Bøger af Kendi Howells Douglas

This story is supplemented by other authors who live in different parts of the city, at other socio-economic levels, and from different communities of faith in the city. A dialogue has developed between us on the margins where our stories overlap. Together we will find these margins to be a place of meeting, a gathering where we can look at the commonalities and differences of our stories, a thus develop a "real book" of Christianity in Los Angeles and not, as Adamic put it, "a mere booster pamphlet" for my particular point of view.

In the world's cities, the church must not only give people hope for eternal life. We must also help them realize their most basic hopes for physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being in the present world. An individual Christ-follower can feed a hungry child, and a single congregation can provide food for the hungry families in their neighborhood. But it will take all God's people working together to stamp out the problem of hunger in a city. And hunger is only one small piece of the puzzle of human suffering that plagues our world's cities. The Christian community, moved by Christ's compassion, can bring lasting change to a city. The world's cities are not only large concentrations of people. Cities form nuclei through which people, money, materials, information, and ideas flow to energize our globalized world. A businessman in a village in India can sit in a coffee shop reading the Wall Street Journal online before making his investments in the London and Tokyo markets. This is only possible because of the kind of interchange taking place between cities like New York, Paris, Delhi, Nairobi, and Sao Paulo. The results of globalization ripple out from these great hubs to engulf the smaller cities, villages, and rural areas of the surrounding hinterlands.

Do we have a positive theology of the city so that an urban spirituality can emerge from this place? We have for too long focused on quick fixes, pop up churches, and strategic solutions which have left us malnourished and emaciated, yet bloated from our over-consumption of these unsatisfying approaches. Spiritual formation is something that we need to pay closer attention to today. How do we live this kind of holy life in the city?