I Want My City

"The Gospel is not placeless." — Chris Elisara, opening devotional (John 1:14; Jeremiah 29:7)

The Oceania deep dive began with a devotional truth that set the frame for everything that followed. Chris Elisara, drawing from the Word becoming flesh in a particular place and from Jeremiah's command to seek the welfare of the city of exile, named what city mission workers know in their bones: God is not generic. God incarnates. God is local.

Greig Whitaker is an expression of that truth. He serves with the Salvation Army in the City of Ryde, Australia. His city has a name. His people have faces. And the journey that brought him to where he is now began not with a programme but with a God who said something he didn't expect.

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 God seemed to be doing in cities where leaders had begun to think beyond their own congregation's growth.

What we heard from Oceania 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. That recognition did not impose the framework onto Oceania's story. It let Oceania's story help us understand what the emerging language was trying to describe.

What we heard from Oceania

Oceania is not one context. Australia's post-Christendom cities, New Zealand's bicultural inheritance, and the Pacific Island networks each carry their own history, their own church culture, and their own relationship between Christian community and civic life. The deep dive conversation centred largely on Australian experience — and specifically on what is happening in and around Sydney's western suburbs, where Greig Whitaker serves.

But the theological frame that opened the conversation was wider than any one city. Chris Elisara grounded the listening in the incarnation: the Word became flesh and moved into the neighbourhood (John 1:14). And in Jeremiah's command to the exiles: seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you (Jeremiah 29:7). These are not abstract texts. They describe a posture — one that is local, committed, and oriented toward the city's flourishing rather than the church's growth.

A reorientation, not a programme

Greig did not always love his city. He served it — but for his own purposes.

"I served the city so they would come to my church," he says. "I was an abusive lover of my city." The image is harsh, but honest. It describes a posture that many church leaders recognise, even if they have never named it so directly: using city engagement as a strategy for congregational growth rather than an act of genuine love.

One day, walking in a local park, he was praying for a few more people to fill his church. God interrupted him. "You do not love your city," the impression came. Then, a few moments later: "You do not know your city."

Not a rebuke designed to crush, but a diagnosis designed to reorient. You cannot love what you do not know. And you cannot know a city you are only ever asking to give you something.

"God stopped me. I was asking for a few more. And He said: 'I want My city.'"

That moment — and the repentance it prompted — became the foundation for everything that followed. The city belongs to God. It is not a mission field to be harvested for the church's benefit. It is a community for whom Christ died, and in whose flourishing God has a deep and specific interest. Greig describes the posture that emerged from that reorientation as becoming friends to the city's brokenness — not as a strategy for conversion, but as an expression of genuine love for the people and places God loves.

Finding others who share the burden

With the new orientation came a new question: who else is doing this? Greig's journey into city movement work began with a pizza dinner, years ago, with a small group of leaders who shared the same burden — among them Roger Sutton, Dave King from the UK, and Ian Shelton. That gathering was unremarkable on the surface. Its fruit has been anything but.

The image Greig uses for what city movement relationships make possible is a railway track. The relationships themselves are the tracks — the deeper and stronger they are, the more mission can be carried into the city. You don't build tracks to run one train. You build them so that what needs to move between communities can move freely, at scale, over time.

"The deeper and stronger those tracks are, the more mission can be carried into the city."

This relational infrastructure is built through oneness tables — structured gatherings where church leaders from different traditions sit together with Jesus at the centre, rather than their own institutional interests. The posture is one of reconciled diversity: not agreement on everything, but protected relationships across difference. "Walk together in all things," Greig says, "and work together on some things." The first is a commitment to the relationship. The second is where collaboration happens. But you cannot sustain the second without the first.

What 55 senior leaders said

Perhaps the most striking moment in the Oceania deep dive came from a research gathering: an Australian evangelism roundtable convening 55 senior church leaders. The question on the table was one that sounds simple but rarely gets answered directly: what would it take for every Australian to hear the gospel before 2033?

The leaders wrote 450 words. The responses were compiled and analysed. Ninety percent of the leaders, across their different traditions and contexts, pointed to the same thing: the unity of the church is the most important factor for the evangelisation of Australia.

Not a new programme. Not a new technology. Not a new theological framework. The unity of the church.

"90% of 55 senior church leaders said: the unity of the church is what it will take. Not in spite of our differences. Through them."

This convergence is not accidental. It reflects what Australian leaders have been learning on the ground: that the fragmented church, no matter how energetic in its individual parts, cannot saturate a nation. But a connected church — one that can act together, pray together, and speak with a coherent and unified witness — is a different matter entirely. "Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples." Unity is not only an ecclesiological virtue. It is an evangelistic one.

Early patterns we later recognized

Before we had a shared language for describing how city movements grow, we were listening to what Oceania leaders were already doing. Several patterns stood out — not as points in a framework being applied, but as discoveries made by leaders who had arrived at them through hard-won experience.

The first was an honest reckoning with motive. Before Greig could serve his city well, he had to acknowledge that he had been serving it for the wrong reasons — using it as a source of congregational growth rather than loving it for its own sake. That internal reorientation — repentance, really — preceded everything else. You cannot build a city movement on motives you have not examined.

The second was the priority of relationships that exist for no immediate purpose. The pizza dinner with Roger Sutton, Dave King, and Ian Shelton was not a meeting to plan a strategy. It was a gathering of leaders who shared a burden and needed to find each other. The railway tracks came before any train. What the shared language would later try to describe as the relational step was already being practised here — quietly, without a name for it, as the necessary precondition for everything else.

The third was the discovery — through research, not theory — that senior church leaders already knew the answer to the national mission question. Unity. The 90% finding from 55 leaders was not a directive handed down. It was a recognition rising up from practitioners who had come to the same conclusion independently. Whatever shared framework might describe this, the leaders had already been living toward it.

The fourth was the emergence of a structural role that exists not to lead a congregation but to serve the whole church of the city. The local city mission catalyst is a formally different kind of position — one whose purpose is to make it easier for churches to find each other, collaborate, and stay in relationship. That structural innovation, once named, would prove to have echoes in very different contexts around the world.

Common practices that seemed transferable

When we look back at what we heard from Oceania 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 Oceania on this point was less about urban research than about honest self-examination. Greig's park moment was, at its core, a Trace movement: a clear-eyed look at the actual state of the church's relationship to the city — including its own complicity in treating the city as a resource rather than a community to love. Seeing that clearly was the precondition for anything that followed.

Chris Elisara's opening theological frame adds a second dimension: the incarnation and Jeremiah 29:7 as the lens through which to read the city. God is not placeless. Neither is the church's calling. Understanding your city — its wounds, its rhythms, its people — is the beginning of faithful local mission.

What we heard from Oceania on this point: that the relational infrastructure for mission has to be built before the mission needs it. The pizza dinner happened before there was a movement to join. The oneness tables were established before any joint programme was planned. The tracks were laid so that trains could run later — not the other way around.

This relational infrastructure is built through oneness tables — structured gatherings where church leaders from different traditions sit together with Jesus at the centre rather than their own institutional interests. The posture is reconciled diversity: not agreement on everything, but protected relationships across difference. "Walk together in all things, and work together on some things." The first commitment makes the second possible.

What we heard from Oceania on this point: that church unity is not a secondary concern for leaders serious about city mission — it is, according to practitioners who have done the work, the primary one. The 55-leader roundtable did not produce that finding because someone told them unity was important. It surfaced because leaders from across traditions, independently, had come to the same conclusion through experience.

The oneness movement in Australia is the structural expression of that conviction. Appearing together — not as 140 separate congregations but as a connected movement — is itself a form of witness. "Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples." Unity here is not an aspiration. It is an evangelistic strategy.

The structural expression of the oneness journey in Australia is beginning to take shape. Oneness tables — where "my church" language gives way to "we church" — are multiplying. A new role is being created: the local city mission catalyst, a dedicated position to serve the church of the city rather than any single congregation within it.

Three buckets define the role: create opportunities for churches to encounter one another, build onboarding systems so that new participants can enter easily, and develop the structures that make ongoing collaboration sustainable. The role is not a pastor of churches. It is a servant of the whole — someone whose job is to make it easier for the rest of the church to be the church together.

The model they have developed — Find Your PLACE, Find Your PERSON, Find Your PARTNER — gives church leaders a practical language for entering the oneness journey. It is not a grand restructuring of denominations. It is an invitation to begin where you are, with one relationship, and let the tracks grow from there.

Greig describes where the Australian movement was three years ago as "on the edges" — a conversation happening in corners, among a few, that felt marginal to the mainstream of Australian church life. He describes where it is now differently: "It's a shout across Australian Christendom."

That shift — from edge to centre, from whisper to shout — is what looks, in retrospect, like transfer in its early stages. No single event caused it. The pizza dinner. The oneness tables. The roundtable. The research. The new role. The relationships that became tracks. Cumulatively, an ecosystem formed in which the oneness conversation could travel faster and further than any individual leader could carry it alone.

God created in "relational connectedness," Greig observes — in the telescope's vast interconnected cosmos, in the microscope's intricate cellular networks, in the deep structures of nature itself. The church in oneness is not a human innovation. It is a return to design. "My church thrives in We church." Not despite the difference — through it.

"Three years ago, this was on the edges. Now it's a shout across Australian Christendom. We didn't manufacture that momentum. We laid the tracks."

Contextual practices from Oceania

Some of what we heard from Oceania is specific to the Australian Christendom context — a majority-Christian cultural inheritance that has lost much of its institutional weight, and a church learning to recover its missional identity from within that particular history. These practices may raise useful questions for other contexts, but they emerged from conditions that are not universal.

The oneness table as a structured practice

The oneness table — a facilitated gathering of church leaders from different traditions, centred on Jesus rather than institutional interests — is a specifically designed practice for the Australian Christendom context, where denominational boundaries are real but shared civic concern is also present. The structure protects relationships across difference: leaders commit to walking together in all things, and choose to work together on some things. The first commitment is unconditional; the second is contextual. Leaders in other contexts might adapt the structure differently, but the underlying logic — protecting the relationship before needing the collaboration — seems to travel.

The local city mission catalyst role

Creating a formal, dedicated role to serve the whole church of a city — rather than any single congregation — is a structural innovation specific to the Australian context, where enough churches are present to warrant such a coordinator but where they have historically operated in isolation from one another. The three-bucket design (encounter opportunities, onboarding systems, collaboration structures) is a model that emerges from this specific challenge. Other cities and regions might need a different structural expression of the same underlying conviction: that someone needs to be responsible for the whole, not just the parts.

Find Your PLACE, PERSON, PARTNER

This entry-ramp model — giving leaders a simple, practical language for beginning the oneness journey wherever they are — is a contextual response to the specific challenge of lowering the activation energy for church collaboration in a fragmented landscape. The model works in the Australian setting because the relational culture supports it and the theological conviction behind it is widely shared. Leaders elsewhere might need different language or different entry points — but the principle of making the first step accessible and specific seems transferable.

The evangelism roundtable as a discernment tool

The decision to convene 55 senior church leaders around a single shared question — and then to listen carefully to what the aggregate of their responses revealed — is a specifically shaped discernment practice. It assumed a level of relational trust among those leaders that made honest written response possible, and a research posture that was genuinely curious rather than merely confirmatory. The finding (90% pointing to unity) was more powerful because it emerged from the leaders' own voices, not from an imposed conclusion.

What Oceania contributed to the emerging pathway

Oceania's contribution to the listening series was, in some ways, the most personal of any conversation. It was not primarily a story of scale or data or structural innovation. It was a story of a leader who encountered God in a park and came out of that encounter with a fundamentally different orientation — and then discovered, slowly, that others shared the same reorientation and that together they could build something none of them could build alone.

What stayed with us from this conversation, and what shaped how we heard everything that followed:

• The reorientation as the first move. Before any method, any structure, any network — Greig's story began with an honest reckoning with his own motives. The shift from "my church" to "my city" is not primarily organisational. It is a change of heart, prompted by an encounter with what God actually wants. That posture of honest self-examination as the beginning of city mission work shaped how we listened to every subsequent conversation.
• Railway tracks as a metaphor for mission infrastructure. The image of relationships as tracks — built before the trains run, strong enough to carry what needs to travel — became one of the clearest pictures in the whole listening series of what it means to invest in the relational preconditions for movement work. You build the tracks before you know what they will carry.
• "We church" as the unit of mission. The language of "we church" — and the conviction that "my church thrives in We church" — named something about the nature of city mission that resonated across every subsequent conversation. No single congregation can serve a city alone. The whole church needs to think of itself as a whole, not as competing parts.
• Friends to the brokenness. Greig's reorientation was not toward strategy but toward relationship — becoming genuinely present to the city's pain, its loneliness, its need, without an agenda to make the church look good. That posture of being friends to the city's brokenness — not useful to it, but present with it — is a kind of faithfulness the listening series kept returning to across very different contexts.

Lessons for city leaders

1. Examine your motive before you examine your method. Greig's breakthrough did not begin with a better strategy. It began with an honest question: are you loving your city, or using it? That internal reckoning is the beginning of faithful city work — and it has to be revisited regularly.
2. Find the others first. The pizza dinner happened before there was anything to plan. Finding the other leaders in your city who share the same burden — and eating with them, praying with them, simply being with them — is the first structural act of building a city movement.
3. Lay the tracks before the trains need to run. Relational infrastructure built in ordinary time carries mission in urgent time. The oneness tables, the shared meals, the protected relationships across difference — none of this was built because a crisis was coming. It was built because it is the right way to be the church together.
4. Take seriously what practitioners already know. The 90% finding was not a directive from above. It rose from the accumulated experience of 55 leaders who had been doing the work. In your context, the practitioners around you may already know the answer to the hardest question. Ask them.
5. Create a role for the whole. If there is no one whose job is to serve the whole church of the city, that work will not get done. The local city mission catalyst role is a structural answer to a structural problem — someone who exists not to lead one congregation but to make the whole more possible.

Questions for your city

1. If God said to you "you do not love your city" — would it be true? What would honest self-examination reveal about why you serve it?
2. Who are the other leaders in your city who share the same burden for the whole city? Have you found them? Have you eaten together?
3. What would it take for every person in your city to hear the gospel — and does church unity appear on that list?
4. Is there anyone in your city's church network whose whole role is to serve the whole church, rather than any single congregation?
5. What would your PLACE be — one neighbourhood or community where you commit to being genuinely present, not as a strategist but as a friend?

These field notes draw from the Lausanne Cities Oceania 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.