Yesterday a friend of mine and I launched a hyper-local experiment for Grand Rapids, MI called ZOOMAE. In short, ZOOMAE exists to empower dreamers to stimulate spiritual renewal in Grand Rapids through publishing, networking, and missional projects. ZOOMAE is the english phonetic spelling of the greek word for “yeast” and is used by Jesus in Matt. 13 and Luke 13 to metaphorically describe the Kingdom of Heaven’s explosive growth and transformative power.

I simply love this metaphor! Yeast is incredibly tiny, simple, ordinary, normal, and seemingly insignificant. Yeast is also transformative and stimulates explosive growth when embedded and distributed throughout the locality of a lump of dough. Jesus says the same thing of the Kingdom of Heaven, of the Reign of God when those who are stewards and partners of that reign (the Church) are as equally embedded, distributed, planted, and partnered. Even though seemingly insignificant, normal in appearance, ordinary, very simple and incredibly small, individual Jesus-followers will exact tremendous transformational and stimulative influence on localities. When the Church hyper-locally lives out Her identity as the continuing presence of Jesus Christ by proclaiming the good news of the Reign of God, people and places will be transformed. When simple, ordinary, normal followers of Jesus live radical, embedded lives within particular localities, radical transformation and explosive growth will happen.

That is the vision of ZOOMAE: to empower simple, ordinary people of Grand Rapids to dream big for God in their city to stimulate spiritual renewal and life transformation.

In large ways the experiment was born out of several conversations among friends around the local watering hole. For some time a few of us have wondered how it would look and what would happen if we considered ourselves pastors to the city. Not a building or organization, but the whole city. It was also born out of a desire to empower local practitioners, pastors, leaders, and activists to speak prophetically into the city through the tangible, written medium of books. These two ideas morphed into a broader effort to empower Grand Rapids Christians to own their city in a way that would see the Kingdom of God descend and bring transformation.

Who knows where this will go over the coming months. Now we are finishing up the organizational ground work (i.e. board of directors and 501(c)3 application) and beginning to lay the ground work the rest of the year for the big launch in 2010. Over the coming weeks I will fill in some of the details like the publishing, networking, and missional aspects, as well as the coming theme for 2010. Until then, check out the Facebook page.

be His; just do,
-jeremy