Urban Current

by Charles Lyons Whatever your address, you live in an urbanized world. Cities run the world. The powers, ideas, and influences of urban centers impact every person on the planet.

by Charles Lyons “Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it cost a man His life, […]

by Charles Lyons No one can deny our troubled racial history. Lies, broken treaties, and firewater pretty much defined our relationship with the American Indians as the new nation took shape. Others came, and the […]

by Charles Lyons Jeremiah Lanphier was a single, middle-age businessman with no family. Ministering in the dark slums of Hell’s Kitchen in the 1850s, he found himself spiritually, emotionally, and physically drained from his work.

by Charles Lyons “As a young man, with a well-earned street name of Satan, James Anderson said he could pull the trigger, drop his victim’s body at the edge of town, stop to eat chicken […]

by Charles Lyons Should the Gospel preached in an Iowa cornfield be any different from the Gospel preached in Times Square?

by Charles Lyons “Hubris, racial tension, myopic politicians, and the woeful auto industry brought this iconic American city to its knees.” So begins the one-year TIME magazine project back in 2009 titled “Notown,” chronicling “A […]

by Charles Lyons I hadn’t been to Albert Lea for several years but it was family reunion time. I pulled off the interstate and headed to Walmart to pick up some supplies. I was blown […]

by Charles Lyons This July I mark, celebrate, and praise God for 40 years serving my church family. I have been privileged to shepherd the Armitage congregation in Chicago for a generation.

by Charles Lyons The world you grew up in is not the world you are going to grow old in. “With fragile growth in Europe and the United States, the shift in an economic balance […]