Organizing

Urban Mission Includes Organizing

Excerpts by Kennth Luscombe  

"Community organizing in urban mission is premised on the unlimited capacity of even the poorest of the poor to achieve the potential of their humanity through collective effort. Because it is oriented toward community and seeks to incarnate the value of mutuality, it is a movement of love. Because it is oriented toward transformation and seeks to achieve this through organizing the people to discover their power to act, it is a movement of hope. Holistic urban mission as community organizing helps create the conditions for releasing hidden potential into concrete achievement. Community organizing adds a decisive cutting edge to community development.

"The challenge of urban mission as we approach the twenty-first century - the first truly urban century - is to make accessible through our full engagement in the city a holistic vision of the transforming grace of God that seeks to liberate, renew and perfect creation. All the ingredients necessary are available. To bring to light the image of a holistic new ecology of urban mission we will need to create a social holograph that depicts the profound interrelation and interdependence of reality. As Christians we hope and pray that our holographic existence will unfold with clarity the enfolded promise of God for the eschatological fulfillment of redeemed creation. We will seek to foreshadow in living color the metaphor of the holy city, the New Jerusalem, prepared with the Creator's final touch - like the radiant perfection of a bride on her wedding day (Rev. 21:1-2). But the eschatological holograph of urban mission must be create in the midst of the city in our own time and place, investing current urban reality with the hope for justice, inclusion, equality, solidarity and peace."

Kenneth L. Luscombe in Serving with the Urban Poor, World Vision, 1998, p.  220-1. Luscombe is a Baptist minister from Australia who is CEO of DGL Intl.