Customer Reviews

Discovering Your City : Bringing Light to the Task of Community Transformation

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This book had some good concepts, but overall I was pretty disappointed by it. It moves quickly from practical suggestions for identifying potential areas of ministry to over spiritualized strategic level warfare, which focuses more on the enemy than anything else. The appendix (which takes up more than half the book!) has some helpful tables in it, but for the most part it wasn't very helpful.

In Discovering Your City, Bob Waymire and Carl Townsend seek to equip Christian leaders with a barebones skillset for socio-cultural research. This is needed, they argue, because of the rapidly increasing irrelevance on the part of the Church in relation to changing urban landscapes. The traditional church has lost its ability to speak to many of the emerging subcultures that characterize contemporary American society. Waymire and Townsend establish this fact in the opening paragraphs of their introduction using church attendance statistics that have become characteristic of church growth literature. These bleak facts lead them to their central thesis: "The Church must listen, hear, and understand the voices of current generations. It is quite obvious that new creative, contextualized wineskins are sorely needed" (Intro-3). Their thesis is certainly nothing new. However, their contribution to it is certainly worthwhile. Rather than promoting a new model, paradigm, or program, Waymire and Townsend focus instead on foundational methodology. These "creative, contextualized wineskins," they argue, cannot be developed without thoroughly researching the target group. In their own words, "The fundamental purpose of this book is to provide guidance and help in `discovering your city' so you have the accurate, up-to-date picture necessary for effecting biblically-based transformation of both the city, and the Church in the city" (Intro-13).

In support of their thesis, the authors take a very practical approach. Aside from brief discussion in the first few chapters, they provide very little philosophical background or discussion regarding the reasoning behind research. The majority of the book is aimed squarely at methodology. This emphasis can be frustrating to some readers, especially if they are not yet entirely convinced of the benefits or conceptual foundation of research in ministry. However, these matters are simply not within their scope, and they leave them to be treated by others. Their concern is purely pragmatic.

Waymire and Townsend provide a systematic, step-by-step approach for analyzing any given community. They break the research process down into six distinct steps: mobilization, spying out the land, collecting "harvest force" data, collecting "harvest field" data, analysis, and communication. These steps are separated into ten chapters.

Generally speaking, the authors provide a very informative model for anyone new to the idea of research in ministry. Their emphasis on practical research that answers real-life questions and reveals concrete needs makes the approach accessible to any practitioner willing to do the work. They put the process in terms that anyone can grasp and avoid the highly theoretical. Half the book is composed of appendices, full of useful charts, tables, and lists designed to walk potential researchers through the actual "legwork."

This emphasis on practicality and accessibility, however, is perhaps the book's greatest weakness as well. Little effort is made to use "industry-standard" best practices or vocabulary. Instead, terms like "harvest field" and "harvest force" brand the book as distinctively "churchy." In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with this, but the idea of a church leader using terms like this in a presentation to a local group of aldermen or businesspeople is undeniable rather humorous. The steps presented by Waymire and Townsend are not placed into any sort of larger academic context, and one wonders just how credible they are. All-in-all, the book has a nonprofessional feel. Numerous formatting and proofing issues only exacerbate the issue, and their extensive scriptural "proof-texting" drains their credibility even further among Bible college audiences (as illustrated by their continued use of the story of Nehemiah to provide scriptural foundation for their approach).

In the end, the book provides a decent introduction to the topic at hand. It is perhaps even sufficient for amateur-level research for grassroots-type ministries. Their step-by-step breakdown helps would-be researchers to categorize their work into logical stages, and along the way they offer many practical suggestions on where to find information and how to conduct the work. True community analysis, however, requires a much more solid foundation than that offered here.