Urban Adventures: Vol. 2

I had the pleasure of getting an opportunity to hear what the Lord was doing in our city in one of the congregations from downtown Kansas City. In my practicum class we heard from a couple who is part of Restoration Church. The husband is a pastor on staff with them and his wife had been incredibly active in the ministry and had pulled out to pursue a career in the medical field. They had both come out of very rough lifestyles and focused their ministry on doing home discipleship groups. The thrust is immediate conversion and training in the basics of Christianity. They told us stories of witnessing to prostitutes and drug addicts. Along with this much time was spent fundraising for the ministry.
I thought they had many things to bring to the table. One of the things emphasized was getting new believers engaged in ministry and evangelism from the get go. I have seen many believers, including myself, shrink back from ministry because of feeling ill-equipped and scared. All too often it feels like that in order to do ministry one needs a vast history with the Lord and has mastered all of the right things to say as opposed to just relying on your testimony.
One thing I would like to see implemented with that is more time added in the Word and in prayer. One of the things that they told us is how badly they wished they had time for prayer and communion. I see great things ahead for this ministry as they further interact with Hope City and gives their ministers time to cultivate an interior life on top of the evangelistic one, by no means sacrificing one for the other but having both. I think it is amazing seeing the Body of Christ in its various shapes and forms, especially in the city. Spending so much time at IHOP, I have prayed a lot for the church in this city. It is good to have faces for those prayers as well as seeing God’s hand at work in expressions that are not always visible to me.
On top of that we have been given an assignment to survey the neighborhood we live in and evaluate, to the best of our abilities the condition of living we have found. I have yet to fully lay hold of this task but am excited to explore in the coming week. I have observed, however, the quick turn from lower class to upper class. The truth is that a few miles down the road from us is the Plaza and a few miles north is the most dangerous neighborhood in the city. One thing I have noticed about Kansas City is that it does not have the greatest public transit system. I think that this has a lot to do with how spread out the city is and how difficult it would be to do full scale renovations. This spring I spent some time in Boston and got to use the “T” which is their system and was quite impressed. It worked well there because of how compact the city is as opposed to Kansas City which is sprawled across the border of two states.

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