Brave Cities: The Archaeology, Artistry, and Architecture of Kingdom Ecosystems, by Taylor McCall and Hugh Halter

Should church be a hobby or a way of life?The authors of Brave Cities offer a "new" vision for the church emphasizing decentralization, informal relationships, enterprise, and community integration.The subtitle describes the kind of "kingdom" work Christians ought to do-understanding the history of a community, creating meaningful goods through artisanship, and building structures that support human flourishing.Brave Cities riffs on Augustine's idea that the city of God exists within the cities of man.It describes where Christianity meets entrepreneurship meets urban renewal.This book can be seen as part of the emerging church movement, which rejects many traditional forms of church structure and seeks to "rediscover" true Christian practice.The movement treasures authenticity and has been described by Brian McLaren in A New Kind of Christian and A New Kind of Christianity.It's been popularized in well-known books such as Blue Like Jazz and Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools.In chapter 1, the authors argue that church planting is more art than science-and therefore that the overly programmatic and metric-focused church-planting movements misunderstand what is truly important.In chapter 2, they discuss how Christians ought to study the "archaeology, artistry, and architecture" of their cities and their communities.In chapters 3 and 4, they detail how Christians should build and serve in the marketplaces of their communities.In chapters 5 and 6, the authors argue for an informal, decentralized, family-centric ministry-one without formal roles or titles or paid positions.The final chapter concludes with warnings about the challenges of building brave cities and investing in the broader community.McCall and Halter claim that their model of church, which integrates Christian living with entrepreneurship and urban renewal, is both more authentic and closer to the model Jesus lived than the Sunday morning gathering for worship, prayer, and teaching.Their alternative view of a Mueller, Paul D.