Planting in the cities

The evangelical community is growing in London and leading the way for other European cities.

This was just one of the very positive messages coming out of the Urban Plant Life Conference held at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster on November 18. Sponsored by the London City Mission (LCM) and with major input from Tim Keller and the church-planting arm of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York, this was an outstanding event. Apart from Keller’s excellent, clear and challenging teaching, what made it so remarkable was that it drew together Christians from quite different evangelical traditions all heavily engaged in planting churches.

Marvellous mixture

With about 350 people gathered, the motive for the conference, John Nichols of LCM explained, was that he had met many British Christians travelling to New York to attend Redeemer church-planting conferences and said to himself, ‘Why don’t we save the travel and put one on in London?’ The idea of the conference was to learn, to see what God is doing through various groups and to network to find out if there were ways to help and encourage one another. Later in the day Tim Keller reminded us that perhaps the best way of solving some of the problems we might have within our own groups would be to talk with Christians from a different background who might be more able to ‘think out of the box’ for us because they are not necessarily tied to the same assumptions.