WHAT WE DO
TRAINING
When urban church planters and local movement catalysts set out to start new churches in their cities, we want them to be faithful and fruitful. We recruit, assess, train, and coach local leaders all over Australia, helping them to launch and grow healthy churches and unity movements.
RESOURCES
New churches take the lead to reach new people groups and generations with the gospel and act as a lab for existing churches. City to City Australia utilises resources from the City to City Network to share the best training, thinking and experience after planting about 300 churches.
NETWORKS
City to City works with network leaders all over the world to create sustainable and faster-growing gospel movements. We are seeing networks of gospel-centred churches that train, fund, and support others so that hundreds of new churches can be planted and sustained in 65 global cities by 2025.
FUNDING
Australian cities, like most global cities, are super expensive, and a lot of the churches we support each year will require money to get off the ground. When the church becomes self supporting, it can provide seed money to start another church or movement.
Unity
We believe localised church unity is the ‘great cause’ of the ‘great commission.’ It is as the prayer of Jesus is answered through us, “make them one as We are,” that the effect of “the world recognising the Father sent the Son,” will be realised. To this end, City to City Australia works with local church and spiritual leaders to gather together and form unity movements, where trust and relational connectedness become the vehicle through which the clear vision of city wide transformation is enabled. City to City Australia supports these movements through firstly creating a communication conduit that connects movements across the country to be able to share, learn and resource one another, as well as offering coaching opportunities and strategic discernment planning sessions.
Why plant new churches in cities?
The Apostle Paul, arguably the greatest missionary in history, had a simple, two-fold strategy as he set out to bring the gospel to the Gentile world. First, he went to the cities (cf. Acts 16:9, 12), and second, he planted churches in each city (cf. Titus 1:5 - "appoint elders in every town"). Having done that, he could say that he had "fully preached" the gospel and that his work had been accomplished (cf. Romans 15:19, 23). His assumption was that once a church was established everything necessary for the spread of the gospel would follow.
Today, research shows that new churches are the best way to reach new generations, new residents, and new people groups in a city with the gospel. In fact, they are up to 6 to 10 times more effective at attracting people to the gospel than older, more established churches. Although we desperately need the existing churches to continue to grow and maintain faithful gospel ministry, if we are to reach the rapidly growing numbers of people in cities who do not know Christ, we need hundreds and thousands of new churches to be established in those cities.
For the first time in the history of the world more than 50% of the world's population lives in cities. Most leading urbanologists estimate that by 2050 the number of people living in cities will exceed 75%. The growth of cities is the missional challenge of our generation.