Cultivate Roots

"Help courageous leaders cultivate networks that transform cities." That is the mission of the City Leaders Collective. Every word is doing work — but the one that matters most is cultivate.

Rob Kelly has spent years coaching city network leaders across North America. He has seen what happens when leaders chase fruit without cultivating roots. He has watched city movements close down — not because the city wasn't ready, but because the internal health of the network wasn't strong enough to carry the weight of what it was trying to do.

He has also seen what flourishing looks like. And the difference, consistently, is underground.

Why we listened this way

These field notes come from a listening journey, not a fixed framework. We were looking for two things: common practices God seems to be using across very different city contexts, and unique contextual practices other leaders might adapt for their own settings.

Read more about the listening posture

These deep dives were not designed to confirm a pre-existing model. The invitation was simpler and more patient: to slow down and genuinely listen — to regional leaders describing what God seems to be doing in their own contexts, in their own words.

The TRUST language had not yet fully emerged when this conversation took place. We were listening without a framework to test — looking simply for what decades of North American city movement practice had actually taught its practitioners about what works and what fails.

What we heard from North America stayed with us through all the conversations that followed. When the shared language began to take shape, we found it naming patterns we had already encountered here. The evidence came before the names — and North America had some of the most carefully documented evidence of any conversation in the series.

What we heard from North America

North America is not one context. Canada and the United States carry different church histories, different relationships between faith and public life, and different cultural assumptions about what community leadership looks like. Within each country, coastal cities and interior cities, legacy denominations and newer movements, neighbourhoods of deep poverty and centres of concentrated wealth — all of these create city movement challenges that cannot be addressed with a single approach.

What the City Leaders Collective has done, working across this diversity, is build a body of practice — and a diagnostic language — grounded in what actually happens when city movements thrive or fail. Their current reach: 82 established city networks, 23 developing, and roughly 100 leaders who have moved through their coaching cohort. The current cohort has 20 cities. In a 2025 survey, 73% of participating cities reported experiencing growth. Many are moving from operating a single network to building meta-networks — coordinated ecosystems of networks that reach far greater scale than any one alone.

The failure pattern

Rob has a sobering observation: "We've seen a number of city movements close shop — and in almost every case, it was not because the city wasn't receptive. It was because the movement's internal health wasn't strong enough."

That diagnosis shaped everything the CLC does. The North American city movement landscape is not short of activity. It is, in many contexts, short of maturity — the kind of deep root system that keeps a movement alive through leadership transitions, funding gaps, relational strain, and the long arc of work that city transformation actually requires. Activity without maturity produces movements that look impressive for a season and collapse when the conditions change.

"You cannot cultivate what you do not understand. And you cannot understand without sitting still long enough to listen."

What they are looking for in a leader

Daria Nardozza, who leads the City Leaders Collective's work in Montréal and coaches alongside Rob, has a shorthand for what they look for in city movement leaders: humble, hungry, coachable, visionary, collaborative, prayerful. Those six qualities are not accidental. Each one guards against a specific failure mode she has seen derail promising movements.

Humble, because pride kills collaboration. Hungry, because passivity will not sustain the work across years. Coachable, because the leader who thinks they already know will stop learning before the city needs them to. Visionary, because without a compelling picture of what flourishing could look like, others will not follow. Collaborative, because no single leader is the movement. And prayerful, because city transformation is ultimately a work of the Spirit, not a programme to be managed.

The CLC's coaching relationship is, in part, a way of providing what city movement leaders most often lack: friends on the journey. People who know the work, understand its specific pressures, and can walk alongside without an agenda of their own. The isolation of the city movement leader — carrying a vision for an entire city, often without peers who understand the weight of it — is one of the most underacknowledged risks in the field.

Early patterns we later recognized

Before we had a shared language for describing how city movements grow, we were listening to what North American practitioners had already learned — often through costly experience. Several patterns stood out, not as theoretical proposals but as hard-won discoveries.

The first was what Rob calls the soil work: understanding your city — its history, its culture, its demographics, its church assets — before attempting to serve it. In the North American context, where the impulse toward activity is strong and measurable outcomes are expected quickly, the discipline of slowing down to understand before acting proved to be countercultural and essential. The city movement leaders who had lasted were consistently the ones who had done this patient work first.

The second was the relationship between the leader's internal health and the movement's external reach. The trunk has to be sound before the branches can bear fruit — and by trunk Rob means the leader's personal formation, the team's relational health, the clarity of theology and vision, and the financial sustainability of the work. None of these are glamorous. All of them are foundational. The movements Rob had watched close down were almost never failing at the branch level. They were failing at the trunk.

The third was the shift from single networks to meta-networks. North American cities already have widely distributed church presence — but presence alone does not produce coordination. The move from isolated networks to connected ecosystems was an early signal of something the whole listening series would return to: that the whole is not simply the sum of its parts. Something new becomes possible when networks connect that was not possible when they operated independently.

The fourth was a posture toward leadership development that Rob describes as "the genius is in the room." The CLC's coaching approach is not to transmit a model but to draw out what God has already placed in the leaders being walked with. That humility — the conviction that the knowledge belongs to the practitioners, not the coaches — shaped not only the CLC's approach to city movement leadership but the spirit in which the listening series itself was conducted.

Common practices that seemed transferable

When we look back at what we heard from North America through the lens of the TRUST language that emerged through later conversations, certain practices become easier to name. These are not claims that the framework was applied here — the shared language had not yet taken shape when this conversation took place. But what leaders described seems, in retrospect, to echo what Trace, Relate, Unite, Structure, and Transfer are pointing at.

What we heard from North America on this point: the discipline of understanding the city — its history, culture, geography, demographics, and church assets — as the necessary foundation for any faithful city work. In the tree framework Rob uses, this is the soil. You cannot plant without understanding the ground. And that understanding is not a prerequisite you complete once and move on from. It is an ongoing posture of attention and humility.

The City Leaders Collective draws a straight line from city theology to city action: the New Jerusalem as telos — God is in the business of human and city flourishing. The Four Greats as compass: the Great Commandment (love God), the Great Compassion (love neighbour), the Great Commission (make disciples), the Great Collaboration (do it together). But the Four Greats only translate into practice when the leader has first done the slow work of understanding where they are and who they are serving.

What we heard from North America on this point: that the internal health of a city movement is the condition of its relational reach, not its consequence. In the tree metaphor, this is the trunk — before you extend branches into the city, the trunk has to be sound. That means the leader's personal formation, the team's relational health, the clarity of theology and vision, the financial sustainability. Movements that extend their branches before tending their trunk are building on foundations that will not hold.

"We're not just making networks. We're making this a real job — a normative vocation that cities and churches and funders recognise as worth investing in."

The six qualities Daria looks for in a city movement leader (humble, hungry, coachable, visionary, collaborative, prayerful) are, among other things, a description of what a healthy trunk looks like from the inside. Pride kills collaboration. Passivity cannot sustain the work across years. The leader who has stopped learning will stop leading before the city needs them most. The six qualities are not a hiring checklist — they are a formation framework for the kind of leader whose internal roots can bear the weight of external ambition.

What we heard from North America on this point: the structural move from operating a single city network to building a meta-network — a coordinated ecosystem of networks that reaches far greater scale than any one alone. The principle behind this is ancient. Rob points to St. Patrick as an early practitioner: when Patrick evangelised chieftains, whole clans followed. The scale principle — reach a network leader and reach the network — is not a modern innovation. It is a rediscovery.

In North American cities, where the church is already distributed widely but often acting independently, the meta-network represents a structural opportunity to multiply what already exists rather than building from scratch. The fragmentation is real — but it is not final. Connected ecosystems produce possibilities that isolated networks cannot.

"Network effects: things that happen that you didn't initiate. In theological language, that's where the Holy Spirit is moving."

When Rob talks about network effects, he is describing the surprising fruit that emerges from connected ecosystems: collaborations that no one planned, resources that flow in unexpected directions, momentum that outlasts any individual leader's tenure. These are signs, he believes, of Spirit movement — not manufactured by strategy, but released by structural conditions that allow trust to flow.

What we heard from North America on this point: a 12-part diagnostic and development tool that moves from WHO (the cultivator — the leader's character and calling), through WHY (the roots — theology and vision), into WHAT (the trunk, fork, limbs, branches — the organisational and network architecture), toward HOW (the crown — unity of the church — and the fruit — city transformation).

At the centre of the framework is the Celtic Trinity Cross — a symbol of the triune God at the heart of the movement. The point: this is not a management model. It is a theological framework that happens to have practical application. The roots are not strategy. They are conviction about who God is, what cities are for, and what the church exists to do.

"Cultivate roots, not just chase fruit" is the corrective to the most common failure mode in city movement work: the leader so focused on visible outcomes that they neglect the invisible conditions that make those outcomes possible and durable.

What we heard from North America on this point: Rob's guiding phrase — "follow the Spirit and follow the science" — as a description of what it looks like for a city movement to grow in a disciplined and discerning way. By science, he means data: the kind of evidence that helps leaders understand what is working, what isn't, and where to focus. By Spirit, he means the discernment to know that the numbers alone do not determine the next step.

Together, the phrase describes a mature city movement leader: someone who is spiritually attentive enough to move when the Spirit moves, and intellectually honest enough to let data challenge their assumptions. Neither alone is sufficient. Spiritual sensitivity without evidence can become self-referential. Evidence without spiritual attentiveness can become mere programme management.

"The genius is in the room. We don't want to think we know it all — we want to draw out what God has already placed in the leaders we're walking with."

Contextual practices from North America

Some of what we heard from North America is specific to the particular shape of city movement work in a context with abundant church infrastructure, strong professional and organisational culture, and decades of accumulated practice — but also persistent fragmentation, leadership isolation, and the temptation to measure maturity by activity. These practices may raise useful questions for other contexts, but they emerged from conditions that are not universal.

The coaching cohort as a formation model

The CLC's coaching cohort — currently 20 cities per cohort, drawing on a cumulative pool of roughly 100 coached leaders — is a specifically North American expression of structured leadership development. It assumes that city movement leaders need peers, mentors, and a structured learning arc to develop the capacities the work demands. The isolation of city movement leadership in North America is real, and the cohort model addresses it by providing friends on the journey who understand the specific weight of the work. Leaders in other contexts may need different structures to achieve the same outcome.

The tree framework as a 12-part diagnostic

The tree framework — with its 12 components moving from the cultivator's character through roots, trunk, fork, limbs, branches, crown, and fruit — is a diagnostic tool developed in and for the North American context. Its theological grounding (the Celtic Trinity Cross at the centre, the New Jerusalem as telos, the Four Greats as compass) reflects a specifically North American evangelical theological culture. Leaders in other contexts might use the tree metaphor as a loose analogy while building their own diagnostic vocabulary from within their tradition.

Meta-network as a structural response to fragmentation

The meta-network concept — coordinating multiple networks into an ecosystem — is a specifically shaped response to the way the North American church is organised: many congregations, many networks, high infrastructure, high fragmentation. The structural solution (coordinate what already exists rather than building from scratch) is contextual to a landscape where the pieces are present but the connections are missing. In contexts where the church is smaller or more centralised, different structural responses may be needed.

Making city movement leadership a recognised vocation

Rob's observation — "we're making this a real job, a normative vocation that cities and churches and funders recognise as worth investing in" — describes a specifically North American challenge: that city movement leadership is often informal, poorly funded, and not recognised as a legitimate professional calling. The CLC's work to establish the vocation as real and worthy of investment is a contextual response to a context where the professional and institutional culture is strong enough to make that recognition meaningful.

What North America contributed to the emerging pathway

North America's contribution to the listening series was, in many ways, the most diagnostic of any conversation. It was not primarily a story of dramatic breakthrough but of accumulated learning — decades of watching what works, what fails, and what conditions make the difference. That kind of practitioner wisdom is rare, and it shaped how we heard everything that came after it.

What stayed with us from this conversation:

• The roots/soil distinction. The image of a city movement as a tree — with invisible root health as the condition of visible fruit — gave the whole listening series a vocabulary for talking about what fails when movements close down. It is almost never the branches. It is the trunk, or the roots, or the soil. That diagnostic language became part of how we understood everything else we heard.
• Activity without maturity as a named failure mode. The North American city movement landscape has no shortage of activity. What it sometimes lacks is the deep internal health that makes activity durable. Naming this explicitly — and identifying what maturity actually looks like in a city movement leader — was one of the most useful contributions of the whole series.
• "The genius is in the room." The coaching posture Rob and Daria model — drawing out rather than imposing, learning from practitioners rather than transmitting to them — shaped the spirit in which the listening series was conducted. We went to listen, not to teach. We expected to find wisdom already present. That expectation was consistently rewarded.
• "Follow the Spirit and follow the science." The phrase gave the listening series a way of thinking about discernment in city movement work — holding data and spiritual attentiveness together rather than treating them as alternatives. That both/and posture turned out to be present in very different forms across every subsequent conversation.

Lessons for city leaders

1. Cultivate roots before you chase fruit. The most common failure in city movement work is investing in visible outcomes before investing in the invisible foundations — the theology, the leader's formation, the relational health of the team — that make visible outcomes possible and durable.
2. Diagnose at the trunk before you extend the branches. When a city movement is struggling, the problem is rarely at the branch level. Look at the trunk: is the leader's personal formation sound? Is the team's relational health intact? Is the theology clear? Is the movement financially sustainable?
3. Know what you are looking for in a leader — and why. The six qualities Daria names (humble, hungry, coachable, visionary, collaborative, prayerful) each guard against a specific failure mode. A leader who lacks any one of them carries a specific risk into the movement they are building.
4. Find your peers. City movement leadership is isolating. Finding others who understand the weight of the work — coaches, colleagues, friends on the journey — is not a luxury. It is a formation practice that sustains leaders over the long arc.
5. Hold the Spirit and the data together. Neither alone is sufficient. Spiritual sensitivity without evidence can become self-referential. Evidence without spiritual attentiveness becomes programme management. The mature city movement leader holds both.

Questions for your city

1. Have you done the soil work — genuinely studied your city's history, culture, demographics, and church assets before deciding what to do?
2. If you looked honestly at your movement's internal health — the leader's formation, the team's relational health, the theological clarity, the financial sustainability — what would you find?
3. Are you operating a single network trying to serve a whole city? What would it look like to connect with other networks and build something that reaches further together?
4. Which of the six qualities — humble, hungry, coachable, visionary, collaborative, prayerful — is most underdeveloped in you right now?
5. Do you have friends on the journey — people who understand the specific weight of city movement leadership and who walk alongside without an agenda?

These field notes draw from the Lausanne Cities North America Deep Dive, part of the 2025–2026 continental listening series. Stories, reflections, and practices are reported as shared by participating leaders and have not been independently verified by Lausanne Cities.