Clown in the City

At opening this book, everything one has learned or thought about “urban ministry” is challenged, and changed. Stephan de Beer offers a fresh, exciting and thoroughly engaging approach. The title is enticing and playful, but the book is a serious grappling with the daunting realities of a shadowed, marginalised, urban life. It does not theorise or pontificate about a concept. The author is not a distant, neutral observer. He is an engaged minister to the people, a struggler in their struggles, prophet to the powerful. This book invites the reader to join the people of the cities under siege by failed policies, empty promises, and disastrous politics, in their struggles for meaningful life, and it makes a powerful, persuasive case. Stephan de Beer has offered us a great gift and a wonderful opportunity to think and hope anew, and differently, about the life, reality, and future of the city.

Review of: Urban Ministry Reconsidered: Contexts and Approaches

This submission is a review of Smith, R. D., Boddie, S. C. & Peters, R. D. (Eds.). (2018). Urban ministry reconsidered: Contexts and approaches. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. The book reviewer addresses the central question of the book, recaps the key points and addressees its relevance for Christians in Social Work.

Born from below: Urban regeneration through incarnational theological formation in Guatemala City and beyond

This article sets out to describe the development of and engagement with a global training collaborative around the formation of urban ministry leadership committed to the act of loving cities and working for peace. The collaborative is an initiative of Street Psalms called the Urban Training Collaborative and each urban training hub has agreed to be shaped and formed by an Incarnational Training Framework (ITF). The ITF was constructed over a 20-year period in the midst of a global missional community made up of leaders from cities all over the world. The ITF is infused by an incarnational theology as interpreted from below and focused on the message, method and manner as exemplified in the life and mission of Jesus Christ such that messengers are free of fear and unleashed to love their cities and seek their peace. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ animates faith-based engagement around the complex issues of poverty, injustice, social inequity and violence, and shifts paradigms from scarcity to abundance, theory to practice and rivalry to peacemaking. To shed light on the practical outworking of an incarnational theology from below, we will critically reflect on Guatemala City as a case study to illustrate how the formation of a city-wide missional community was developed through engagement around the aforementioned ITF which led to the corresponding paradigm shifts and then subsequently seeding a global training collaborative