Welcome to my ongoing series on prayer walking and discovering God in the wildly diverse city of Chicago!

I’m not doing this alone - there is a collaborative effort underway to encourage city street prayer walking and discovery with church planters, churches, and college students all across the city. Find our wiki here.

Chicago is a mission field, it is our mission field.

There are 77 recognized community areas in the city, making it one of the most glocal, ethnically diverse, and contrasted cities in the world. The people of Chicago are fiercely loyal to their ‘hood and many (though they live in a global city) rarely leave the boundaries of their blocks for another part of town.

My hopes are to make good use of my CTA Chicago card; using buses and trains to travel to and in these different communities. I will do my best to write reflections on what I saw, felt, and heard from God as I navigate through the city. My assumption is that God is already at work in their neighborhoods (in bars, churches, and city streets), and a missionary’s job is to find him and point him out for others to see. My centering prayer will come from Luke 10, asking God our Father, the Lord of the Harvest, to raise up workers in the desperate harvest field of that particular neighborhood.

With so many villages to pray through, (there are 77 recognized areas, but most maps draw up about 237 neighborhoods), I’m thinking I may also look for teammates in this work, and start a collaborative project to draw out a complete “spiritual map” of the city. If you are a church planter in Chicago or would like to work on this with me, please email me (see “Contact Us” on this blog’s sidebar).

Why spend so much energy on this project? My firm belief is that first and foremost God’s people depend on God through prayer. If there is to be a church planting movement with lives transformed and the gospel proclaimed afresh, it will come through a prayer movement. One that has its ear close to the ground, to see what God is doing in the streets.

This will be sort of a “live” post, meaning I’ll be updating it as a directory to posts about each neighborhood. To learn what I found from each neighborhood, click on the name of each below:

Following is a list of the Chicago Community Areas by community area number (see map).

May God get the glory!

The latest Speaking of Faith podcast had Krista Tippett interviewing Janna Levin, theoretical mathematician, philosopher and author of A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. She has spent her career looking into the realities of existence and truths of the universe. In the interview, she describes how the universe through mathematics is completely predetermined, and nothing can be considered “free-will” as we understand it.

Now, this might just be my American free-spirit predetermining my response here, but I have to humbly disagree with her.

With what little I know of Mandelbrot Set (M-Set) Fractals (see a totally sweet post on them here) they are a repeating rhythm based on a simple equation that ideally go on for infinity. They have infinite precision, but they are not touchable.

Arthur C. Clark (wrote 2001: A Space Oddessy) narrated a movie series on fractal geometry called “Fractals - the Colors of Infinity”. I’ve included the YouTube video (1st part) below. (A little cheezy, but you owe it to yourself to watch this…)

Fractals like this explain the motion of the planets around the sun, the shape and movement of clouds, continents, or trees, right down to DNA revolving around itself. What is so unusual about the M-Set is that is both complete and incomplete - both fully definable and fully indefinable. It is like islands of order in the sea of chaos. The M-Set is infinitely complex, organic, fluid, and yet completely definable and simple.

I believe the realities of the M-Set Fractal help us understand how parts of our universe is both revealed and concealed, both mysterious and definable. When we think about predeterminism, and free-will, no longer are we confined to choose one side or the other. Maybe through mathematics, we can understand that God allows free-will and yet knows everything. Maybe we can understand how God is both revealed and mysterious…

In my opinion, the Mandelbrot Set (nicknamed the “thumbprint of God”) offers a question to Jenna Levin, and invites deep questions into existence, consciousness, and organic reality in the universe.

For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God–

For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so that we can do the good things he planned for us long ago. — Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians

While we might all know from sermons and studies that it is BY grace we have been saved, do many of us know the grace FOR which we’re saved? I believe this man is learning. We are God’s unique gift to his creation.

The glory of God is man fully alive. — St. Augustine

May no man or woman go to their grave without having sung the song…without having reached their destiny and gracing the world with their unique masterpiece.

It’s been tough finding a balance in life as of late. Especially in regard to my future life. Katrina and I are looking down life’s road and realizing that within 6 months I’ll be a free man (free of school anyway…the loan companies may have another word to describe my status). I feel that this road will have some new and unexpected twists in the coming months, and many of the decisions we make now have major implications for how we live in the future.

But there’s the rub - I don’t want to take the reigns from God and develop “The Big Plan”, where everything is neatly packaged and ordained from quite a ways off. And at the same time, Katrina and I working together in conjunction with others who are investing in what’s going to happen in a future we’re not totally clear on. I’ve been preparing 20 years of education to live outside of the educational system, and now that this chapter in life is coming to a close, I’m not sure I know how to turn the page.

The church fellowship I’m living in right now tells me that planning is at least unproductive, if not ungodly. I react to that on several fronts, but especially when considering my interaction with others. Planning is how people cooperate, collaborate and track together. The best kind of planning overtly shares the burden of the group’s common goals, keeping one person from having to own the vision themselves.

It seems that the worst comes from focusing on “THE PLAN” instead of planning. Your planning is not some document you’ve etched in stone, its a living breathing draft that is lived, worked, and revised every single day. We are human, we need to be flexible in our planning. In addition however, I know that a mediocre plan that is consistently worked on is better than epiphanies that contradict each other every six months.  It’s about working toward the horizon, yet living for today with the hearts of your close friends in mind.

I guess its kind of like GPS systems they put in cars. If you give it a coordinates, it immediately spits out a PLAN for you to follow, and immediately you follow the exact directions it offers. But then something happens. A clown with a pack of ravenous wolverines jumps out in the middle of the road and you have to swerve onto a side street to avoid him. The plans change. The GPS recognizes this and helps you move toward your goal based on your new situation. It’s planning-on-the-fly.

As we move into a “team development” and “planning” phase this year, it is my goal to focus on planning as a lifestyle - listening to the Spirit, and working intentionally to draw up the sketches (rather than the hard and fast rules) of what our mission work might look like in Chicago.

So what are we doing about it? For starters, you can see what we’ve got so far on Our Vision page. I’m writing down thoughts and sharing them with people who have committed to journeying with us. I’m consistently listening to the Spirit for inspiration or new insights. I’ve joined a “mission team developers” Facebook group that puts other missionaries raising up teams in connection with each other for encouragement and reflections on how to go about planning. I’ve even drawn some of those mind maps…

Right now it just feels like I’m roving around in the dark. If anyone has any good suggestions on how to develop a meaningful long term plan, let me know.

Some of these thoughts came from an interview Tim Berry and Steve Addison.

Read with me these lyrics from Sara Groves, admittedly one of my favorite muscians out there:

From, You Are the Sun

You are the sun shining down on everyone
Light of the world giving light to everything I see
Beauty so brilliant I can hardly take it in
And everywhere you are is warmth and light

And I am the moon with no light of my own
Still you have made me to shine
And as I glow in this cold dark night
I know I can’t be a light unless I turn my face to you

Without you I’m a cold dark stone…

When I think about these words, I think first about the spiritual community I am a part of.  Our simple church can focus on reflecting a lot of things: the world around us, the traditional church (”Honey, I shrunk the CHURCH!”), or even ourselves (the fact that we are “radical” or “alternative”).

God puts things in nature for us to pay attention to.  When I hear the words from this song, I am reminded that the only thing a community can center itself on that brings true, redemptive life is our Lord, Jesus Christ.  All too often groups/denominations/social agencies begin with a clear reflection of Christ all over them, but soon it becomes not enough for them, and they begin looking elsewhere.  Churches and denominations find solace in legalism and routine, models and strategy.  Social agencies fall to the other side of the fence, losing Christ among the bustle of changing society and improving neighborhoods.

What might a truly redemptive community look like?  One that gives everything it has to Christ, and then waits to see what might come out of it?  A family that is so devoted to reflecting the brilliant light of Christ that everything they do spreads light in the darkness?

I’ll be honest, its not as easy to focus on Christ as it sounds.  Staring at the sun is not always fun.  It usually ends up burning a hole in the back of your eyes.  What might happen to our spiritual family if all we did was focus on the revolutionary Christ?  We’re about to find out…

*One simple step in this process has been reading through the materials put up on RUrevolutionary.com.  This is a site that is devoted to taking the focus off church, and putting it back on the subversive Christ, who overturned a whole country, empire, and the whole world!  There are some sweet ebooks we are studying together, and asking ourselves what it means for us today.  I’ll keep you all up to date on what we discover!