Let’s Serve the City Together
We love the Church and we love our city. And we believe the Church does and can play a major role in loving and transforming our city.
In September, we hosted around 25 church, not-for-profit and business leaders for a 5-hour workshop to dream, think, pray and plan together.
The workshop was facilitated by UK-based Roger Sutton, the co-founder and CEO of Gather Movement, which works in partnership with over 150 cities and towns to bring transformation.
The day was framed up by Megan Tyler, the Chief of Strategy for Auckland Council. Similar to Auckland Church Network, the Council has a vision to see our city flourish, and Megan brought brilliant insights into key challenges facing our city; and sparked some great discussion about what role the Church could play in addressing these.
As we built relationship and dreamed about the potential, three key questions we asked ourselves as a group:
What does the Church do best?
What do we have in our hand?
What are some ideas for serving our city together?
For example, in the context of our city, the Church is best at loving and giving hope to people, providing hospitality, praying, meeting people in their time of need, mobilising volunteers, and introducing people to God.
We have a vast range of resources in our hands including buildings and land, willing volunteers, food banks, social housing, community gardens, toddler care, debt counselling and budgeting services, and the list goes on.
And so, many ideas emerged for how we can serve our city together, for example collating a one-stop-stop directory of community-facing services, serving and supporting migrants & refugees at their entry point, supporting at-risk youth, and providing help for those in the disability sector.
We would love to hear your ideas too! Email Ben with your thoughts.
We will be forming small working groups to further plan and action some of these ideas. We believe the Church really can be better and more effective as we work together.