of Cain, the civilization leads to violence.
When you get to the Tower of Babel, that was a city being built. That was a skyscraper. And of course, we know that was done to make a name for ourselves. That's what they did. Then you have the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham and Lot, they divided and Lot went into the city and Abraham stayed out of the city and it was better for Abraham to stay out of those cities. And even when you get to Exodus, you see that the Israelis are enslaved in order to build cities. So cities are seen in a very negative way. They are places where human beings come together to glorify themselves, to make a name for themselves, where the rich and the powerful oppress those who are not. But then when you get to, when Israel is brought back to the promised land, suddenly cities in the Bible take on a different, you might say, there's a different aspect.
For example, God did not want Israel to be a completely rural society. He demanded that they build what he called cities of refuge, six cities, where if someone accidentally killed somebody else, they could run to that city where they could get protected. And the whole idea behind that is this, that it's in cities where jurisprudence begins, where civilization begins. Because people are living together, they have to develop ways of people living closely compacted together, can live. And therefore out in the countryside, if somebody accidentally kills somebody else, well, that family might just come and just kill that other family. But if you go to the city, that's where they have judges and they have lawyers and they have a way of dealing with complaints, because you can't live in a city without a way of adjudicating complaints.
That's why God says, "I want you to build cities because cities build culture and cities build jurisprudence and cities develop human culture." And then of course, God says, "I want Jerusalem to be an urban society that's the joy of the whole earth." And even when the Jews go into exile, when they get to Babylon, they're told to pray for the peace of the city and to do everything they can while they're there for its prosperity. And so in the middle part of the Bible, we don't see this negativity toward the city you see in the early part. It doesn't mean that the city isn't still a bad place. It's no contradiction, but at the same time, it's showing that there are other aspects of the city that maybe we didn't see just in the book of Genesis and Exodus.
Then finally we get to the new Testament and you'll see, not only Jesus ministering in the city, he ministered in the Decapolis, which was 10 cities on the Northern part, just outside actually of Judea, he ministered in the place where it was very urban, Decapolis means 10 cities. And he ministers there a lot. But Paul, in particular, we see in the book of Acts, would target cities. He would plant a church in the biggest city, in an area like Philippi in order to reach Macedonia, he'd plant churches in Philippi. And then he would leave the region because he knew if you change the city, you change the region, because the city is the center of the region. And when you get to Revelation, you eventually see that in the end, when God creates a new heavens and new earth, a culture that is perfectly God glorifying and a perfect culture for human flourishing, you know what you have? You have a city, a new Jerusalem.
Now “synchronic” is a word that means topically, what does the Bible actually tell you about cities? And the answer is these things. First of all, cities are good. That is there are places of refuge and security? Why do you think immigrants go into cities? If an immigrant is coming to a new country, they go to cities because there's more people like them there that speak their language. There's newspapers in their language. There's restaurants and there's civic associations and cities are places of refuge for the people who don't have as much cultural cache in a particular country.
Secondly, cities are good because they are places where culture's developed. Geerhardus Vos explains why cities are both good and bad. And he says at one place, "Cities, while the accumulator of the energy of culture, cities are also an accumulator of the potencies of evil." Now the idea of a city as an accumulator, it's another way of saying the cities are like a magnifying glass. What a magnifying glass does is it can concentrate the beams of the sun onto a piece of paper and it goes into flame. In the same way, cities are not actually good or evil. Cities are magnifications of human nature, which means in the cities you see humanity at its best. And you also see humanity at its very worst, because cities are the accumulator of human nature. They're the magnifiers of human nature.
And therefore cities are incredibly good. You can see the best almost of everything that human beings can produce in cities. And they're also the very worst. There can be tremendous poverty, tremendous corruption, tremendous racism, tremendous crime. And so instead of blaming cities for the bad, or romanticizing cities for the good, we need to see what we actually have in cities and cities bring out what's in the human heart. And that's the reason why we can say cities are good, cities are bad, but most of all, cities are important. They're important for the culture. That is to say, generally speaking, the changes that happen to human culture happen in cities and they spread out to the rest of culture. So human cities tend to drive culture and therefore they're important to human society, but they're also crucial for ministry, because if you reach a city, then you can reach the society.
Like in the small town you might reach the lawyers, one or two lawyers, but it's in the city that you reach the legal profession, because that's where the law schools are. That's where the guilds are. And therefore, by going into the city, even though city ministry is much more complicated and much more difficult and much more expensive. And like I said, much more complex than other kinds of ministry, it's really, really important. And the Bible calls, not all Christians to go to cities, but the Bible does call some Christians to go to cities and all Christians to care about cities. So let me just end like this.
At the end of the book of Jonah, God is rebuking Jonah, because Jonah went to Nineveh only out of—he was forced to go to Nineveh. He didn't want to go to this great city, filled with pagans. He didn't want to be there. And when he finally went, he preached and some of them, a lot of them repented, and then God didn't destroy the city. And he got Jonah really angry. Jonah didn't even want to go and preach to Nineveh. But when it turns out that, he thought, "Well, maybe if I preach to Nineveh and they turn away, God will destroy them." But when God decides not to destroy them, he gets very angry.
And at the very end, God is saying, "You care about the plant that I grew up around your head. Why in the world aren't you concerned about this city with 120,000 people who don't know their right hand from their left?" At the very end, he says, "I am concerned." He says, "Should I not be concerned about this city?" That's the last thing he says in the book of Jonah, he says to Jonah, "Shouldn't I be concerned? Shouldn't I have compassion on the city? Look at all those people." Here's the point. Not every Christian is called to be going to the city, but City to City is filled with people who feel called to live in the city and minister the city. And you know what God is saying there at the end of the book of Jonah? He's saying, "I'm already there. I'm already concerned. I was concerned about the city before you were, I was having compassion on the city before you were, I was already working in the city before you were. And now that you're here, I just want you to know I've gone before you and paved your way."
Brandon O’Brien: Our guest today is Andrew Katay.
Andrew Katay: So my name is Andrew Katay. I'm the CEO of City to City Australia, which is part of City to City Asia Pacific, which is part of City to City Global, which is supported by Redeemer City to City, and which has a long and somewhat checkered connection with City to City, because we're a bit rogue at times.
Brandon O’Brien: In episode one, Tim Keller explained that one critical feature of successful urban ministry is contextual churches—churches whose programming and priorities, whose gospel preaching and application are adapted specifically for the unique challenges and circumstances of city life.
But as anyone who lives in a city will know not every neighborhood or sub-city or locality in the city is the same. It’s not enough to contextualize for “the city.” We have to rethink ministry so that it connects with the particular people on our particular block. That means urban ministry has to be as diverse and varied as the populations that make up our great cities.
Andrew helps us think about what that might look like.
Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. we're excited to have you on to talk about your experience in Sydney.
Andrew Katay: Great to be here.
Brandon O’Brien: America has a fairly long, almost since its origin, urban/rural divide. And I'm wondering if Australia has something similar? Or if, as a society Australia tends to demonize urban places, romanticize them, or maybe at a high level, what's the sort of national relationship to Australia's cities?
Andrew Katay: Yeah, well, so there's a couple of different factors in that, that actually are in tension with each other. Australia was begun as a penal colony in New South Wales and then in Victoria. And so it began as what we would now call urban centers and developed in that way. In such a way, actually, that there's a lot of competition and feeling at one level between those different urban centers. And Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world.
Brandon O’Brien: In terms of population distribution?
Andrew Katay: Yeah, that's right. And I think it's something like 80% or 90% of the population lives within 50 kilometers of the coast, for example. So the cities are all clustered around the coast. We've got a great big desert in the middle. So that's on the one hand, on the other hand, the wealth of Australia. And at one point I think Melbourne was the wealthiest city in the world during the gold rush in the 1850s. And so the wealth of Australia has been built, what we used to describe as “on the sheep's back.” So wool and wheat, and more recently minerals. Coal and gas and so on. So mining. Have led to an enormous wealth creation in Australia. And all of that of course is not urban. That's all, not just even regional, but remote.
And so there's a lot of mythology in Australia around rural and remote areas and the rugged Australian. Not quite the same rugged individualist of the pioneer American, but the Australian who just toughs it out and battles against the odds and beats the elements and so on. And so it's quite an interesting dynamic actually, the whole rural and regional vis-a-vis city thing, when we are both, I think one of the most urbanized countries in the world. And have been for years. But at the same time, much of the wealth of Australia has been built on mining and primary industry.
Brandon O’Brien: So tell me about Sydney in that landscape of, as you kind of described it, as kind of competing cities. What's the sort of city identity or personality?
Andrew Katay: Well, classic firstborn, and literally the firstborn, which means that Sydney never really talks about anywhere else because we don't care.
One of our great playwrights David Williamson described Sydney as the Emerald city. And partly because we have this harbor, which is in an unbiased way, I'm happy to say the greatest harbor in the world. And is absolutely beautiful. The beaches and the foreshores all along the harbor are just quite ridiculously stunning. And so it glistens emerald. But it's like that too. It's a little bit superficial. It's young money, not old money. The old money's in Melbourne. To whatever degree Australia gets entrepreneurial, which is not very, there's a lot of that in Sydney. It's flashy, it's superficial, it's thin.
The other thing to say is that we are here in London and it is one of the great cities of the world along with New York and Paris and so on. And the key I think to those cities is that they have mixed land-use in the city, both residential plus retail, plus commercial, all mixed in together. There is no Australian city that really has pulled that off yet. And so our central business district, the commercial center just really still empties out very much at night.
If you walk around at night, there's just hardly any people who live in the area. And so it's a bit of a donut arrangement. Sydney is sort of 50 kilometers on a semi-circle, north, west, and south. East of course is the ocean. But there's a donut right in the center which is the business district. So people commute in, do their work, and then commute home. But in terms of the actual life of the city itself and what you call center-city, that's not quite the same as these great cities like Paris, New York, and London.
Brandon O’Brien: You've described that the city of Sydney doesn't really function as a whole unit, but that it functions more as, kind of a patchwork of a number of different sub-cities. Can you just unpack that? Tell us what you mean by that.
Andrew Katay: Yeah. So I guess like many large urban areas... And Sydney's not huge, but it's not tiny, there’s 5 million. There's just too many people really to all be homogenous. And so what happens is that different, you might call demographic or go slightly deep in that, ethnographic. Or what we'll maybe talk about later on slightly deeper than that, spiritually-divergent communities form with different sets of values, different hopes and aspirations and desires and fears and personal identity and so on. And that our city in Sydney, and we've done this in Melbourne and in the other Australian cities as well, really function as these clusters of what we've called sub-cities.
And it can be quite close. It can be one rail-line or one major highway that separates from one side to the other. And really everything changes. Ethnic makeup changes. We had a recent vote on same-sex marriage and the area that had the highest “Yes” vote bordered the area that had the highest “No” vote. So you could actually throw a tennis ball from one to the other and so they function quite separately as communities, quite different values, quite different aspirations, quite different sensibilities.
And so what this just means is that from a missiological point of view, the approach that needs to be taken in each of these areas will just need to be at least a little bit different. If it's the same all over, then you'll be missing people. And the people who do marketing know this. And so newspapers, for example, are quite different in different sections of the city.
Each of these different areas function. So there's the northern beaches area, and you can imagine these are northern beaches, they're extremely laidback. It's very relaxed. It's quite wealthy, so it's easy to be laid back when you're wealthy. But very chilled. It's surf in the morning and surf in the evening.
And yet, if you go out to the southwestern suburbs, Sydney's built on a basin that just gets hotter and hotter and bakes further and further away from the water that you go.
And so prices come down. So socio-economically people with lower incomes move out further west. They're not talking about that sort of leisure lifestyle. It's a different lifestyle. It's a different set of, as I say, sensibilities in those areas. And mission in that area just will have to speak to different things compared to mission in the northern beaches or the inner west or the Sutherland Shire and so on.
So I mean all of Sydney is still more or less postmodern, more or less Western in its kind of values, but there really are textural differences, texture differences between the different areas. And when you're in Sydney, right, likewise, you don't say you're from Sydney, so you're from the inner west or from the north shore or from the eastern suburbs or wherever it is.
Brandon O’Brien: And do those kinds of cultural socioeconomic divisions play out in Sydney's churches as well? Do they fall along some of those same divisions?
Andrew Katay: Yeah, sure. Well I often note Paul the apostle describes the church in place or the church in Corinth, for example, not the church of Corinth. And a lot of the commentators will make a point of saying, of course the church is meant to be in a place, but it's not meant to be of the place, except of course the church in Corinth was too much of Corinth. And I often feel actually the church in Sydney is too much of Sydney as well. And so Sydney, which is this fairly fractured place, the church follows that and it's quite a fractured church, denominationally. In Sydney, the denominations have, to a significant degree, not entirely, but to a significant degree remained gospel centered and bible based and so all the established sort of ministry that's been there since the first fleet actually continues, there've been some newer denominations as well, as far as I can tell.
Although this is just changing right now. The denominations hardly talk to each other and because Sydney's just this an hour-and-a-half commute from one end to the center sometimes and then another hour and a half out down the other side, it's just too big to really do much genuine connectivity as churches. And so that led to this concept that we are really trying to promote in Australia, which is the connectivity needs not to be denomination across the whole city. It needs to be within each sub-city.
And so that if you take those sub-cities and there are, I think probably around 20 of them say in Sydney, who is it that will take up the responsibility for reaching the 250- to 350,000 people in those sub-cities? It's not going to be the denominations, they're just looking after the church as their denomination. It can't be the parachurch agencies because they have their own particular slice and they do one particular focus thing. It's got to be the Christian leaders, pastors, and others. Not only pastors but others as well, in that subsidy saying, “We love the inner west, we love the inner southwest, we love the western suburbs,” whatever it might be. And to say, and we are going to take responsibility for seeing churches planted and revitalized to reach this subsidy because we know how to talk their language, we know how to speak to their fears and hopes and desires and if we don't do it, no one else is going to do it.
Brandon O’Brien: When you're talking about fears and hopes and aspirations and sort of speaking a heart language, we're kind of moving past the language of demographics or ethnographics into what you've called a spiritual profile. So could you tell us what you have in mind when you use the terms spiritual profile, what does that mean for you?
Andrew Katay: Yeah. So demographics at the top level, important to know that they're the sort of fairly objective, observable facts about an area. The number of people in a household, the number of households that are rented versus owned, average income levels of the household, this is the sort of stuff you get in a census. Ethnographics is a slightly deeper level of analysis, which is, what are the patterns of behavior? Spending patterns? Leisure patterns? The kinds of investments that people make in relation to their kids? That just getting a little bit deeper towards values, but again, not, they're one step short of values because they're the behaviors that reflect those values.
Spiritual profile is really trying to get to that bottom level of saying, well, all right, let's go as far as to try and summarize on the basis of research, not just guesswork, but to summarize what are the actual values and in particular, from a missiological point of view, and this is why this I think is a useful kind of concept because it really is missiologically driven.
It's not just cultural analysis or even just city analysis. It's an attempt to do a mission as is needed in the day. What are, in particular, the loves, if we are what we love as has been famously said, then we need to know what the loves of people are. And Augustine said that our loves play out in our desires for the future and our fears about the future and our joys in the present and in our sadnesses in the present, these two things, the future, good or bad, the present, good or bad, desire, fear, joy, sadness. And so to try and understand what are those things for the people of a particular area, what are their desires? What are their hopes and dreams and aspirations for themselves and their children, their families? What are their fears? What are the things that they regard as that their greatest nightmare? What are their joys? And so a spiritual profile is really trying to get a sense of the loves of the heart of the people of an area in a way that then will enable you to articulate the gospel, the eternal, unchanging gospel grounded in the word of God with all the resources that the scriptures give us for speaking that gospel in a way that will connect in particular to those loves.
Brandon O’Brien: Can you give us an overview of the spiritual profile for say your inner west context?
Andrew Katay: So the inner west is a fantastically interesting place and I think to be a good missionary in your area, you need to both love but not love too much. You need to love it in the sense of understand it and get it and get why it's good, but at the same time not be seduced by it. So the inner west in Sydney is this lovely little pocket, it's slightly out of the central business district, it's upper-middle-class in socioeconomics. It's very progressive, it highly values education and it's very expensive. And so what this means is that there's a sort a series of elements that feed into the fact that people in the inner west often are working full-time jobs, professional jobs, both members of a couple, gay or straight married or de facto. Both will have to work in order to pay the mortgage for that house that they're trying to buy. So they're time-poor, they're stressed, they're anxious that they're sold out to the system because they're making a lot of money and so they've got to do other things to keep their conscience kind of functioning and so they're highly progressive in ecological terms. And so very environmentally aware, they will often look to volunteer for agencies or at least they'll talk a good game about volunteering, but they won't have time because they're too time-poor.
They're often studying as well. So they're doing master's degrees or part-time PhDs. And so they're combining full-time work with both elements of a couple, doing extra study, often trying to raise kids. Really interesting. They're highly progressive in their opinions, although not with relation to their kids. And so there's a real resurgence in sending kids to independent schools, which are much less progressive than the government schools in the area. The government schools are highly progressive on the sexuality and transgender issues, but the thousands of kids are literally pouring out of these, government schools and into independent schools.
And so they're very family-focused in a fairly nuclear kind of way. They talk a great game about community, but they're too time poor to do much about it. And there's an enormous, enormous self-righteousness about all of this.
They look down on almost everyone else who are either not progressive enough or aren't making their contribution to the world in an adequate kind of way. There's no rest, there's anxiety, enormous self-righteousness at the same time as uncertainty and fear, and all of these are gospel issues. The point there is that once you've got a bit of a sense of what is the profile of an inner west person, spiritual profile, they give you some, both content as well as method or mode, clues for how to do mission in an area like that.
Brandon O’Brien: Is there another area of the city that you could offer a similar profile to say, "That's how the inner west differs from this other kind of missiological unit"?
Andrew Katay: Yeah, sure. I've only lived in two areas in Sydney then, what's called the North Shore and the inner west. The North Shore is also fairly upper-middle-class. My parents were migrants to Australia. My dad, an asylum-seeker, actually a refugee in 1956 from Budapest in Hungary, set up on the North Shore because that's where upper-middle-class people went, though they were aspirational about that. They weren't there themselves.
The North Shore is not very progressive. It's much more conservative. It's older money. It's extremely sort of settled and much more geographically separated. The houses all are much larger backyards. You can be entirely self-contained in your house. You might eat out occasionally but, mostly, you'd order in, at least when... This was when I was growing up. There are only three pubs like that. This is true fairly recently. There might be more now, but there are only three pubs that were licensed in an area of what? 400,000 people or something like that. It was quite remarkable just how conservative it was. It was a real sense of, "No, we don't want to allow that culture to invade our area."
Equally self-righteous, but in a slightly different kind of way in the... It's that “We are the good people because we are upright and stable.” Whereas the Inner Westerns, “We are the good people because we're accepting and progressive.”
Again, to sort of proclaim Christ in a way that says... It doesn't take that into account would just be a mistake.
Brandon O’Brien: Yeah. Give us an example of that. What would it look like to maybe contextualize the gospel for those different spiritual profiles?
Andrew Katay: Yeah. There's some things to not do. One of the challenges is to simply enter the culture wars with the gospel and just to go beating people on the head. Right? That just doesn't help at all. One of the keys, I think, and I think Tim Keller has just done a stellar job, both modeling and also teaching, that to contextualize the gospel requires you first to enter into the culture and to affirm what there is to be affirmed there.
In relation to the inner west where we live, I live at the moment, and try and serve, there's a couple of things to say. One is you have to have a very kind of open and curious posture in relation to people that models the same kind of openness and acceptance of whatever to start with. The initial engagement needs to be positive, open, curious, inquisitive, interested. We run an event each quarter called “Wine, Cheese and a Conversation about X and God.” We've had all sorts of topics. Wine, cheese, and a conversation about mental health and God, or extremism and God, and suicide, cancer, whatever it might be.
The wine and cheese is because we are partly saying we are not afraid. We're not prudish. We can be a little bit... Yeah. I mean, it doesn't count for much, but it's just a posture of saying, “We are not...” But even more importantly than that, it's we want to enact the value that you have, but find it so very difficult to actually live out, which is conversations with people who have different opinions you value, although you often end up in arguments instead of conversations. We are going to model having a conversation about that. That's a posture question or a mode rather than a content issue.
I think on terms of contextualizing the gospel, in relation to content, a couple of issues there. One is the question of rest, as I mentioned before, is because of the nature of the way that life in the inner west works, house prices are so high, double incomes, further study, and kids, and school fees. The whole package and that fear of missing out, the anxiety about, "Am I providing?" and so on. The issue of rest actually becomes a really significant gospel kind of point of connection with the inner west. Rest as something that you can find for your soul, as Jesus promised it. In other areas of Sydney, because they're all about rest, that you need to speak about rest as an idol. But in the inner west, it's rest as a possibility because no one's very restful at all. That's the first thing.
The second thing I'd say is that because of the nature of the self-righteousness, the question of sin has to be handled in a delicate way, in a theologically kind of sophisticated way. I think that Tim Keller has really done a brilliant job of showing how to talk about idolatry as sin, as one possibility alongside rebellion as sin. For these very confident, self-confident Inner West progressive, for pro-justice, pro-environment, pro-indigenous issues, I mean, they're very, very, self-righteous about all this stuff. To talk to them about being disobedient sinners, it's incomprehensible to them.
But if you talk to them about having made something other than God the center, and defining, meaning giving reality of their lives, and it's not working for them and it's kind of consuming them and it's sort of eating them up, and that is a form of judgment that speaks. Finding ways to talk about the cross of Christ, in relation to idolatry as a freeing of us from that treadmill, the terrible, endless, unsheathing treadmill of creation of one's own identity, in serving whatever cluster of idols that there are there, that all becomes really significant in how to speak about the gospel and what God has done for us in the Lord Jesus in a way that will touch people.
Brandon O’Brien: That's really helpful. It prompts me to wonder how a person would get started in a community that they're either currently serving or aspiring to serve. How do you recommend that they get started developing something like a spiritual profile for whatever the appropriate geographic or whatever region is for them?
Andrew Katay: Yeah. Well, we did this some years ago. We worked up a focus group script actually. We just did a bit of research on what a spiritual profile might be and thought about that for a little while and put together some questions. We passed them by a fairly established and well-reputed social researcher. “Do these questions have too much bias in them or would they actually...” And then actually go out and ask people that is... Because one of the dangers about a spiritual profile is that you end up guessing rather than asking. The problem with guessing is you end up projecting.
And then you're just talking to a mirror and you're pretty surprised you're not surprised at all, actually, what'd you find out. That's pretty obvious. Really, the only way to... I think the best way to do it is to just ask questions. Find some people, even if you need to, we did. Often an invite to come and say, "We genuinely are not going to preach at you. We really want to hear what you say. You preach at us."
We ran a number of these focus groups and got some great results from that. In the end, they kind of confirmed what our guesses would've been, but it was really important not to guess.
But the research is crucial, not just guessing, not just projecting, but doing some research and always trying to get that basic underlying issue of “What are the loves?” What is it that people are loving, desiring, fearing, rejoicing in, weeping over? That will tell you where the heart is and that will show you how to preach cross to them.
Brandon O’Brien: How do you imagine or envision the optimal relationship between the people who are working in the inner west and people who are working somewhere else? To what degree is there a value in the kind of citywide coalition or cooperation if this sort of missiological unit is smaller than that?
Andrew Katay: Yeah. Well, that, I think is a really interesting question because you just can't... there's just a limit of the number of meetings that you can go to. You know what I mean? You can go to your own church's meetings and then the local area meeting and then the citywide and the national and the global one. You just end up doing meetings the entire time. That's a genuine problem.
We really are trying to promote the sub-city as the unit of movement and mission in Australia. We think there are about 200 sub-cities across Australia. We don't pray for a movement of the gospel in Australia or for a movement of a gospel in Sydney. We pray for movements, plural, of a gospel. Each of those movements will need a coalition of leaders. As I say, pastors and others. Each coalition will need someone actually who's got some dedicated paid time to actually hold it together because that's the only way things hold together.
We want 200 movements of the gospel in Australia. The reason that there's value for different sub-cities to have connection with each other is that they will learn from each other how to do better contextualization, by hearing from the other, what they're doing. Because it's often, it's really great to see how someone else is contextualized. Not because that's what you've got to do, but because that shows you the kind of thing you ought to do and aren't doing right now.
And so I remember seeing one of the great Redeemer City to City resources from years and years ago was a spiritual profile of a Manhattanite and then not just spiritual profile, but spiritual profile with ministry implications. So the profile was three quarters of a page long, just 15 dot points or something. The ministry implications was three pages and it was a brilliant piece of work. And what was really clear was A that's what we needed. And B it wasn't going to be that right, because there is nowhere else that's like Manhattan. And so the spiritual profile of a Sydney side or the spiritual profile of an Inner Westy with ministry implications was just going to be different from what it was as a Manhattanite. And so learning, seeing what others do will actually show you an example of what either to do or not to do, but it will help you realize what you need to do as well.
And so I think there is a real place for it, but the Sydney is a decent-sized city. And so nothing on some of the enormous Indian or Chinese cities, and just I don't know enough about India and China by any stretch of the imaginary, but I can't imagine that they don't function also as vast collections of sub-cities each with their own missiological edge. And the problem with the idea of city as a whole is if we get 200 people together to talk about reaching Sydney will feel really great about that. Except that's 200 people trying to talk about 20 different movements that are needed. So actually it's tiny.
What we need is 20 groups of 200 people getting together. And the problem with doing it as a whole city is you think, wow, 200 people in the room. That was pretty good. Yeah, it's too small. And so we've got to take it down, more and more down and be okay with the fact that it's really in our local area that we need to have focus.
Brandon O’Brien: Yeah, well, and it does seem that you're saying that instead of the single target of Sydney, you may have 20 targets of these subsidies. And then each of those targets is a bit of a moving target. They're shifting over the generation over a period of time.
Andrew Katay: And there's another angle on this, which is, this is why when it works, when it's right, long incumbencies within an area actually can be a good thing. So to have ministers that stay not five-to-seven years in one place and then move cities or move to completely the other side of the city or something like that. But people who are in their sort of area, even if they move within the area, but within their sub-city for a long period of time, really soak it up. Both love it, but love it not too much that sort of tension and really get it and have a long tenure within the same kind of place I think can be a real value because that they can morph with those changes. Really understand what's going on, provide some leadership for others who come in and so on. Yeah.
Brandon O’Brien: If you imagine, Christian leaders in Sydney catching this vision and saying, we're going to invest in deep connection with our various sub-cities, what future do you imagine for Sydney if that happens?
Andrew Katay: Well, what's really interesting is that there's quite a lot of this happening already in Australia actually. And I'm only new to this really, there's many others who've been very hard at work at this and have done enormously great work in taking what has always been a kind of concept. Right. I don't know if you're familiar with this phrase, the ministers fraternal, that idea. So ministers fraternal is ministers get together for a cup of tea each month and meet to pray. And it's the kernel of what this might be. But the problem with that is that quickly becomes inward looking and relatively and not goal directed at all.
Instead, if you add to a coalition which has genuine unity based on the recognition that because different kinds of churches are needed to reach different kinds of people, therefore we not just tolerate each other, but celebrate each other. If you add unity and put with unity a goal. And so here's a goal that we are kind of working on, which is to say, we think that movement is marked by one church, one healthy growing church per thousand residents. So if you take unity, which is hard enough and you add to it, a goal like that, then only that will change, that's all snaps into action at that point. And this in the inner west of Sydney, there are 260,000 people. They're 130 churches and they're not all healthy. So suddenly you've just got, here's what we are doing together. We're building with each other, we're praying with each other, we're supporting each other and we need each of us to plan another church and we need to help those that aren't so healthy to get healthy.
And we need to start making impact in the west, because there are real social needs in the west, which we, as whole, as the church of Christ can achieve that none of us will be able to do individually. And that adorns the gospel in a way that becomes kind of unmissable. And so when you've got church multiplication with planting and regeneration and revitalization, along with justice and mercy efforts that the church does collectively together, then that I think has just got a possibility about of a rolling momentum to see movement emerge. A movement of the gospel.
Brandon O’Brien: That's great. Thank you Andrew. For your time. It's been a real pleasure to chat with you.
Andrew Katay: It's a great pleasure.
Brandon O’Brien: You can find more information about City to City Australia online at https://citytocityaustralia.org.au.
Next week we have Bishop Raymond Rivera, a long-time pastor in New York City’s South Bronx neighborhood and author of Liberty to the Captives, who offers a framework for ministering in the context of captivity. Spoiler alert: all of us are captives.
How to Reach the West Again is a production of Redeemer City to City. This episode was produced, written and hosted by Brandon O’Brien.
Our associate producer is Braeden Gregg.
Tim Keller’s presentation on City Theology was recorded by Andrew Walker. The interview was recorded on location in London by Moises Zetina and Luke Gates of Westway Records and edited by Lee Jerkins.
RCTC is a non-profit organization co-founded by Tim Keller and supported by generous people like you. If you’ve enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform, leave a review, and consider making a gift to support the work at www.redeemercitytocity.com/give.