Chapter 14 THE GOSPEL FOR THE CITY

I have made as strenuous a case as I can that the city is one of the highest priorities for Christian life and mission in the twenty-first century. Now I want to press even further. These chapters on City Vision may have given you the idea that I think all Christians should move into cities and serve there. To be clear, this is not what I am saying. I believe there must be Christians and churches everywhere there are people. In one sense, there are no “little” places or people.¹ God loves to use unimportant people (1 Cor 1:26-31) and unlikely places (John 1:46) to do his work. Jesus wasn’t from Rome or even Jerusalem but was born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth—perhaps to make this very point. We have been told that now something like 50 percent of the world’s population live in cities — but this means that half the population does not live in urban areas, and therefore we must not discourage or devalue gospel ministry in the hundreds of thousands of towns and villages on earth. And ministry in small towns may not change a country, but it surely can have a major impact in its region.2

And yet a thought experiment may be illuminating here. Imagine you are in charge of establishing new churches in two different towns - one has a hundred residents, while the other has ten thousand residents. Imagine also that you have only four church planters. Where would you send them? Regardless of philosophy, I doubt anyone would send two church planters to each town on the premise that all places are equally important in ministry. It simply would not be good stewardship of God’s human resources to send two pastors to a town with only a hundred residents. It is good stewardship, though, to insist that we should increase our attention and emphasis on urban ministry in a day when nonurban areas typically have more churches than cities and when cities are increasingly exerting more influence on how human life is lived in the world.

So I am not saying that all Christians should pack up and go to live and minister in urban areas. What I am saying is that the cities of the world are grievously underserved by the church because, in general, the people of the world are moving into cities faster than churches are. And I am seeking to use all the biblical, sociological, missiological, ecclesial, and rhetorical resources at my disposal to help the church (particularly in the United States) reorient itself to address this deficit.

But the call to the city doesn’t end there. Everywhere in the world is more urban than it was ten or twenty years ago. Wherever you live, work, and serve, the city is coming to you. In a sense, every church can and must become a church for its particular city - whether that city is a great metropolis, a university town, or a village. As a result, I believe you can benefit by allowing yourself and your ministry to be intentionally shaped by the realities and patterns of urban life and culture. In order to accomplish this, we must look first at how the dynamics of the city affect our lives and then consider how churches with City Vision will minister in response to these dynamics.

HOW THE CITY WORKS ON US

By many people’s reckoning, the “death of distance” should have led to a decline in cities, but it has not. If you can learn things over the Internet, the thinking went, why pay big-city prices for housing? But real learning, communication, and community are far more complex than we may care to acknowledge. A great deal of research has shown that face-to-face contact and learning can never be fully replaced by any other kind.

It is no surprise, then, that research shows us that productivity is significantly higher for companies that locate near the geographic center of “inventive activity” in their industry. Why? Proximity to others working in your field enables the infinite number of interactions, many of them informal, that turns neophytes into experts more quickly and helps experts stimulate each other to new insights. Edward Glaeser observes, “Much of the value of a dense work environment comes from unplanned meetings and observing the random doings of the people around you. Video conferencing will never give a promising young worker the ability to learn by observing the day-to-day operations of a successful mentor.”3 Other studies reveal that a high percentage of patent applications cited older patents in the same metropolitan region, so “even in our age of information technology, ideas are often geographically localized.”4

Urban theorists call this “agglomeration.” Agglomeration refers to the economic and social benefits of physically locating near one another. It is not surprising, then, that more movies are produced in Los Angeles and Toronto than in Atlanta, because those cities have far larger pools of skilled laborers — writers, directors, actors, technicians — who can make movies happen. It is not surprising that new innovations in financial services come out of Manhattan or new technologies out of Silicon Valley. Why? Agglomeration. The physical clustering of thousands of people who work in the same field naturally generates new ideas and enterprises. But the benefits of agglomeration are not limited to locating near people who, like you, work in the same field. There are benefits to be reaped of living near large groups of people who are unlike you but who have skills that supplement yours.

A good case study is the world of the arts. “Artistic movements are often highly localized,” even more so than in other fields. Urban scholar Elizabeth Currid interviewed New York City cultural producers (fashion designers, musicians, and fine artists) and gatekeepers (gallery owners, curators, and editors), as well as owners of clubs and venues frequented by these groups, people in the media and sometimes the academy, the directors of foundations that supported the arts, and prosperous businessmen and women who often acted as patrons.7 Art “happened” when complex interactions occurred among people in these diverse sectors of the arts ecosystem - not typically through business meetings in workplaces but through interactions at social gatherings and spontaneous meetings in informal situations. Currid found that the cultural economy depends on having “artistic and cultural producers densely agglomerated,” part of a “clustered production system.” When these various classes of persons live in geographical proximity, thousands of enterprise-producing, culture-making, face-to-face interactions take place that could not take place otherwise.2 As Ryan Avent puts it, “Cities are a lot like a good group of friends: what you’re doing isn’t nearly as important as the fact that you’re doing it together.”10

How do the dynamics of agglomeration bear on the real life of the average city Christian? First, the city uniquely links you with many people like you. The city’s challenges and opportunities attract the most talented, ambitious, and restless. So whoever you are, in the city you will encounter people who are far more talented and advanced than you are. Because you are placed among so many like-but-extremely-skilled people in your field, you will be consistently challenged to reach down and do your very best. You feel driven and pressed by the intensity of the place to realize every ounce of your potential. Cities draw and gather together human resources, tapping their potential for cultural development as no other human-life structure can. But sin takes this strength feature of the city - its culture-forming intensity — and turns it into a place tainted by deadly hubris, envy, and burnout. This is what sin does. It is a parasitic perversion of the good. The gospel is needed to resist the dark side of this gift.

FACE-TO-FACE
Two researchers at the University of Michigan gave groups of six students each the rules of a game to play as a team. Some groups were allowed ten minutes of face-to-face interaction to discuss strategy before playing. Other groups were given thirty minutes of electronic interaction before playing the game in the exact same way. The groups that only met electronically before the game did far less well. This and other experiments have helped us to see that “face-to face contact leads to more trust, generosity, and cooperation than any other sort of interaction.”11 Indeed, common sense tells us that we work up to the level of those working around us.

Second, the city uniquely links you with many people unlike you. The city attracts society’s subcultures and minorities, who can band together for mutual support. It is inherently merciful to those with less power, creating safe enclaves for singles, the poor, immigrants, and racial minorities. Because you are placed among such inescapable diversity, you will be consistently challenged in your views and beliefs. You will be confronted with creative, new approaches to thought and practice and must either abandon your traditional ways and beliefs or become far more knowledgeable about and committed to them than you were before. Again, sin takes a strength feature of the city - its culture-forming diversity — and turns it into a place that undermines our prior commitments and worldviews. And again, the gospel is needed to resist the dark side of this gift.

How should Christians respond to these ways that the city challenges us? We must respond with the gospel. And how, exactly, does the gospel help us face these challenges with joy rather than fear? Obviously, it is true that we must bring the gospel to the city and hear the gospel while in the city. But we must also recognize how much the city itself brings the gospel to us. The city will challenge us to discover the power of the gospel in new ways. We will find people who seem spiritually and morally hopeless to us. We will think, “Those people will never believe in Christ.” But a comment such as this is revealing in itself. If salvation is truly by grace, not by virtue and merit, why should we think that anyone is less likely than ourselves to be a Christian? Why would anyone’s conversion be any greater miracle than our own? The city may force us to discover that we don’t really believe in sheer grace, that we really believe God mainly saves nice people - people like us.

In cities we will also meet a lot of people who hold to other religions or to no religion who are wiser, kinder, and more thoughtful than we are, because even after growth in grace, many Christians are weaker people than many non-Christians. When this surprises you, reflect on it. If the gospel of grace is true, why would we think that Christians are a better kind of person than non-Christians? These living examples of common grace may begin to show us that even though we intellectually understand the doctrine of justification by faith alone, functionally we continue to assume that salvation is by moral goodness and works.

Early in Redeemer’s ministry, we discovered it was misguided for Christians to feel pity for the city, and it was harmful to think of ourselves as its “savior.” We had to humbly learn from and respect our city and its people. Our relationship with them had to be a consciously reciprocal one. We had to be willing to see God’s common grace in their lives. We had to learn that we needed them to fill out our own understanding of God and his grace, just as they needed us.

I believe many Christians in the West avoid the city because it is filled with “the other.” Because cities are filled with people who are completely unlike us, many Christians find this disorienting. Deep down, we know we don’t like these people or don’t feel safe around them. But see how easily we forget the gospel! After all, in the gospel we learn of a God who came and lived among us, became one of us, and loved us to the death, even though we were wholly other from him. The city humbles us, showing us how little we are actually shaped by the story and pattern of the gospel.

The gospel alone can give us the humility (“I have much to learn from the city”), the confidence (“I have much to give to the city”), and the courage (“I have nothing to fear from the city”) to do effective ministry that honors God and blesses others. And in time we will see that, for our own continuing spiritual growth and well-being, we need the city perhaps more than the city needs us.

WHAT SHOULD CHRISTIANS DO ABOUT CITIES?

If this is how the city can change us for the better, what can we do to return the favor?

Christians should develop appreciative attitudes toward the city. In obedience to God, Jonah went to the city of Nineveh, but he didn’t love it. In the same way, Christians may come to the city out of a sense of duty to God while being filled with great disdain for the density and diversity of the city. But for ministry in cities to be effective, it is critical that Christians appreciate cities. They should love city life and find it energizing. 12 Why is this so important?

First, because so many who live in and have influence in the city do actually enjoy living there. If you try to draw them into your church, they will quickly pick up on your negative attitude, which can erect a barrier in their willingness to listen to the gospel. Second, if a church consists primarily of people who dislike urban living, those people won’t be staying very long. Your church will be plagued with huge turnover (as if turnover and transience aren’t enough of a problem already in the city!).

Preaching and teaching that produce a city-positive church must constantly address the common objections to city living, which include beliefs that city life is “less healthy,” too expensive, and an inferior place to raise families. Two additional objections are especially prevalent. One objection I commonly hear is this: “The country is wholesome; the city is corrupting.” Christians should be able to recognize the bad theology (as well as bad history) behind this idea. Liberal humanism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries viewed human nature as intrinsically good and virtuous, so they concluded that human problems came from wrong socialization. In other words, we become violent and antisocial because of our environment. They taught that human society-especially urban society-teaches us to be selfish and violent. As we have seen, however, the Bible teaches that the city is simply a magnifying glass for the human heart. It brings out whatever is already inside. In the previous chapter, we examined the city’s strengths for culture making, as well as its spiritual dangers. But we must remember that the city itself is not to blame for the evil that humans have sinfully brought into it.

Here is another common objection: “The country inspires; faith dies in the city.” While the countryside can indeed inspire, it is quite wrong to say that the urban environment is a harder environment to find and grow in faith. As we noted earlier, many people coming from regions where Christianity is suppressed by the culture hear the gospel for the first time in the great cities where there is more of a “free market” of ideas. Millions of people who are virtually cut off from gospel witness are reachable if they emigrate to cities. Also, many who were raised as nominal Christians come to the cities where they are challenged in new ways and brought to vital, solid faith in the process. I have seen this occur thousands of times during my ministry at Redeemer. The city is, in fact, a spiritual hotbed where people both lose faith and find it in ways that do not happen in more monolithic, less pluralistic settings. This is, yet again, part of the tension of the city we see addressed in the Bible (see chapter 11).

Sometimes the contrast of the countryside and the city is drawn even more starkly. My colleague at Westminster, Harvie Conn, told me about a man who said to him, “God made the country, and man built the suburbs, but the devil made the city.” The theology behind this statement is dubious to say the least. And theologically, it is not a good idea to think of the countryside as intrinsically more pleasing to God. An urban missionary, Bill Krispin, explains why. Bill once said to me, “The country is where there are more plants than people; the city is where there are more people than plants. And since God loves people much more than plants, he loves the city more than the country.” I think this is solid theological logic. The apex of creation is, after all, the making of male and female in the image of God (Gen 1:26-27). Therefore, cities, which are filled with people, are absolutely crammed full of what God considers the most beautiful sight in his creation. As we have noted before, cities have more “image of God” per square inch than anywhere else, and so we must not idealize the country as somehow a more spiritual place than the city. Even those (like Wendell Berry) who lift up the virtues of rural living outline a form of human community just as achievable in cities as in small towns.

WENDELL BERRY AND THE “AGRARIAN MIND”
Many people point to the essayist Wendell Berry as a leading light of modern agrarians who seem to make a strong case for rural living over urban living. However, while Berry does laud the life of the farm and the small town, he defines the “agrarian mind” as essentially that which values the local:

The agrarian mind is… local. It must know on intimate terms the local plants and animals and local soils; it must know local possibilities and impossibilities, opportunities and hazards. It depends and insists on knowing very particular local histories and biographies.13

He goes on to speak of the agrarian mind as (1) valuing work not for the money it can command but for what it provides for human flourishing; (2) valuing work that makes things that are concrete, durable, and useful; (3) embracing humility and having little need for growth and wealth; and (4) holding a commitment to a particular place for a lifetime and to conducting one’s work, recreation, family life in the same place and within a web of thick, long-term, local personal relationships. Berry contrasts this with an “industrial mind” characterized by pride and a lack of respect and gratitude for nature and limitations and manifesting itself in exploitation and greed.

What this means, I believe, is that a person with an “agrarian” mind can live in a city very well. It is illuminating to compare the seminal work of Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of the Great American Cities) with Berry’s work. Jacobs was as committed as Berry to the importance of neighborhood — of local economies in which members of the neighborhood knew each other, had regular dealings with each other, and identified their own interests with the interests of their neighbors.

How can you as a church or an individual live out this value if you are not located near a metropolitan area? I believe the best strategy is to include urban ministry in your global missions portfolio. This may mean supporting individual missionaries who serve in cities; an even more effective strategy is to support church-planting ministries in global cities. 15 Another promising trend is the creation of metro-wide partnerships of churches and other agencies to support the holistic work of spreading the gospel throughout the city.
Christians should become a dynamic counterculture where they live. It will not be enough for Christians to simply live as individuals in the city, however. They must live as a particular kind of community. In the Bible’s tale of two cities, man’s city is built on the principle of personal aggrandizement (Gen 11:1 - 4), while “the city of our God… is beautiful in its loftiness, the joy of the whole earth” (Ps 48:1-2). In other words, the urban society God wants is based on service, not selfishness. Its purpose is to spread joy from its cultural riches to the whole world. Christians are called to be an alternate city within every earthly city, an alternate human culture within every human culture-to show how sex, money, and power can be used in nondestructive ways; to show how classes and races that cannot get along outside of Christ can get along in him; and to show how it is possible to cultivate by using the tools of art, education, government, and business to bring hope to people rather than despair or cynicism.
Someone may ask, “Can’t Christians be an alternate city out in the suburbs?” Absolutely! This is one of our universal callings as Christians. Yet again, though, the earthly city magnifies the effect of this alternate city and its unique forms of ministry. In racially homogeneous places, it is harder to show in pragmatic ways how the gospel uniquely undermines racial barriers (see Eph 2:11-22). In places where few artists live, it is pragmatically harder to show the gospel’s unique effect on art. In economically homogeneous places, physically removed from the human poverty that is so pervasive in the world, it is pragmatically harder for Christians to realize how much money they are spending on themselves. What is possible in the suburbs and rural towns comes into sharper focus in the city. The city illustrates in vivid detail the unique community life that is produced as the fruit of the gospel.
Christians should be a community radically committed to the good of their city as a whole. It is not enough for Christians to form a culture that merely “counters” the values of the city. We must also commit, with all the resources of our faith and life, to serve sacrificially the good of the whole city, and especially the poor.
It is especially important that Christians not be seduced by the mind-set of the “consumer city” — the city as adult playground. Cities attract young adults with a dizzying variety of amenities and diversions that no suburb or small town can reproduce. Even when holding constant factors such as income, education, marital status, and age, city residents are far more likely to go to a concert, visit a museum, go to the movies, or stop into a local pub than people outside of urban areas.16 On top of this, urban residents, more than their country cousins, tend to take an unmistakable pride in sophistication and hipness. Christians must not be tempted to come to the city (or at least not to remain in the city) for these motivations. Christians indeed can be enriched by the particular joys of urban life, but ultimately they live in cities to serve.

Jacobs called this “eyes on the street”- people who felt ownership of the environment, were committed to the common welfare, and watched the street, willing to take action if necessary. Both urban neighborhoods and small towns have mixed-land use in which residences, shops, businesses, schools, and so forth were all within walking distance of each other, which leads to more human-scale, local economy.

Jacobs’s book was a polemic against the “suburbanization” of the city occurring in the 1960s by planners who were destroying local neighborhoods in order to build large-scale, homogeneous areas of retail, business offices, or residences. The New Urbanism today revels in the very small-scale, walkable, mixed-use communities that Jacobs describes. Political theorist Mark Mitchell writes these interesting words:
Ultimately, healthy communities will only be realized when individuals commit to a particular place and to particular neighbors in the long-term work of making a place, of recognizing and enjoying the responsibilities and pleasures of membership in a local community. These good things are not the unique provenance of agrarian or rural settings. They can and have been achieved in urban and town settings. ¹⁴

Christians must work for the peace, security, justice, and prosperity of their neighbors, loving them in word and deed, whether or not they believe the same things we believe. In Jeremiah 29:7, God calls the Jews not just to live in the city but to love it and work for its shalom - its economic, social, and spiritual flourishing. Christians are, indeed, citizens of God’s heavenly city, but these citizens are always the best possible citizens of their earthly city. They walk in the steps of the One who laid down his life for his opponents.

Christians in cities must become a counterculture for the common good. They must be radically different from the surrounding city, yet radically committed to its benefit. They must minister to the city out of their distinctive Christian beliefs and identity. We see this balance demonstrated when we examine the early Christian understanding of citizenship. Paul used his Roman citizenship as leverage and defense in the service of his wider missional aims (Acts 16:37-38; 22:25-29; cf. 21:39; 23:27). He tells the Ephesians that because of the work of the gospel, “You are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone” (Eph 2:19-20, emphasis mine).

And to the church in Philippi, Paul writes, “Our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Phil 3:20-21). Though Roman citizenship was a beneficial badge and indeed carried valuable social status, Paul is clear that Christians are, first and foremost, citizens of heaven.

Joseph presents an interesting Old Testament demonstration of this tension. When he is made prince of the land (Gen 41:39-40), he pursues the wealth and good of Egypt, just as he had previously done in prison and in Potiphar’s house. Through his pursuit of the good of the city, salvation comes to the people of God. This story is especially striking because God puts Joseph in the position to save the city from hunger, not just the people of God.

In the end, Christians live not to increase the prosperity of our own tribe and group through power plays and coercion but to serve the good of all the people of the city (regardless of what beliefs others hold). While secularism tends to make people individualistic, and traditional religiosity tends to make people tribal, the gospel should destroy the natural selfishness of the human heart and lead Christians to sacrificial service that benefits the whole city. If Christians seek power and influence, they will arouse fear and hostility. If instead they pursue love and seek to serve, they will be granted a great deal of influence by their neighbors, a free gift given to trusted and trustworthy people.

Christians should seek to live in the city, not to use the city to build great churches, but to use the resources of the church to seek a great, flourishing city. We refer to this as a “city growth” model of ministry rather than a strictly “church growth” model. It is the ministry posture that arises out of a Center Church theological vision.

SEVEN FEATURES OF A CHURCH FOR THE CITY

It is infinitely easier to talk about living out this posture “on the ground” in our cities than to actually do it. The challenge is to establish churches and other ministries that effectively engage the realities of the cities of the world. The majority of evangelical Protestants who presently control the United States mission apparatus are typically white and nonurban in background. They neither understand nor in most cases enjoy urban life. As I have been arguing, many of the prevailing ministry methods are forged outside of urban areas and then simply imported, with little thought given to the unnecessary barriers this practice erects between urban dwellers and the gospel. Consequently, when ministers go into a city, they often find it especially hard to evangelize and win urban people — and equally difficult to disciple converts and prepare Christians for life in a pluralistic, secular, culturally engaged setting. Just as the Bible needs to be translated into its readers’ vernacular, so the gospel needs to be embodied and communicated in ways that are understandable to the residents of a city.

I believe churches that minister in ways that are indigenous and honoring to a city — whatever its size — exhibit seven vital features:

respect for urban sensibility
unusual sensitivity to cultural differences
commitment to neighborhood and justice
integration of faith and work
bias for complex evangelism
preaching that both attracts and challenges urban people
commitment to artistry and creativity

We’ll unpack each of these characteristics in more detail here, as well as note where several of them are covered more fully in later chapters of the book.

Respect for urban sensibility. Our culture is largely invisible to us, which is why it is revelatory to leave one’s society and live in a very different culture for a while. This experience enables us to see how much of our thought and behavior is not based on universal common sense but on a particular cultural practice. And it is often easier to see the big cultural differences than the small ones. Christians who move to cities within their own country (or even region) often underestimate the importance of the small cultural differences they have with urbanites. They speak and act in ways that are out of step with urban sensibilities, and if this is pointed out to them, they despise the criticism as snobbishness.

Most American evangelical churches are middle class in their corporate culture. That is, they value privacy, safety, homogeneity, sentimentality, space, order, and control. In contrast, the city is filled with ironic, edgy, diversity-loving people who have a high tolerance for ambiguity and disorder. On the whole, they value intensity and access more than comfort and control. Center-city people appreciate sophistication in communication content and mode, and yet they eschew what they consider slickness, hype, and excessive polish. Being able to strike these nuanced balances cannot be a matter of performance. Christian leaders and ministers must genuinely belong to the culture so they begin to intuitively understand it.

THE TRUE CHURCH
We must understand that the seven characteristics of a church that is effective in urban engagement in no way replaces the more foundational question of what, biblically speaking, constitutes a true church.17 The marks of a true church — what it does — are the Word rightly believed and declared, and the sacraments and discipline rightly administered. The purposes of the church—what it aims to accomplish with these ministries — are the worship of God, the edification of the saints, and the witness to the world. All true churches have these characteristics.

Yet a church may have all these biblical marks and qualities, and its ministry could be wholly unfruitful in the city. This is true for the same reason that every preacher who believes the Word rightly and expounds it faithfully will nonetheless preach sermons that are quite useful for a certain kind of hearer and yet confusing and even unhelpful for another. For more on this dynamic, see the Introduction and part 3 (“Gospel Contextualization”).

Center-city culture in particular is filled with well-informed, verbal, creative, and assertive people who do not respond well to authoritative pronouncements. They appreciate thoughtful presentations that are well argued and provide opportunities for communication and feedback. If a church’s ministers are unable to function in an urban culture, choosing instead to create a “missionary compound” within the city, they will soon discover they cannot reach out, convert, or incorporate the people who live in their neighborhoods.
Unusual sensitivity to cultural differences. Effective leaders in urban ministry are acutely aware of the different people groups within their area. Because cities are dense and diverse, they are always culturally complex. This means not only that different races and socioeconomic classes are in closer physical proximity than in other settings, but that other factors, such as ethnicity, age, vocation, and religion, create a matrix of subcultures. In New York City, for example, older downtown artists (over the age of fifty) are significantly different from younger artists. The Jewish community in New York City is vast and variegated. The cultural differences among African-Americans, Africans, and Afro-Caribbeans are marked, even as they share a broad sense of identity over against white culture. Some groups clash more with particular groups than others (e.g., African-Americans and Koreans in some cities). The gay community is divided between those who want to be more integrated into mainstream culture and those who do not. Asians talk about being “1.0, 1.5, or second generation.”

Fruitful urban ministers must first notice these differences and avoid thinking they are inconsequential. Then they must seek to understand these different people respectfully and navigate accordingly in communication and ministry without unnecessarily offending others. In fact, urban ministers should constantly surprise others with how well they understand other cultures. If you are an Anglo man, for example, you should occasionally hear something like, “I didn’t think a white man would know about that.”

Those raised in culturally homogeneous areas who move to a city soon come to realize how many of their attitudes and habits — which they thought of as simply universal common were deeply tied to their race and class. For instance, Anglo-Americans don’t see themselves as making decisions, expressing emotions, handling conflict, scheduling time and events, and communicating in a “white” way—they just think they are doing things the way everybody knows things ought to be done. In an urban setting, people typically become more sensitive to these blind spots. Why? Because they are acquainted with the aspirations, fears, passions, and patterns of several different groups of people through involvement with friends, neighbors, and colleagues who come from these groups. They have personally experienced how members of different ethnic or even vocational groups use an identical word or phrase to mean different things.
No church can be all things to all people. There is no culturally neutral way of doing ministry. The urban church will have to choose practices that reflect the values of some cultural group, and in so doing it will communicate in ways that different cultural groups will see and hear differently. As soon as it chooses a language to preach in, or the music it will sing, it is making it easier for some people to participate and more difficult for others.

Nevertheless, the ever-present challenge is to work to make urban ministry as broadly appealing as possible and as inclusive of different cultures as possible. One of the ways to do this is to have a racially diverse set of leaders “up front.” When we see someone like ourselves speaking or leading a meeting, we feel welcomed in a hard-to-define way. Another way is to listen long and hard to people in our congregation who feel underrepresented by the way our church does ministry. In the end, we must accept the fact that urban churches will experience recurring complaints of racial insensitivity. Urban ministers live with the constant sense that they are failing to embrace as many kinds of people as they should. But they willingly and gladly embrace the challenge of building racial and cultural diversity in their churches and see these inevitable criticisms as simply one of the necessary costs of urban ministry.
Commitment to neighborhood and justice. Urban neighborhoods are highly complex. Even gentrified neighborhoods, full of professionals, may actually be “bipolar.” That is, alongside the well-off residents in their expensive apartments, private schools, and various community associations and clubs is often a “shadow neighborhood” filled with many who live in poverty, attend struggling schools, and reside in government housing.

Urban ministers learn how to exegete their neighborhoods to grasp their sociological complexity. They are obsessed with studying and learning about their local communities. (Academic training in urban ethnography, urban demographics, and urban planning can be a great help to a church’s lay leaders and staff members.) But faithful churches do not exegete their neighborhoods simply to target people groups, although evangelistic outreach is one of the goals. They are looking for ways to strengthen the health of their neighborhoods, making them safer and more humane places for people to live. This is a way to seek the welfare of the city, in the spirit of Jeremiah 29. Urban churches train their members to be neighbors in the city, not just consumers. As we have seen, cities attract young professionals by providing something of a “theme park” with thousands of entertainment and cultural options, and many new urban residents tend to view the city as simply a place where they can have fun, develop a résumé, and make friends who will be of help to them in the future. They plan to do this for a few years and then leave. In other words, they are using the city rather than living in it as neighbors (as Jesus defines the term in the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37).

In the middle years of the twentieth century, Jane Jacobs wrote the classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs’s great contribution came in demonstrating the importance of street life for civil society. She observed how foot traffic and street life and a mixture of residences and businesses (viewed negatively by suburban zoners and even many urban planners at the time) were critical for economic vitality, for safety, for healthy human relationships, and for a strong social fabric. Jacobs was a major opponent of large-scale urban projects in the mid- twentieth century, the very projects that eventually ruined neighborhoods and the street life she had promoted.

Jacobs writes the following:
- Looking at city neighborhoods as organs of self-government, I can see evidence that only three kinds of neighborhoods are useful: (1) the city as a whole; (2) street neighborhoods; and (3) districts of large, subcity size (composed of 100,000 people or more in the case of the largest cities).
  Each of these kinds of neighborhoods has different functions, but the three supplement each other in complex fashion. 18
Jacobs explains how each of these is indeed a neighborhood and how each requires the participation of all urban residents to keep the city healthy. In other words, you must know your literal neighbors (your street neighborhood) and have some familiarity with the blocks around your residence (your district). And yet this in itself is not enough. “Ward politics” — in which one neighborhood pits its own good against the good of the other parts of the city - is unwholesome and unhealthy. So it is important for Christians and Christian ministries to find ways to be neighbors to the whole city, not just to their immediate street neighborhood. Failing to engage in the interests of the entire city often results in a lack of involvement in helping the poorest residents of the city. It is equally important that a church not minister just to the whole city while ignoring its local neighborhood. If this happens, a church can become a commuter church that no longer knows how to reach the kind of people who live in their immediate vicinity.

Urban churches, then, should be known in their community as a group of people who are committed to the good of all their neighbors, near and far. It takes this type of holistic commitment from all residents and institutions to maintain a good quality of life in the city, and a church that is not engaged in this manner will (rightly) be perceived by the city as tribal.
Integration of faith and work. Traditional evangelical churches tend to emphasize personal piety and rarely help believers understand how to maintain and apply their Christian beliefs and practice in the worlds of the arts, business, scholarship, and government. Many churches do not know how to disciple members without essentially pulling them out of their vocations and inviting them to become heavily involved in church activities. In other words, Christian discipleship is interpreted as consisting largely of activities done in the evening or on the weekend.

RENTERS AND NEIGHBORHOOD
One “occupational hazard” of urban church planting is having a new church rent its worship space and therefore only corporately reside in a particular neighborhood for the few hours during which they rent the space. Often this means, on the one hand, that the neighbors have no idea there is a church meeting in that space; on the other hand, church members feel very little responsibility to “love their neighbors.” It is important for churches that rent space to own their neighborhood. Church leaders should therefore be intentional about inhabiting their neighborhood. They should go to local community boards and neighborhood association meetings, as well as contact local government officials and representatives to discover how they can best serve the needs of the neighborhood. This has not been a strength of Redeemer Church in the past, and we are working to change this now that we have moved into our first owned space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Many vocations of city dwellers — fashion and the media, the arts and technology, business and finance, politics and public policy — demand great amounts of time and energy. These are typically not forty-hour-a-week jobs. They are jobs that dominate a person’s life and thinking, and urban Christians are confronted with ethical and theological issues every day in the workplace. Preaching and ministry in urban churches must therefore help congregants form networks of believers within their vocational field and assist them in working through the theological, ethical, and practical issues they face in their work.

In addition to the practical issues of how to do their individual work, urban Christians need a broader vision of how Christianity engages and influences culture. As we have discussed, cities are culture-forming incubators, and believers in such places have a significant need for guidance on how Christian faith should express itself in public life. For more on this subject, see part 5 (Cultural Engagement) and part 7 (Integrative Ministry).
Bias for complex evangelism. Two kinds of urban churches can grow without evangelism. The first is the ethnic/immigrant church. While many ethnic churches are evangelistic, it is possible for them to grow without conversions, as new immigrants are always looking for connections to their own people in the city. Ethnic churches therefore become informal “community centers” for people of the same race and subculture — and they can grow simply by gathering new immigrants who want to be part of the fellowship. Second, churches in Western center cities can grow without evangelism by meeting the needs of one particular “immigrant subculture” - evangelical Christians-through preaching, music, children’s programs, and so forth. In the past, in cities outside of the southern and midwestern United States, there simply was no constituency of “church shoppers” to attract. However, during the urban renaissance of the last fifteen years, this situation has changed, and cities have become desirable destinations for young adults from all over the country. Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s experience is a good way to understand this phenomenon.

Redeemer was begun in Manhattan at the end of the 1980s, during the end of an era of urban decline. Crime was high and the city was losing population, and there were few or no Christians moving into New York City from the rest of the country. During the first several years of Redeemer’s existence, it grew through aggressive but winsome evangelism. An evangelistic consciousness permeated the young congregation, and several hundred people came to faith out of nonbelief and nonchurched backgrounds over the first five years.
By the mid-1990s, the urban regeneration had begun, and we noticed that young adults from Christian backgrounds were moving to the cities. By the end of the decade, we found that we could (and did) grow substantially by drawing these folks in and helping them live out their Christian lives in service to the city. This is, of course, a very good and important thing, but it can also mask a lack of evangelism, and in the end, nonevangelistic church growth can’t help reach the city in the most profound way. Recognizing this danger, our church has recommitted itself to reigniting our ethos of evangelism.

Not only must an urban church be committed to evangelism; it must be committed to the complexity of urban evangelism. There is no “one size fits all” method or message that can be used with all urban residents. For example, it is impossible for a Christian minister in London to share the gospel in exactly the same way with an atheist native Scot or a Muslim from Pakistan - yet they may both be the minister’s literal neighbors. Urban evangelism requires immersion in the various cultures’ greatest hopes, fears, views, and objections to Christianity. It requires a creative host of different means and venues, and it takes great courage.
Preaching that both attracts and challenges urban people. Perhaps the greatest challenge for preachers in urban contexts is the fact that many secular and nonbelieving people may be in the audience. Of course, urban congregations can be as ingrown as any others, but certain dynamics of urban life can more readily make city church gatherings “spiritually mixed” and filled with nonbelievers. Urban centers have higher percentages of single people, and it is far easier for a single Christian to get a single, non-Christian friend to come to a church gathering than it is for a Christian family to get an entire non-Christian family to come. Singles make unilateral decisions (without having to consult others), tend to spend more time out of their homes, and are more open to new experiences. Also, cities are not “car cultures”; they are pedestrian cultures, and it is not unusual for people to simply walk off the street into church out of curiosity. Finally, cities are places where people come to “make it,” are often separated from extended families, and are under a great deal of stress. As a result, urban people are often in a spiritual search mode and can be hungry for human connection and a sense of belonging.

The challenge for the urban preacher is to preach in a way that edifies believers and engages and evangelized nonbelievers at the same time. We will speak more about evangelistic worship in chapter 23. But here are some pointers.

First, be sure to preach sermons that ground moral exhortation in Christ and his work (see the section in chapter 6 titled “Preaching for Renewal”). Show how we live as we should only if we believe in and apply Christ’s work of salvation as we should. In this way nonbelievers hear the gospel each week, yet believers have their issues and problems addressed as well.
Second, be very careful to think about your audience’s premises. Don’t assume, for example, that everyone listening trusts the Bible. So when you make a point from the Bible, it will help to show that some other trusted authority (such as empirical science) agrees with the Bible. Use it to promote trust of the Bible, saying something like, “See, the Bible was telling us centuries ago what science now confirms.” That will help convince your hearers of that point so you can move on. By the end of the sermon, of course, you will be appealing only to God’s Word, but in the early stages of the sermon you invite nonbelievers along by showing respect for their doubts about the Bible’s reliability.

Third, do “apologetic sidebars.” Try to devote one of the three or four sermon points mainly to the doubts and concerns of nonbelievers. Keep in your head a list of the ten or so biggest objections people have to Christianity. More often than not, the particular Scripture text has some way to address them. Always treat people’s typical doubts about Christianity with respect. Jude reminds us to “be merciful to those who doubt” (Jude 22). Never give the impression that “all intelligent people think like I do.” Don’t hesitate to say, “I know this Christian doctrine may sound outrageous, but would you consider this…?”

Fourth, address different groups directly, showing that you know they are there, as though you are dialoguing with them: “If you are committed to Christ, you may be thinking this — but the text answers that fear,” or “If you are not a Christian or not sure what you believe, then you surely must think this is narrow-minded - but the text says this, which speaks to this very issue.”

Fifth, consider demeanor. The young secularists of New York City are extremely sensitive to anything that smacks of artifice to them. Anything that is too polished, too controlled, too canned will seem like salesmanship. They will be turned off if they hear a preacher use noninclusive gender language, make cynical remarks about other religions, adopt a tone of voice they consider forced or inauthentic, or use insider evangelical tribal jargon. In particular, they will feel “beaten up” if a pastor yells at them. The kind of preaching that sounds passionate in the heartland may sound like a dangerous rant in certain subcultures in the city.

Sixth, show a deep acquaintance with the same books, magazines, blogs, movies, and plays — as well as the daily life experiences — that your audience knows. Mention them and interpret them in light of Scripture. But be sure to read and experience urban life across a spectrum of opinion. There is nothing more truly urban than showing you know, appreciate, and digest a great diversity of human opinion. During my first years in New York, I regularly read The New Yorker (sophisticated secular), The Atlantic (eclectic), The Nation (older, left-wing secular), The Weekly Standard (conservative but erudite), The New Republic (eclectic and erudite), Utne Reader (New Age alternative), Wired (Silicon Valley libertarian), First Things (conservative Catholic). As I read, I imagine dialogues about Christianity with the writers. I almost never read a magazine without getting a scrap of a preaching idea.
Commitment to artistry and creativity. According to the United States census, between 1970 and 1990 the number of people describing themselves as “artist” more than doubled, from 737,000 to 1.7 million. Since 1990, the number of artists continued to grow another 16 percent to nearly two million. Professional artists live disproportionately in major urban areas, and so the arts are held in high regard in the city, while in nonurban areas little direct attention is typically given to them. Urban churches must be aware of this. First, they should have high standards for artistic skill in their worship and ministries. If you do not have such standards, your church will feel culturally remote to the average urban dweller who is surrounded by artistic excellence even on the streets where talented artists sing and perform.

Second, city churches should think of artists not simply as persons with skills to use. They must connect to them as worshipers and hearers, communicating that they are valued for both their work and their presence in the community. This can be done in a variety of ways. One way includes being sensitive to your own region’s or city’s particular art history (e.g., Nashville is a music center; New England and the Midwest have many writers; New Mexico is a center for visual artists). Take time to listen to the artists and musicians in your church to understand something about the nature of the local artistic community and how the creative process works. Do your best to work with local artists and musicians rather than flying in your favorite artists long-distance for concerts or shows. When you make use of artists’ gifts, take their advice on how the music and the art should be done; don’t simply give orders to them.

God has given us the city for his purposes, and even though sin has harmed it, we should use the resources of the gospel to repair broken cities. Jesus himself went to the city and was crucified “outside the city gate” (Heb 13:12), a biblical metaphor for forsakenness. By his grace, Jesus lost the city-that-was, so we could become citizens of the city-to-come (Heb 11:10; 12:22), making us salt and light in the city-that-is (Matt 5:13-16).

So we urge all the people of God to recognize and embrace the strategic intensity of cities—and therefore to respond to the urgent call to be in the city and for the city from every coordinate on the globe. City Vision recognizes God’s creational intentions for cities and calls the people of God to be the city of God within the city of man.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION

If you are not located in a city, how might City Vision shape and improve the fruitfulness of your current ministry?

How is agglomeration evident around you? Which types of trades, skills, inventors, or culture makers are concentrated most highly in your area? In what ways can your ministry seek face-to-face opportunities to minister to and through this population - that is, to become an “agglomerizing” church?

Keller writes, “The city itself brings the gospel to us. The city will challenge us to discover the power of the gospel in new ways.” How does this chapter suggest this happens? How have you experienced this?

Which of the seven features of a church for the city does your church currently exhibit? How might those outside your community answer this question?