vision

What is CityLove?

CityLove is an initiative to display God’s love in the neighborhoods within Providence, Rhode Island. Stemming from Renaissance Church, we are a collective that beautifies the neighborhood through meeting practical needs, making art, and building community. Our current initiatives are a grocery delivery, a street outreach to build bridges with the homeless community, and the occasional mural project.

Not only do we strive to bring hope to the city in tangible ways, but we love to create safe spaces for dialogue about spirituality, particularly what Jesus has to do with our everyday lives in Providence. We love the city of Providence.

Providence

Among cities Providence is small but overflowing with amazing food, art, and culture. It’s rich in diversity and history. It’s famous for world-class universities, proximity to the ocean, interesting architecture, and a weird, progressive vibe. It’s a wonderful place to live.

The thing about Providence is that it's also famous for being one of the most post-Christian cities in America. Providence is a city where the majority of people do not claim to know the God of the Bible in a personal way. The city is filled with agnostics and atheists, lapsed Catholics and Protestants, and even a small segment of antagonists. Most, though, have little interest in God—and less in developing an intimate relationship with the person of Jesus Christ.

This state of things in our city is not something we are judgmental about. We have no right to look down on how anyone lives or believes. But we genuinely feel broken-hearted that so many people seem to be ignoring something that has such power to satisfy the soul. We love the city and the many beautiful people in this city. We dream of a new Providence that isn’t famous for not knowing God but is famous for its depth in God!

Passion

The reasons for the widespread aversion to Christianity in our city are complex. Much of it has to do with deep misconceptions regarding what Christianity is all about. Many have experienced hypocritical church people, and some have even been abused by religious authorities. Social media is dripping with rants from political zealots, supposedly representing Christianity, which range from the insulting and disrespectful to the downright psychotic. All this has caused many people to take several steps back and say “no thank you”. It’s understandable.

But despite the widespread suspicion and disinterest there lies within the human heart a craving to be connected to the Creator. We all want to be happy and to fulfill the purpose for which we were designed. Even you reading this, whoever you are, if you're honest with yourself, have had moments, or maybe just one moment of clarity and honesty, perhaps during a time of crisis or contemplation, when you felt the gnawing sense that there must be more. Kierkegaard called it 'angst'; Sartre called it 'nausea'; Buddha called it 'suffering'—that unbearable sense of life's overwhelming absurdity and the exacting urgency of the need for meaning. It is this hidden craving, shared by so many people, that motivates us in the CityLove initiative.

There are many good things that we want to see happen when we are out in the neighborhood. We want to come alongside all the wonderful efforts happening around us to make her more beautiful. We want to help people in practical ways. We want to empower the poor.  We want to fuel opportunities for the under-resourced. Absolutely. But our deepest passion has to do with finding those curious souls outside the walls of the church who secretly want nothing more than to be found by God. This characteristic of searching for the lost marked the ministry of Jesus, and we believe it continues to this very day through his people. We are trying to be faithful to that call to search for the lost and bring them home. This is our passion.