Now Available! A new book by Kevin Yoho. Awaken your own capacity to change the world. All you need to begin is this book and a box of crayons.
Now Available! A new book by Kevin Yoho. Awaken your own capacity to change the world. All you need to begin is this book and a box of crayons.
Reneighboring the Community of Faith to Rebuild Neighborhoods of Hope
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.
Bring hope to your community team! Purchase copies of Crayons for the City today from Amazon (author's Amazon Associate link), or direct from the publisher (click below), or wherever books and ebooks are sold.
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.
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.
DESCRIPTION FROM THE BACK COVER: 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 organization’s priorities, resources, and values to serve the public good. It’s 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 reader’s 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.
Available from Amazon (Affiliate Link) or directly from the publisher, Wipf and Stock.
Kevin Yoho gets it. Crayons for the City gets it. The book tells the story of one pastor’s 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.