The City

Cities have evoked a number of associations in the imagination. For the 17th century New England Puritan, Mary Rowlandson, the city was a haven. During Metacom’s War (a bloody conflict taking place in New England between the English colonists and Indians), Rowlandson was abducted and held captive for three months by the Nipmucs, Narragansetts, and Wampanoags tribes. She tells of this story in the The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. For Rowlandson, the city was a sanctuary from what she described as the “ravenous Beasts” (i.e. Indians) likely to attack those straying from the city’s walls.

Almost two-hundred years later, famous nineteenth century American preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, delivered his “Lectures to Young Men.” In Beecher’s Lectures there is a very different understanding of the city than that seen in Rowlandson’s captivity account. Thanks to the industrial revolution, which was hitting full stride during Beecher’s day, and a new wave of immigration, the city was evolving dramatically. The changing shape of cities presented unique challenges, making the city a new environment with which to reckon.

In contrast to Rowlandson, Beecher calls the city a “wilderness” and “desert,” and unlike the “ravenous Beasts” that Rowlandson feared in her wilderness, Beecher’s concern was the greedy. Beecher’s city-wilderness was not any milder than Rowlandson’s. Beecher described greedy men so prevalent in his day as pouncing upon a man in debt “like wolves upon a wounded deer, dragging him down, ripping him open, breast and flank, plunging deep into their bloody muzzles to reach the heart and taste blood at the very fountain.” That this imagery, oozing with primeval barbarity, is applied to the city is telling.

This was a time when the understandings concerning place were being inverted. The city became a wilderness. The wilderness became a haven. The palisades that once protected the polis were broken down and reversed, protecting a new idyllic wilderness. Romanticism provided the philosophical underpinnings supporting this shift.

The latter half of the 20th century has witnessed similar shifts in how the city is perceived. Following the Second World War, many affluent, usually white families fled the city in search of a pristine and spacious suburbia, a migration dubbed the “white flight.” The city was no longer viewed as the place to go for social advancement. Instead, the upwardly mobile began to collect around cities, in the suburbs. This left a void in urban areas that was filled by an influx of poorer (usually minority) families that entered the city en masse. These shifting demographics during post-war America changed the city. As the 1970s gave way to the 80s, the city was acquiring a vicious reputation.

During the 1990s, the cultural winds started to shift again. The city began to shed its grime and took on a brighter hue. A symbol of this change was the setting of popular sitcoms of the 90s. Shows like Seinfeld, Friends, and Frasier were all set in urban locations. But the shifting attitude was even more concrete, manifesting itself in the urban renewal projects taking place across the country that sought to revitalize cities.

In the midst of these changes, evangelicals have tended to focus their efforts on the suburbs. During the 1990s, it was the Willow Creeks and Saddlebacks leading the way. These churches were decidedly suburban in both location and ethos.

And these locales fit the traditional hubs evangelicals have gravitated towards. For example, Wheaton, Colorado Springs, Grand Rapids, and Nashville pale in cultural significance to cities like Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago. A recent Christian Scholar’s Review devoted its theme to the city and how Christians perceive it. One article by Mark T. Mulder and James K. A. Smith looked at evangelical attitudes toward the city. In the article, Mulder and Smith wonder if American evangelicals have maintained a bias against the city.

Not all American evangelicals have shied from the city. Beginning in the late 1980s and picking up steam during the 1990s there has been a concerted effort to plant evangelical churches in cities. Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City is an example. After some hesitation, Keller started Redeemer which now has thousands of members and has extended its influence well beyond the boroughs of New York.

In a recent talk, Keller explained that Christians should view the city as a refuge, a place where culture is formed, and a place of witness. As a result, the city has always been a strategic place for ministry. Paul realized this and remained urban-centric in his mission efforts. Keller describes the strategy that exists in the city like this: one could spend a decade in China, Morocco, and Paraguay working as a missionary, learning the language and working with the people. Or, one could go to a major city, like NYC, work with people from all those countries (usually future leaders from those countries) and more without having to learn the language of each of those peoples. The city is indeed a strategic place. Yet Keller warns that Christians would be wrong to neglect non-urban areas (and global missions, for that matter). After all, there is not a dark corner of the universe that does not need the gospel’s light shining upon it. But the evangelical neglect has tended toward the city.

Notwithstanding Keller and others, the hunch of Mulder and Smith seems accurate: American evangelicals for most of their history have tended to have an anti-urban bias. This is ironic at best and tragic at worse. It is ironic because the goal of redemptive history is a city. God’s redemptive purposes are not moving to a return to the Garden but they are escalating to a city, the new Jerusalem. It is tragic because Christians have not been strategic enough. Christians have often ignored a place where the marginalized tend to aggregate (i.e. the kind of hearts most receptive to the gospel), where culture is formed, and a place that has a way of absorbing people from the entire globe, namely, the city.