Compared to What?

Nah, I think you should just go public with it. I honestly don’t understand the apprehension about calling specific people out on specific things. It seems like it’s just more helpful that way.

This is a perfectly appropriate place to post names/quotes of ministers who come off as snobbish or elitist to you! Names and quotes are posted and discussed here all the time. But yes, please do PM me if that suits you. I am interested.

It will take me a bit to gather the things I’ve heard so I’m not taking them out of context. As in I know where I heard it but I need to find it to make sure I’m not misquoting.In jigawatts example I still sensed that it could leave someone who lives in the city with the impression that they are more obedient to Christ, and those who lives in suburbs that they have compromised somewhere. My sense is that people should feel bad for actual sins, but they have enough of that that we don’t have to invent new… Read more »

Brother, thanks for your thoughts on this. You take issue with the pro-city message. Christian leaders in cities need to stop making believers outside of cities feel bad, you say. But do you take issue with the logic of that thinking, or is it the theology? The logic of those calling for a focus on cities is simple: God loves people, and cities have a disproportionately high number of them, therefore a lot of Christians are needed in cities to be ambassadors of His love. Is that thinking faulty to you? But if it’s the pro-city theology that’s rubbing you… Read more »

PS: in an earlier comment on this post I asked Doug if he’d share his thoughts on the theology of place and proximity. When we choose where we live, there are myriad values to weigh (many of which aren’t necessarily more ‘moral’ than another, as Luke rightly point out). Convenience, for example, or closeness to family, quality of schools, cost of living, crime rate, etc. How shall we weigh these with our commission from Christ? Doug, if you’re reading this, *that* might make for an worthwhile discussion.

I assume your reply here is meant for me in response to my asking Luke for examples. If so, thanks for the links. But Patrick here offers a biblical basis to undergird his pro-city argument, doesn’t he? (Nineveh, efficacy of the early church on Roman cities, etc.) If you were to talk with him about it, I’ll bet you’d find that your former pastor’s pro-city teaching doesn’t mean he’d discourage you from your calling to your suburb.

Why nott, jigawatt? If the harvest there is plentiful but the workers are few, believers need to go to raise the banner of Jesus. You won’t force anyone to Iceland, just as Darrin Patrick won’t force anyone into the bowels of STL. But by not presuming to pitch a group of believers on going to Iceland, we assume Reykjavik’s Jonah is not among them.

I don’t think ‘should’ is an imperative, just as I don’t take the Patrick sermon you linked to be imperative in nature. But whatevs. Onward!

No, that wasn’t the whole point, but I wasn’t responding to the whole point. For a reason. I agree with him that people should 1) be more thankful for what they have, and 2) quit getting up in peoples’ business about inconsequential things. I just disagree with the characterization of suburbia as the place where people can finally own a house, and now we’re all complaining about it. I agree that it’s wonderful that we live in a society where people comparatively low on the socio-economic ladder can do that, but that’s not why many people criticize suburbia. The issue… Read more »

I’m not defending some sort of snide dismissal of suburbia out of arrogance, I’m just saying not everybody who rejects that lifestyle and chooses another does so out of some sort of short-sighted snide dismissal.

I agree that ministry is needed in both. Right now, we Christians have rural America pretty well covered. But the cities are not covered. The cities are overwhelmingly liberal. And now that there is (finally) a push to plant in the cities again, the peanut gallery starts mocking those efforts as too hipster.

“Right now, we Christians have rural America pretty well covered. But the cities are not covered.”

Could you link some stats to support this please? Thanks.

You need stats to show that rural america has a higher percentage of evangelical Christians than major cities? I am sure I can find data. I did not know that was controversial.

“You need stats to show that rural america has a higher percentage of evangelical Christians than major cities?”

No, you do. You made the statement, “we Christians have rural America pretty well covered”. I was just wondering if you had some factual(statistical) support for that.

I kind of bristled at the statement “we Christians have rural America pretty well covered” when I read it, but chose not to engage because it’s not a fight that I have a dog in. Anyways, I don’t agree with the statement because, as one who lives in the south, you see all kinds of supposed “Christian” things around here that are really goofy…e.g. “God and Guns” – those who believe this usually have it the other way around (they worship their guns and rights before God), and the prosperity gospel (see Creflo Dollar and other hucksters that pollute this… Read more »

Sorry, meant to say that I don’t totally agree with the statement. Anyways, again not a discussion that I want to get bogged down in. Just my observation and $0.02 from living in the south.

Here is a stat that you might find helpful:

According to Mark Mulder and KA Smith in “Subdivided by Faith” the breakdown for white evangelicals is:

18% Urban
52% Suburban
30% Rural

For the general population it is (according to fivethirtyeight.com):

26% urban
53% Suburban
21% Rural

For those keeping score at home, that is almost a 10% bias toward rural. And that is happening at a moment in history where urban is where all the growth is.

“For those keeping score at home, that is almost a 10% bias toward rural. And that is happening at a moment in history where urban is where all the growth is.”

Population growth? Are people in rural areas not having babies? I’m just not seeing why christians should be in the city more than anywhere else.

I say we try to get them all to 100%.

Evan, they have to add up to 100% (so they cannot all be 100). What I think would be good though is to at least have them match the urbanization going on right now (if not surpass it).

lol. :) 300% is too ambitious eh?

My point is, quite simply, that Paul may not have had a ‘strategy’ at all, as if he were a modern church-growth analyst–this may simply have been the natural thing to do, especially as he was moving from Jewish community to Jewish community, which, like diaspora groups in every age, tended to be found in cities, whither it was easiest to go and easiest to find work as an outsider.

Regardless as to whether it was Paul’s strategy or simply the wisdom and the leading of the Holy Spirit, the result was that Christianity became established and influential in cities. Constantine was surrounded by Christians – not rural Christians from remote parts of the empire but influential Christians from Rome, Corinth and etc. Giving up on the cities (as the church, for the most part has in the USA), is a losing strategy. Giving up on the cities is giving up on the main areas of cultural influence.

That may well be (though Constantine was certainly not especially influenced by any Roman or Corinthian bishops–Ossius of Cordoba looms quite a bit larger, little though we know about Constantine’s theological development). Nevertheless, I worry that focus on ‘the City’ may obscure other questions that need to be asked–whether, for example, the left-leaning values typical of modern cities are ultimately salutary, and, even more importantly, to what degree modern cities are actually real communities in any meaningful sense, or rather, how the Church should relate to the communities that it does find.

Phillip, you do not think that Constantine was influenced by culture of Rome? You do not think that the fact that Christianity had reached near majority levels in Rome by that time had any impact on him? Come on. Seriously. Of course, it mattered what the major cities believed and by the time of Constantine the major cities (according to Stark) were near majority level Christian. Now, imagine if the make up of the church at the time was different from today and instead of it being Rome and Corinth with Christian majorities but the Roman villagers and the equivalent… Read more »

“The idea of having the church in the city is to improve and better the culture.” I’m not sure that’s exactly the way most Evangelicals would see it. Postmillenialists maybe? Or nothing to do with that?

What evangelicals are you referring to?

Just the ones I said, The First Church of Most of Them. :)
Me. I would think the idea of having a church in the city is because The Church is in the city and the idea of planting a church in the city is to build The Church in the city. That might well improve and better the culture, but the improving the culture per se is not the point.

As someone in the planting movement in a major reformed denomination, I know plenty of “for the city” guys and every single one of them talk about the culture.

Tim Keller (thought to be the founder of this movement) talks all the time about Christians changing the culture of cities.

Why does Keller et al.talk about changing the culture of cities (or anywhere), as if that were The Great Commission? Again, is it postmillennial outlook at work? Maybe not, just wondering. Anyway, you say the people you’re talking to are “for the city” guys in the church planting movement in a major reformed denomination. That’s a narrow slice of a narrow slice.

Christian, I am an historian of the later Roman Empire. Of course I believe that Constantine was influenced by the wider culture of the Roman world, but, like any historian of the later Empire, I recognize that the city of Rome was much less significant in the fourth century than it had been previously. The fact of the matter is that Constantine only visited the City three times, and spent most of his life either on the northern frontier (he was born at Nish in Serbia and first named emperor at York, in fact) or in the East, where he… Read more »

Phillip, Stark is not the only one that argues that Christians were near majority levels in the cities of Constantine’s day. And if you think that “Anthony of Egypt” was the most important Christian figure of the 3rd century you are crazy. Cyprian of Carthage and Tertullian (both very literate and very important culturally in the west) were much more influential not to mention the greek fathers from this period (with names no less than Origen and Clement). But that was hardly my point. My point is not that influential people (individual writers) had to be in the city. My… Read more »

That’s why I said ‘at the end of the fourth century’, thereby indicating that I meant during the fourth century itself, but perhaps my language was unclear. I was also thinking of Anthony’s importance as a symbolic figure, which few can match. For that I apologize. I can, however, see no justification whatsoever for your repeated personal attacks on me and my intelligence, especially granted that you’ve only proven your own ignorance of the period–no one who had ever actually studied the authors you name, or their historical situations, would even dream of implying that the opinions of the inhabitants… Read more »

Apologies for the odd italics–something seems to have gone wrong with the html tags.

I think it comes both directions. Friendly fire is a major problem in today’s church. Everyone thinks he is Martin Luther.

Oofda, you’re killin’ me here.