The Greatest Hope
Charisse Camp wasn’t supposed to be there.
She was a last-minute substitute for someone else who couldn’t make it to the Arkansas Flourishing Cities Summit on September 25th. She didn’t know much about CityChurch Network or what the Summit was supposed to be about. “Probably just another conference,” she thought.
Charisse works on the lobby team for Family Council and is the Executive Director for AR Future Foundation. She’s also a member of St. Mark Baptist Church. She walked into Sanders Hall at Geyer Springs First Baptist Church in Little Rock that Thursday morning and found her seat among over 50 pastors and nonprofit leaders representing more than 30 churches across Arkansas.
Anthony Hampton leads CityChurch Network’s Flourishing Families in Schools initiative and serves as an elder at The Way Church Network. “You come in with this mindset that this is another one of those conferences where, even though they say it’s going to be this, you still come in with some sense of expectation that it’s just going to be a bunch of people talking to you about what they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished.”
That’s not what happened. The Summit didn’t start with a keynote address. No breakout sessions. It began with prayer—three hours of it.
The Summit was framed around Jeremiah 29:7: “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” First, pray. Then, collaborate on ways to impact cities for good.
“I’ve never been to an event like that. It was very eye-opening for me,” Charisse says. “I thought it was an excellent idea to start it out in prayer and worship and get our hearts and minds in a good place where we were humbled.”
Logan Bloom, who leads CityChurch Network’s prayer initiative, and Pastor Jordan Bowen of Hillcrest Community Church led the prayer time. What happened during prayer set the tone for everything that followed in the 24 hours spent together.
Begin with Prayer
Leaders broke into small groups and prayed for one another. The group prayed through Psalm 85, a psalm of revival. They prayed for their churches, their cities, their nation, and the world.
Harold Nash pastors Fellowship North in North Little Rock. For him, the simple format of praying together stood out. “I appreciated getting the opportunity to pray with other believers about God’s work in the city.”
When it came time to pray in small groups, Jordan chose his group deliberately. “Probably the biggest highlight was when we got in groups of three or four. I don’t think I knew anybody in my group, which is what I wanted. It was really encouraging to be able to pray with pastors, to pray over their church, and pray for revival to begin in them and their church, and then for them to do the same for me and my church.”
Jason Ancarrow directs CityChurch Network’s Arkansas Marriage Initiative. He’s also an elder at South City Church. “It’s easy to say everything should begin with prayer, but when you actually do it, you realize, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s why we begin with prayer.’ It really set the tone for the Summit.”
Charisse describes what the extended prayer time accomplished. “We repented, we laid aside our agendas and our own thought patterns and plans. We laid it all at the altar to seek His will and His plan for our lives. It was refreshing and rejuvenating to spend that much time in worship and prayer with other believers before we even got into what our plans are, just to center our hearts on God.”
The Theological Theory of Everything
After dinner Thursday evening, Dr. Scott Duvall, New Testament scholar and professor at Ouachita Baptist University, shared a message titled “The Theological Theory of Everything.” Using 1 John 4:19, Duvall spoke about how everything starts with God’s love. “You can’t strive your way into shalom,” he said. “You have to receive God’s love first.”
Keith Lape pastors River City Church in North Little Rock. Years ago, he was sent as a missionary to the inner city by his Church of Christ congregation. “Duvall’s message was so simple, but so real and on point and good for reorienting. All the complexities pretty much boil down to God’s love. Everything’s got to tie ultimately back into that.”
Charisse connected Duvall’s message to the question of how cities flourish. “He talked about shalom and nothing being broken, nothing missing. How do we get there? It’s through accepting. We have to first accept God’s love in order to properly demonstrate it to other people. We have to accept His love in order to pour that out.”
Jordan brought a friend with him to the Summit. “I’ve been deeply praying with Will, praying for him. To hear Duvall’s words, I thought, ‘Man, I need that, but I know that the season Will’s in and that’s exactly what he needs to know—the depths of God’s love for him.’ I was really thankful. I’m so glad Will got to hear that.”
The Foundation
On Friday morning, Don Blackmore of Central Baptist Church in Jonesboro spoke about marriage ministry as discipleship. The statistics he began with immediately captured everyone’s attention. 72% of all churches in America lack a substantive marriage ministry. 74% of all churches have no ministry for newlyweds. 93% of churches do not offer any ministries for singles. A large majority of churches report spending zero percent of their ministry dollars on marriage and relationship ministries.
Harold Nash heard Don’s message and started thinking. He and his wife lead the marriage ministry at Fellowship North. “I enjoyed hearing how God is using Central Baptist in Jonesboro for marriage. It stirred me. I was thinking about the Air Force base in Jacksonville. There’s a couple in our church, and I was asking them if they knew of any marriage ministry happening on the base. I think that might be a good outreach opportunity to do marriage ministry there.”
Keith took away something specific for his context. “I want to be more intentional about infusing language and teaching into my messages that highlight marriage and family, and cultivating holy relationships. Especially to help our people who come from generational poverty, especially our young folks, help cast a vision for them to see a new normal, a healthy normal. It’s God’s Plan A design, even though most of what they’ve experienced is more of the enemy’s Plan B.”
Charisse sees strong families as the foundation for building a flourishing community. “In order to have flourishing cities, you have to have flourishing families. The foundation of any society is the family. If you’ve got strong men that are believers and strong leaders in their family, that creates strong marriages, which create strong families, because they raise their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. That foundation builds strong churches, which builds strong communities, which make strong cities, states, and nations.”
Next Step Conversations
After Don’s message, leaders divided into four Next Step Conversations: Prayer, Equipped Leaders, Marriage Ministry, and Church/School Partnerships. The goal in these conversations was to get practical, for leaders to say, “So, what are we going to do about it?”
Anthony Hampton led the church/school partnerships conversation with three people. “Pastor Minick and Pastor Russell were talking about connecting with Southwest High School. They want to teach the gospel and be bold about it. I began thinking about the resources and connections we have. FCA has connections at the high school. Instead of going around another way with all the headaches, let me connect you with them, and hopefully, there’s an inroad for you there.”
Keith attended the prayer conversation. His next steps were specific. “Assess our prayer efforts with our church and in my larger ministry network and strengthen it. Make more public pleas to pray. Urge more prayer in our monthly ministry leaders luncheon amongst our Church of Christ preachers. Facilitate even more prayer, especially if I can cultivate the mindset of Spirit-led, scripture-fed, worship-based prayer. And then create more space for prayer in our gatherings.”
Bill Reed coaches young men ages 18 to 35 through his organization, Navigation Strategies. He spoke about what the conversations were designed to do. “If you’re really going to affect change, you really must develop strategies. That’s what the next step does—develop a strategy. With all these good things, now what are we going to do? Do we just say that was good fellowship and go back to our regular places? Or do we go back with some type of plan to implement change?”
You Can’t Do It Alone
Philip Blunk pastors Impact Church in North Little Rock and serves as Church and Community Relations Coordinator for Amplify Fest. When asked why church unity is important, Philip says, “It’s Jesus’s prayer, primarily in John 17:20-23. We’re answering His prayer. It’s really simple. Jesus prays, ‘Lord, may they be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know the Father, that You sent Me and loved the world even as You love Me.’ That complete unity is the Church united on the day of Pentecost. They were all in one place, in one accord. So we really need to begin diving into that. Holy Spirit, show us what this means. What does complete unity that You’re praying over us mean for us as Your body in Arkansas?”
Keith sees both obedience and cooperation in unity. “If it’s important to do things God’s way, and if it’s important to advance his kingdom, then we’d better obey His commands and follow them, which includes actively practicing the unity of the body and working together. One is obedience, and the other is kingdom concentrated cooperation through our connecting, communicating, and collaborating.”
“My friend says history is transformed through friendships,” Jordan says. “In studying the Great Awakenings, everything could be traced through prayer and relationships. You can see how God moved in that way. The same with Paul. He ends Romans by listing names of people from different churches at different locations with different giftings, and how all of that played into the move God was doing through Paul and his missionary journeys. When I can collaborate with other leaders in a city to unite together, I know the Lord is building new friendships that will potentially provide new avenues to impact new people.”
Anthony’s assessment is blunt. “If we don’t unite, we fail. God called us to walk in one accord. That’s what took place in the book of Acts. They were all on one accord when they were working together, and God got the glory for it. If we’re not living out the Great Commission, if we’re not living out the church of Acts that many of us boast and brag about and how it started, then what good are we doing? Our communities fail. People fail. Society fails. When the Church does not work together, then we fail.”
But Anthony also sees hope. “It’s not too late to engage. It’s not too late to turn things around, to change, to really engage yourself in the moment, in the culture and the climate that we find ourselves in. The Church still has a place, and the Church needs to be bold and take its stand. We need to be unified and say, with one voice, ‘God is who we serve. Jesus is the only way. And we need to go live that out.’”
Bill Reed sees the practical wisdom in unity. “There’s always safety in numbers. We’re not just Lone Rangers out here doing our things. We don’t need to compete with other churches. We’ve got enough people who are not going to anyone’s church—that’s who we go after.”
The Greatest Hope For Our Cities
Pray for and seek the welfare of the city.
For twenty-four hours at the Summit, over 50 leaders from churches big and small did exactly that. They prayed. They collaborated. And they left with practical next steps to demonstrate the love of Christ to their neighbors.
But the work is far from complete. The mission for a united church in Arkansas remains. That is the greatest hope for our cities.
Real change is possible when we work together. And together, we are building flourishing communities.
We are grateful for the exceptional work of churches across Arkansas—those who attended the Summit and those committed to real unity and real change throughout our state. They are helping the whole Church grow.
Speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him, the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
Ephesians 4:15-16
