(Tim) Our parents lived in Cambridge on Mass. Ave when they were first married. Dad was I-V's first staff worker there in New England (it was all his terrritory) and he and Mud (Mother) attended Park Street Church when Ockenga was in his prime. David, Nathan, and I bought our M.Divs at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and while living on Boston's North Shore, were on the most intimate terms with the city's best and brightest.
So I was interested to see the kind of vision being cast for the ministry
of the PCA there, now. Turns out the PCA has a congregation there called Citylife Church. The man leading Citylife's work is "Reverend Doctor Stephen Um" and, from the church's web site, here's how Dr. Um describes himself and summarizes his own philosophy of ministry on his congregation's web site:
First, Dr. Um describes...
himself:
Having received most of his higher education from
institutions
near the Boston area, Dr. Um has acquired a unique
awareness for
the various intellectual and cultural issues confronting
Bostonians.
He is a graduate of Phillips Academy
[check out those pledge totals; high school has gotten expensive since I attended] at Andover, and Boston University where he read Sociology and
Philosophy. After
receiving a call to ministry, he entered Seminary at
Gordon-Conwell
Theological Seminary where he received an M. Div. and a
post-graduate
degree (Th.M.) in Biblical Theology. He received his Ph.D.
in
New Testament studies at St. Mary's College (University of
St.
Andrews) in Scotland. Furthermore, since the beginning of
2002,
Dr. Um has been teaching New Testament studies as a
faculty member
of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He has a burden to
propagate
the vision of kingdom expansion through church planting to
prospective
church planters studying in our nation's seminaries.
For the past 16 years, Dr. Um and his wife (who has received a degree in
Family
Ministry
and Counseling from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) have been
involved in
several Presbyterian Churches throughout the Northeastern part of the
country.
They began their ministry by serving at a church in Hartford, CT for a
couple
of years before planting a multi-cultural college church at Brown
University
in
Providence, RI. From there, they moved down to New York City for five
years where
they sensed God's call to plant a young professional ministry.
He is now the Senior Minister of Citylife Church in Boston, and the
author of
The Theme of Temple Christology in John's Gospel, The Library of
New Testament Studies 2006, T & T Clark International (formerly the
Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series). Dr. Um
is a member of the Board of Directors for The Gospel Coalition,
for which he serves as the Secretary. Citylife Church in center city
Boston is an ethnically diverse group of professional and creative
urbanites.
Dr. Um and his wife have three children, Noël, Adeline, and Charlotte.
Next, Dr. Um describes his philosophy of ministry:
What is the greatest, most crying need in the American church
today?
"I believe the greatest need for today's
American church is for its individual
members to make a radical commitment to the centrality of the Gospel
as
Christ's finished work for every aspect of their life and mission. We
need to
have the eyes of our hearts enlightened (Eph 1.18) in order to savor
the
supremacy of Christ in all things and to move away from anything that
chokes or
blinds our ability to value his worth and glory. Jesus perfectly lived
the
life that we should have lived by transferring his righteousness to his
people
so that our religious piety or social morality would be exposed for
what it is,
a form of self-salvation. The church needs to be aware of her tendency
to
focus on secondary, peripheral issues, that is addressing
behavioristic
symptoms, rather than on central issues of historic confessional
Christianity,
namely justification by faith alone on Jesus perfect record which gives
us a
vital relationship with a Holy God. The crying need in our churches is
for
prophetic voices to expose the limitations of all other cultural
worldviews
(e.g. traditional, modern, or postmodern) while offering an ultimate
satisfaction and substitutionary redemption which frees us from all
kinds of
enslavement. The confidence and humility which Christ's righteousness
provides
will enable us to embrace this incarnational responsibility to be
secure with
ourselves while loving God and others. This commitment to a
contextualized
gospel will cause the church to be missional and counter cultural, and
therefore more relevant and theologically sensitive in deconstructing
other
philosophical paradigms while illuminating both religious and secular
people to
engage in an organic relationship with the person of Jesus."
- Reverend Doctor Stephen Um
Reverend Doctor Stephen Um is explicitly targeting "an ethnically diverse group of professional and creative
urbanites." Sadly, I fear he will only confirm Boston's best and brightest in their conviction that world history has been awaiting their arrival and that the Gospel is extraneous to their burden of actual bloody sins.
