street cred

How would you define street credibility?

Gritty life experience, truthfulness, keeping commitments, facing reality, enduring hard times, running with a gang?

Shakespeare's 16th century version of street cred might be:

Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

My boss describes credibility as a track record of delivering on your promises and telling the truth about your failures.

However you describe it, I had a little of it in Houston. Enough to function semi-successfully as a pastor in an inner-city mission church. Part of the street cred came from my willingness to be poor and welcome anyone who came. Part of it came from the commitment to both live in the neighborhood and spend an enormous amount of time there. Part of it was that I genuinely cared about people. And part of it was longevity -- 20+ years in the city, all of it as a part of a church, 13 years pastoring.

And then I left.

There are many consequences in leaving a tight-knit community, some of which intensify when you relocate across the country.

One consequence is that whatever street cred you had doesn't travel well -- the Streets of San Francisco have their own identity, and there is no immediate trust.
Listen to a Texas saying, "I don't care how you did it up Narth," and you understand.

One of my prayers, preparing for London, is for opportunities to develop credibility here at home. 7 miles square, the boundaries of the streets of my city. Bigger than it sounds.