Tony Hodges
Founder
As a Christian businessman, I moved in 2014 from being CEO with day to day responsibilities for the company I had started in 1996, to becoming its Chairman. It had grown to 100 people on 3 continents supporting blue chip employers and touched some 20 million people around the world each year to a greater or lesser extent.
Increasingly though, after memorising and meditating on the Sermon on the Mount, I found myself asking what a city would look like if the Kingdom of God came fully. I wasn’t satisfied with my answers and started to pray more and research. I then added the further question of why the Christian business community in each city was so fragmented. In addition, I did not understand why Christian leaders in cities only appeared to have superficial relationships with each other when Christ’s primary command was to display love for one another. I observed that not only did Christian leaders generally not have close links with each other, they did not have close links with the Christian business community in their city either.
This all led to reflecting on what might happen if the Christian business community and the church leader community came together. I started to pray more, discuss and research, meeting some 300 Christian business people and Church leaders around the UK in an 18 month period.
City Vision has come into being as an enabling agency to help the business people of peace and the church leaders of peace in a city to find new ways of working together to bless their city. The lessons from my working life of engaging with large organisations, some employing 500,000 people, seem to fit well with the challenges of city size transformation. The encouragement we have received has satisfied me that God is with us in this endeavour to bring His people together.