I wanted to share with you a right up done by Stacy May regaring the V360 effort here in Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma City: A Call and Commitment to the Urban Core
Forbes magazine recently named Oklahoma City the country’s most recession-proof city. Forbes cited a strong housing market, decreased unemployment and growth in agriculture, energy and manufacturing as contributing factors to its economic health. This is good news for residents of Oklahoma City. And it’s good news for a team of church planters who are passionate about bringing spiritual revitalization to a city that’s thriving economically.
From the inside out
City Catalyst Lance Humphreys attended the initial Vision360 meeting in Orlando in the fall of 2006. Lance wanted to participate in Vision 360 because he believes God wants to transform cities through the church in a way he hasn’t seen in his lifetime. He left the meeting asking himself, “What is God already doing in our city as it relates to church planting?”
Meanwhile, Executive Director Ben Nockels, and his wife Shannon, were living in Colorado Springs when God began to speak to their hearts about the importance of church planting. God led them back to Oklahoma City where they launched Mars Hill Church. “It was never about planting a church,” Ben says. “It was always about planting multiple churches. We knew this was not about our church plant, but about serving the entire city.”
From the beginning Lance and Ben had a sense that the urban center of Oklahoma City was to be the focal point of their efforts. They had observed the physical rebuilding that took place in the center of the city following the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing in 1995. “The inner city became the focal and rallying point for renewed faith in our city,” Lance says. They longed for and believed that spiritual revitalization could take place just as economic revitalization had. And they felt the spiritual revitalization was going to take place from the inside out. “If we could impact the urban center then we could impact the entire metropolitan area,” Lance says.
Ben agrees: “Starting with the most forgotten, under-resourced and broken kids is going to be the avenue to really transform our cities.”
With a heart for the poor and broken, they started moving forward with a vision for their city that transcended what any one church could do alone.
Step by step
The following steps were key to launching Vision360 in Oklahoma City:
Narrow focus - The decision was made that for the first five years the team was not going to do anything that didn’t impact the city center. They felt that area was where the Lord had asked them to begin and they strived to keep their vision focused specifically on that area. This led to success in bringing both board support and financial support.
Networking - They built a relationship network with two groups of people that were already involved in church planting: young church planters and established churches who had a history of reproducing or had the capacity and heart to reproduce. “I began by building relationships with church planters in the urban center,” Lance says. “A core of five young church planters and myself began to dream about what it would look like to replant the church in Urban Oklahoma City.”
Invitations - In the past six months Lance and Ben started inviting business and city leaders into the process. “We have aggressively pursued church leaders and business leaders who already demonstrated a buy-in to the vision,” Lance says. “We’ve gone after the people we want to work with. We’ve met individually with pastors we wanted to be involved with.”
An Education Strategy
Like many urban settings, Oklahoma City is a mix of racial and ethnic groups, wealth and poverty, youth and families.
The Oklahoma City vision includes identifying the 15 most vulnerable, at-risk schools and launching churches within those schools. The at-risk status is based on free and reduced lunches, academic scores, volunteer base, etc. Each school is the gathering place and the built-in missional focus. “Kids are a gateway to parents, parents are a gateway to families, families are gateways to neighborhoods,” Ben says. “And what are cities made up of but a system and network of neighborhoods?”
They are currently in the process of identifying the vulnerable communities, working with school board members, and determining how they will begin to recruit and train church planters to go into those communities.
Business Leaders
A team was pulled together from a cross-section of the city including young entrepreneurs and more established leaders. The first fundraising event took place in late February of this year and was hosted by the former mayor of Oklahoma City in his own home. The response was fantastic and there are 20 members currently on the board. The first official board meeting took place on June 5.
“When I moved back to Oklahoma City we began meeting people,” Ben says. “Many of those people have been strategic in getting Vision360 off the ground. We met as friends and those friendships turned into partnerships. There is a real clear sense that God was at work long before any of this came about.”
