“It is lots easier to duplicate and replicate than incarnate, but Kevin Yoho’s engrossing Crayons for the City is a showcase exhibit on how to move from franchise church to artisan church. Yoho’s love for the city and its people beams on every page as he traces the local-color particularities that lead to the universal principles.”

“In Crayons for the City Pastor Kevin paints a revealing portrait of how a church can succeed at reneighboring itself and impacting an entire neighborhood. He demonstrates how a clubhouse with a steeple can become a lighthouse that gives light not only to the city but eventually to the nation and the world.”

“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 breath 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.”

“Kevin figured out that urban neighborhood kids mirror rather than mask their true feelings. He learned how to use art and kids’ drawings to reveal the depth of their despair, and so you will see how the arts and school fit into the story of renewal.

For sure, Kevin honors all of us by taking our stuff, then translating, correcting, nuancing, and applying it in urban transformation, but his own effervescent creativity also takes him beyond what most of us imagined or achieved in other times and cities.”

“Twenty years ago when we started The Simple Way, we decided to worship on Sunday at the church closest to us. I’m 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: ‘Don’t 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 the neighborhood, and find Jesus on these broken streets. Pastors like Kevin Yoho are reminding the Church why she exists. And it is not just to have worship services on Sundays.”