This episode starts a series exploring the five historical eras of city and rescue missions. It highlights how these movements, born from the Great Awakenings, innovated to address urban problems like poverty and spiritual emptiness. Key figures like Thomas Chalmers and Johann Hinrich Wichern laid the philosophical groundwork, emphasizing “locality” and a comprehensive social safety net. This episode explains the crucial distinction between the strategic “City Mission Society” and the tactical “City Mission,” and how the rise of the modern welfare state led to a specialization of rescue missions, focusing primarily on evangelism, homelessness, and addiction, while still aiming for holistic transformation.

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