At the center of the blitz of new United Methodist church development that is swirling around Chicagoland, there is a village.  Actually, there are two.

The village that is gaining attention around Northern Illinois and beyond is Urban Village, a new church project sponsored by two districts, with two pastors, and ultimately two locations - serving all sorts of people in the West and South Loop communities that buttress downtown Chicago.  The pastors, Chris and Trey, are talented young clergy whom the cabinet could have sent any number of places to do turn-around. (Each of them had already served effectively in revitalization pastorates.)  But the cabinet came to believe that throwing two of their best clergy players into one flagship new church would yield more fruit.  To find out more about Urban Village Chicago, click here.

The other village, a bit behind the scenes, was a village created by Northern Illinois Conference Director of Congregational Development, the Reverend Martin Lee.  This village is a learning village, an academy of pastors, two or three dozen at a time over several years.  Martin’s village was created to nurture leaders for vital congregations in Northern Illinois.  There are several reasons that there are a couple dozen projects ongoing in Northern Illinois presently, not the least would be the passion of their bishop for new church development.  But without the village that Martin quietly built, we probably would not see the spiritual village downtown that could rise to become one of the hopeful models for the future of United Methodism with the new generation of young adults in America.

Please click here to reference the article, A Church Without Walls by Susan Passi-Klaus on www.umc.org.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Paul Nixon, New Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.