Crayons for the City: Reneighboring Communities of Faith to Rebuild Neighborhoods of Hope

When a fire severely burned a small boy and displaced his family it left lingering marks on the entire neighborhood. As a community pastor Dr. Kevin Yoho not only witnessed the visible signs of despair but also came to understand the pain hidden in the flames. He will be your guide as you step outside your organizational structures through the practice of what he calls reneighboring. Crayons for the City is about training leaders to be a new kind of community network engineer who will realign their organizations priorities resources and values to serve the public good. Its a story about how one community of faith improved the lives of hundreds of families by taking a walk across the street with fresh expressions of the good news. How do leaders grow and change--from holding on to ineffective ministry models to building new connections of grace and gratitude? The journey is not an easy one for most. Crayons for the City starts with the readers own context and offers a new methodology of how to engage it. Awaken your own capacity to change the world. All you need to begin is this book and a box of crayons. FOR THE BACK COVER: Crayons for the City is a practical inspiring insightful example of how a traditional church in a troubled urban neighborhood can become re-neighbored and have a transformative impact on its community. Decades of creative front-line urban ministry give Kevin Yoho the credibility to speak convincingly and correctively to the church in the city. --Bob Lupton veteran urban activist; founder of FCS Urban Ministries; author of Toxic Charity Charity Detox and Theirs is the Kingdom This book is a must-read for anyone with a burden and vision for new hope for the city. Kevin Yoho uses his extensive experience in church and community leadership to offer fresh ways to breathe life into our aging and marginal urban neighborhoods. He shows how congregations and other groups through intention and design become strategic neighbors offering real relationship genuine encouragement and real hope to those who have gone too long without it. --E. Stanley Ott President Vital Churches Institute It is much easier to duplicate and replicate than to incarnate but Kevin Yohos engrossing Crayons for the City is a showcase exhibit on how to move from franchise church to artisan church. Yohos love for the city and its people beams on every page as he traces the local-color particularities that lead to the universal principles. --Leonard Sweet author; professor (Drew University George Fox University Tabor College); founder of preachthestory.com FOR THE FRONT PAGES: Kevin Yoho gets it.Crayons for the Citygets it.The book tells the story of one pastors commitment to reconnect a struggling urban church with its struggling neighborhood in ways that transformed them both. It also invites readers to do something similar in their own way in their own location.The book is filled with practical insights and wisdom undergirded at every point by a profound theology of love and hope. --Dale T. Irvin President and Professor of World Christianity New York Theological Seminary Twenty years ago when we started The Simple Way we decided to worshipon Sundayat the church closest to us. Im glad we did. Kevin Yoho was the pastor. I remember hearing him challenge bad theology and the stigma of our neighborhood known by many as the Badlands. Kevin said this: Dont forget what they said about Nazareth . . . nothing good could come from there.Kevin Yoho knew that God shows up in the margins. Yoho is a gifted theologian and urbanologist--helping people unpack the mystery of the incarnation . . . this idea that God put skin on and moved into the neighborhood and invites us to follow. I remember hearing another pastor tell me that he initially thought we were missionaries here in the Badlands but then he realized that we were actually missionaries to the Church--inviting the church to come back to