Dhati Lewis is the founding pastor of Blueprint Church, a church-planting church in Atlanta, Georgia, and the president and founder of MyBLVD. He is also the author of both the Bible study and book, Among Wolves: Disciple Making in the City and Advocates: The Narrow Path to Racial Reconciliation. He was a main stage speaker at the 2023 Amplify Conference.
In the following interview, we discuss how Blueprint disciples its people to reach its urban community through a spirit of hospitality, the difference between church hurt and church harm, and how Blueprint simplifies evangelism so that anyone and everyone can do it.
We did a pretty lengthy interview with you back in 2018, right after you wrote Among Wolves, and you were giving birth to the idea of Blueprint Church and rolling it out for other churches. I’m curious about where you were then and what you’ve learned in those five years that have brought you to where you are now.
Yeah, it’s been a turbulent five years, but I think it’s been a turbulent five years for everybody in Christianity. I think what is happening right now is challenging all of us and the church to differentiate between what’s convenient and what’s essential.
One of the things that I think about is in 2001 the airline industry after 9 /11 went through a significant time, right? Because, if you remember it before 2001, you could take your loved ones almost all the way to the plane. But now when you go to the airports, you can’t even stop. The police officer’s like, Hurry up, keep it moving, keep it moving. What happened was the airline industry had to differentiate their core purposes and their core function and what’s convenient and what’s essential to accomplishing that.
And I think the church in a lot of ways is going through the same thing. After the pandemic, after all of the stuff that’s going on—pastors changing their careers, people attending online, people not coming back [to in-person church], people deconstructing, decolonizing—the church is fighting in a lot of ways for relevancy. And we’re having to fight through what’s essential and what’s convenient.
Blueprint Church hasn’t been exempt from that. We went through all of the same things that all the pastors are going through, [but we’re] building up a core. God is building back his church. There was some time where people were relocating, and not coming, and making different decisions, but just like most churches we are reestablishing that.
One of the things that I love, that has always stuck with me [is something Andy Stanley] wrote: “Marry your mission, but date your methods.” And I think the church is understanding that the mission has not changed, but we have to rethink and we have to retool [our methodology]. So Blueprint is going through that iteration, but we’re still committed to being a church planting church. We’re still in the same neighborhood. We’re still committed to a lot of the principles. We’re really excited about the season that God is doing, but it has definitely been through turbulence.
In the previous interview that we did with you, you brought up this idea that a lot of churches are just preachers preaching and people sitting in the pews, not really knowing what to do—a spectator kind of Christianity. So, what are some of the ways you’ve been able to call your people out into the neighborhood, put their faith into action, and also help them to grow spiritually?
Yeah, that’s one of the things that we have always been about—like the church both gathered and scattered, right? And I think that is so essential.
Our mission statement is to unleash healthy people to do ministry where life exists. We want our leaders and our people to be able to do ministry where they live, where they work, and where they worship. We can’t think about church as environments where it’s passive participation, where there’s one or two people who prepare all week and then you have a bunch of other people who sit and come and listen. We have to raise up missionaries.
One of the questions that I’ve been constantly wrestling with is how do we change the church from being a family of church members to a family of missionary disciple makers. God is calling us to be on mission for him, and [it’s] our responsibility to equip the saints for the work of service, for the mission, for the ministry. Because people that historically were coming to church are now not coming to church. So we have to raise up the missionaries that are being equipped to go out.
Yeah, that makes sense. So what are some of the unique ways that that works itself out in an urban setting?
I just think that we have to be a lot more explicit about doing ministry holistically: spiritually, emotionally, economically and socially. And I think that’s one of the things that as evangelicals we’ve oftentimes missed. We just believe that if you preach the gospel everything else will take care of itself. But what we recognize in the urban [setting] is that you have to preach the gospel, but there’s also a healing component to Jesus. Oftentimes Jesus says he proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom, but also he was doing healing, so there were both physical and tangible needs and spiritual needs.
One of the things that we oftentimes underestimate is that people are in their trauma. When I think about urban, I think about density and diversity, and whenever you have that there’s so many triggering things, especially in a time when there’s so much polarization in our country. We have learned to be divided about everything. We have divided over the pandemic, over politics or whether you wear a mask or not, whether COVID-19 even existed or not.
So I think one of the things that we have to do specifically in the urban context to show the beauty of the gospel is to show the unifying work of the gospel, that God through Christ has torn down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, rich and poor, Black and white. He’s torn down the dividing wall. And that’s why I’m committed to shifting our missiology from an ethnic missiology to a neighbor missiology. We’re simply asking the question, How do I reach my neighbor?
Blueprint uniquely does that by first, simply asking that question: How do I care for my neighbor? How do I love my neighbor? and especially when my neighbor no longer looks like me, talks like me, and acts like me. What’s unique about Blueprint is that we are in the largest Section 8 housing neighborhood in all of the Southeast—the Old Fourth Ward—but we’re also in the fastest-growing gentrifying community. The New York Times actually wrote an article about us in 2011, talking about the Old Fourth Ward in Atlanta being kind of a beacon of these worlds colliding. And I think that is an important observation to make, but I think there’s no better place to do it, but here. I mean, it’s the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. It is the place of so many different things. This is a place where the gospel is on display for us. So there’s a uniqueness and lots of challenges with that.
One of the things that we often confuse with Christianity is that we confuse maturity with middle-classism. We think that the more money you have in America the more mature you are. We have to eliminate some of the models of mercy ministry—that the rich [are] coming down to the poor and helping the poor—instead of us embracing our mutual brokenness and recognizing, no, it’s both rich and poor. The rich can learn just as much from the poor as the poor can learn from the rich. And it’s not just he who has the most money is the most mature and will be able to give the most.
So how has your church been able to bring that vision out into the community? I know that a lot of communities experience church hurt or they may not have the most shining example of the church.
First, I would just say that Blueprint is not immune to church hurt. We have as pastors experienced church hurt and many people that are still with us and people that have left have experienced church hurt. And to overcome church hurt [we need to] differentiate between church hurt and church harm. Church hurt is sometimes just a differing of opinions. Even if I speak the truth in love, that can become church hurt. Church harm is when there’s an intentional thing. So, I think we need to talk more about church harm than church hurt.
People are going to be hurt. Whenever you have a relationship, there’s going to be hurt in that relationship. No one needs to be in a harmful situation, but we can’t promise that there’s not going to be hurt in a situation. Especially in churches that are like a Blueprint Church that is a majority-minority multiethnic multi-income church. We have people that are in Section 8 at our church, and we have people who are doctors in our church. But really this is about recognizing that we are all peers at the foot of the cross, and that’s one thing that we constantly promote at Blueprint. And we’re clear on the common mission that we have for Christ and what we’re doing with Christ.
So, some of the practical ways that we’ve done things over the years predominantly at schools [as] a way to bring the dignity out in everyone [is] every year we go to the local elementary school called Hope-Hill Elementary, and we call it Day One: Every student who goes into that school, we call out their name, we cheer for them, we give them school supplies, and we’re just really excited letting them know that this experience is not like any other experience, and God sees you, the teachers see you, people see you, and you’re going to love it.
We’ve done a lot at that school. We’ve done a lot at the middle school. We’ve done a lot at the
high school. We’re really trying to establish hospitality. Hospitality is creating the space where change can take place. And we felt like the school system was the one area that both the rich and the poor were concerned about. And so we have been very instrumental in a lot of those things, whether it’s performing on school boards, PTA, athletics, all of those things and all of those institutions. And so that’s one of the primary ways that we have been present.
So, to pivot a little bit, a lot of people are excited about doing service projects. You’ll even get non-Christians who will jump on church projects and feel really good about reaching out to the community and volunteering their time and doing that stuff. But as soon as you approach the topic of evangelism, everyone’s running for the hills. From a church leader standpoint, how do I help my people believe that they can reach their friends and family and neighbors in the community?
I think the biggest thing is discipling people to become evangelists, discipling people to teach them how to share their faith. Oftentimes, we treat evangelism in the same way a lot of us learn how to swim. Someone took us, and just threw us in the deep end, and it was kind of like a sink or swim mentality. And that brought trauma for so many of us in terms of learning how to swim. But that was just the way that we learned. [In] the same way, we give [people] a class and then just drop them off in the neighborhood and tell them to go and do it. And I think it’s problematic for many people.
So what we try to do [at Blueprint], is we think about three stages: What is the easy, obvious and strategic way to help people share their faith? We do a thing called Jerusalem Five. Basically, we take about five weeks and we try to get people to identify five people that they’ll share their faith with. And so we say, hey, week one just simply identify five nonbelievers you have. Week two, just pray for those five. Pray in Colossians 4:2–4 that God would give open opportunities, open doors, and just pray for them. Week three, just simply call them up and say, “Hey, I’ve been praying for you. Can I pray for you specifically?” And then take their prayer requests and actually pray for them. Week four, follow up with them and say, “Hey, I would love to take you out to lunch,” and then just make connections. And then week five, actually take them out to lunch or breakfast or coffee, and then share the gospel [and] your testimony with them.
Right there was easy, obvious and strategic. And that was something that anybody could do. We’re doing it a lot slower. I didn’t just throw you out there. And then as we’re giving you information, everybody knows nonbelievers, everybody can pray by themselves, everybody can just call and say, “Hey, I’m praying for you.” And you see I’m taking this easy, it’s obvious and it’s strategic. And so that’s one way that we do it.
The other way that we do it is we talk about, hey, what are ways that you can find some common ground? Everybody wants a better school. So how do we create space to have a better school? And then how do we build relationships with unbelievers? So, in our city groups, we’ve had times where we find what the pain points are. And one of the pain points that we found in one of our local elementary schools is PTA, parent involvement. So one of our city groups, we decided everybody in our city group needs to join the PTA. And then that’s the way we connected with parents. And that’s the way we started learning about the school and connecting with school and doing things. And what it is doing is creating neutral ground. It wasn’t something that the church was doing. It was neutral ground for believers and unbelievers alike to come together for the betterment of our school. So we’re creating hospitality and creating spaces for people to engage with unbelievers.
I think if we’re going to make disciples in the 21st century in a polarizing time, we’ve got to recapture the art of hospitality. Because hospitality is where we are able to make an enemy a friend. Right now in our day, as soon as you espouse, I’m a Bible-believing Christian, you have a group of people who are going to tell you you are an enemy, you are the oppressor. And so the question becomes, how do I help that enemy become a friend, and ultimately, a brother or a sister? I love Henri Nouwen’s definition: Hospitality is creating the space, not to change people, but creating space where change can take place. So how do we create these environments where we can pray that change can take place simply through relationships? There’s so many different [ways], but it’s creating intentional space where you’re trying to help an enemy become a friend, and ultimately a brother or sister.
Preregister now for the 2024 Amplify Conference on October 22 and 23 hosted at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, and take advantage of discounted super early-bird registration pricing to hear from other leaders who are championing the gospel in their unique spheres of influence.