Would You Move After a Shooting On Your Front Lawn?
Memphis Teacher Residency, among other teaching programs, is helping to reform urban education in the city.
Downline Ministries and City Leadership are training church and city leaders to make a difference in their community. (Downline promotes discipleship in and through local churches, while City Leadership recruits and develops leaders to serve the city.)
These organizations practice collaboration over competition. It's as if each understands that the social issues facing our city are too big for one organization to tackle.
Choosing Your City
We Memphians hope that 100 years from now, historians will look back bewildered, wondering, "What happened in Memphis?"
Indeed, even today we trust that you'll be able to discern—with a nod to Augustine—that within every city are two cities simultaneously emerging. One city represents all that is good and beautiful and just; the other, everything that is corrupt and evil and disintegrated.
Sometimes you have to experience the latter before you can collaborate in order to pursue the former. Such is the case with Memphis, and we are the better for it.
However, we don't want to be the only ones experiencing the fruit of such a united endeavor. We hope other urban centers will foster their own cultures of collaboration for the good of their cities.
In the end, this isn't really about Memphis at all; it's about wherever you, the reader, currently reside. We urge you to take up this challenge in whatever area code you call home: to Choose _ _ _ .
Love your city well in Christ-centered, gospel-motivated word and deed; we promise she'll love you back.
Jason Seville is the director of emerging leaders for Downline Ministries, chief editor of "Downline Builder: Customizable Curriculum for Biblical Discipleship," and a church-planting resident with Fellowship Associates.
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Lydia Wong
Luke 14:26“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. 27Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple...33So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple" I'd say that Jason has made the right commitment.
Pop Seal
Bullet hole in roof, shell casings in the street, man hunts around houses at night, and more caused me to LEAVE NEW ORLEANS (1995) and I've never regretted it. I'd do missionary work there, but I'd not move my family back for anything.
Bobby Harrison
If not the Seville's of the world, then who? Who will answer the call? My hurt hearts with fear for that family. But you know what, it should hurt even more for any neighbors God has put around them that don't know Christ. That is True Love. I'm chewing on John 10:11, 15:13, Romans 5:7, 1 John 3:16. And even if my heart was so hard that I couldn't allow myself to consider my neighbors there my brothers and sisters...even if, because of the bullets flying around my home, I considered them my enemies...well then we know what Jesus has to say about that: Matthew 5:43-48. Praying for you and your family, Jason. Thank you for rugged, real faith.
Teresa Ulrich
I moved here to Memphis three years ago, and have fallen in love with this city. This city can be so rough, but it's got so much grit and heart, and I see the Kingdom blossoming here. It is reminiscent of Jesus' words in Isaiah 61:1-3: "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion—to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified."
Charles Cosimano
In other words you are willing the risk the life of your family for this committment. Perhaps you should consider a committment of a different kind.