Breaking Isolation, Building Godly Leaders, Bringing Flourishing To Our Cities.
The mission came first. The story explains it.
In The City For The City exists for one conviction: isolation fractures what God designed to flourish, and the Kingdom advances through reconnection. Not new programs. Not bigger platforms. Reconnection, of believers to God, of believers to one another, of the Body to the city it was placed in.
For fifty years we've watched the same pattern: awakening sparks, and isolation scatters. Pastors who carry their cities alone. Marketplace leaders with Kingdom vision and no one to walk it with. A generation that walked away from the building without walking away from Jesus. The enemy doesn't have to destroy the Body. He just has to keep its parts from finding each other.
Walking Together is our answer, a forty-day field manual for staying connected when everything scatters, walked in cohorts of a few people at a time, in living rooms on every continent we can reach.
Rich Carney has spent fifty years asking one question across six American cities: what happens when the Body of Christ actually functions, pastors, marketplace leaders, educators, intercessors, and civic leaders walking together instead of apart?
He learned the cost of walking alone before he learned the theology of it. As a Green Beret he served in places where isolation kills, including El Salvador in 1983, where the silence after the helicopter lifted off taught him more about the human soul than any classroom. Later service with the State Department took the same lessons into the machinery of nations. A Doctor of Ministry from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary gave the convictions their theological spine.
In Austin, he led the Austin Bridge Builders Alliance for a decade, connecting churches, nonprofits, schools, and city leadership around the flourishing of one city. Out of that work came In The City For The City, and out of fifty years of it came Walking Together. He and his wife Sandee have invested their lives in this work side by side. They walk it the way the book teaches it: together.
The book carries the stories. The cohorts carry the people. If you want to know what fifty years taught him, start with Day 1.
Have a question for Rich? Ask it.