In 1965, four years before Neil Armstrong took a low-gravity step on lunar soil, my friend Dr. Martin Marty published Babylon By Choice. It’s a booklet about the mission of the Church, and in it, Marty makes two claims: 1) the new environment for Christian mission is urban, and 2) the basic reality of urban life is its secularity. Fifty years later, Marty’s voice reverberates all-round the Christian community. Popular evangelical pastor, Tim Keller, insists the “very models for ministry must become increasingly urban.”[1] Redeemer City to City, a ministry he co-founded, recently had an inaugural North American conference where they hoped to “accelerate and support gospel movements in North American cities.” Sean Benesh, former Developer of Urban Strategy and Training for TEAM, coined the word metrospiritual to capture the “urban-centric approach to faith and Scripture.”[2] Prominent evangelical universities are providing degrees, creating centers, and implementing new models of education that focus on the city. These all form the chorus that echoes Marty’s words; the city is the mission field of the Church.
Marty’s second claim is equally prescient and relevant to contemporary discussions among Christians. Erwin Lutzer’s recent book, The Church in Babylon, is one of many books preparing believers to engage a world that no longer supports decades of comfortable Christendom. These recent publications resemble the voices of Marty’s day, bringing forward the same posture that led churches to suburbanize and flee the city.[3] As Marty reports, the urbanizing world of the late 60s and early 70s saw a society where the influence of the Christian faith was rapidly diminishing, and churches were slow to adjust. Keller writes this about Western churches in the 70s:
“While many Christian leaders were bemoaning the cultural changes, Western churches continued to minister as before – creating an environment in which only traditional and conservative people would feel comfortable … All they preached and practiced assumed they were still in the Christian West, but the Christian West was vanishing.” [4]
Both the focus on the city and the fear of its influence reveal that Marty properly esteemed the significance and power of “Babylon,” an ancient city that now symbolizes all cities and their corruption. In his booklet, Marty challenges his readers to choose Babylon, to commit to a sort of “lovers quarrel” with it, to make it the Church’s home. The World Outspoken tagline, “The City We Make,” is yet another echo of Marty’s voice. Our project reflects a commitment to Babylon, a love for it. It also reflects a commitment to a future city, one “with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10).
My goal in this article is to explain our mission to make the city, tell a different story, and contribute to the culture-making. Our urban-centric focus has generally caused one of three reactions. Some immediately feel our work does not include them because they do not live in a city or live in an urban community that doesn’t compare in size to cities like Chicago. Others are suspicious of our ideology, and they divide into two possible groups. They either suspect we are optimists promoting the creation of a utopia, or they suspect we are aligning ourselves with specific political and theological agendas contrary to the gospel. To these three communities, I’d like to provide a response by considering three question: 1) What is the City, 2) How does it work, and 3) Why should we choose it?
What is The City?
By asking this question first, I am not trying to be overly philosophical. The reason this question is even being asked is because of the resistance to the city and its ways. Most evangelicals (particularly white-evangelicals in the US) are still wary of urban places. Many Christians still tie the gospel to a rural mythology. They believe the myth that “only people in contact with the soil can have real spirituality.”[5] They think “the Christian message’s interest in developing real and authentic persons makes sense only in traditional societies and not in the modern city.”[6] We see this in the way they talk about spirituality. For these faith-people, God is a horticulturalist who made and cares for the natural world, and the city is a wicked construction of corrupted humans.
In Theology as Big as the City, Ray Bakke remembers an article entitled, “Why Evangelicals Can’t Survive in the City” (pb. 1966; one year after Marty’s booklet). The author of the article suggests the Bible is fundamentally a rural book that shows shepherds and farmers as God’s favorite people. According to the author, David was God’s chosen one while he remained a shepherd, but his life as king in the city corrupted him. The lesson presented in the article was simple: Christians should stay away from the city.[7] In a more recent example, Jen Pollock Michel writes this referring to the sin of man in building the Tower of Babel: “They reject the good gift of land and choose as a substitute the domestication of a city.”[8] Her comments suggest that building a city at all was a sin rather than connecting sin, the rejection of God and corruption of man, to the telos (i.e. purpose) of the city that was built. The problem with this mythology is that it misreads the book of Genesis, and ultimately the full arch of the Bible story.
We need a more complete image of the city. We see in these examples that many still see the city as the place of vice, violence, and evil. To this group, the city is only ever Babylon, the place of the Tower of Babel. Today there are others, however, who envision the city as Utopia, the place of power, recognition, and freedom. The first group seeks escape from the city, and the latter flocks to it. Neither vision captures fully what a city is, yet together they reveal the partial beauty and brokenness of it. To help us see an image that captures the city’s very real propensity to violence and its equally real power for fostering human flourishing, we must first recall the backgrounds for the words “urban” and “city.”[9]
Urban life recalls the Latin background of our language in the term urbs. To most thinkers this word represents “the world man builds for himself.” It is the largely physical side of man’s own creation. “Urban” refers to the form or structure of life. It is, so to speak, the apartment that man has to furnish.
The word “city,” on the other hand, carries the memory of the Latin civitas, a word that immediately throws the idea of civilization into our minds. Civitas refers to the psychic or mental and spiritual side of man’s world. It implies not the form of the city but the activity in the city. It does not represent the furnished apartment but the working and thinking of the people who live in the apartment.
Our image of the city needs to account for its two dimensions. The city is both the world we choose to build for ourselves and the spirit with which we relate to it, each other, and those transcendent realities we call goodness, truth, and beauty. The urban, meaning the conglomeration of buildings, streets, parks and plazas – the furnishings in the human apartment – is an agent in service to the city; it supports the city in forming the minds and spirits of its people. This reveals the first of two images I think account for the city’s complex dimensions. The city is an incubator for culture-making.
The City as Incubator
In his day, Marty observed the power of media and entertainment in promoting a very urban image of life. He writes, “Truly, because of the power of mass media of communication [sic], the whole world is becoming a city.”[10] Keller, again a contemporary echo of Marty’s voice, similarly argues that globalization and the internet have strengthened and expanded the reach of urban culture, making it more difficult for rural areas to continue unaffected by the urban world. In 2010, Edwin Heathcote noted that cities like Laos were growing and absorbing smaller cities and suburbs in their growth. He observes that these bigger, “metacities” needed greater connectivity, and he writes, “digital networking has not, as was forecast, led to a decline in the city. Rather, it has led to an urbanisation [sic] of the rest of the planet.”[11]
My point is that it is no longer possible to ignore or distance ourselves from the influence of the urban world. The apartment is nearly fully furnished, and the only questions now are: what kind of world did we make and what does it do? “If the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself …”[12] We have to contend with the urban world as a real force capable of engaging all of us. Lewis Mumford, attempting the remarkable task of writing a history of “the city,” concludes this:
“From its origin onward, indeed, the city may be described as a structure specially equipped to store and transmit the goods of civilization, sufficiently condensed to afford the maximum amount of facilities in minimum space, but also capable of structural enlargement to enable it to find a place for the changing needs and the more complex forms of a growing society and its cumulative social heritage.” [13]”
As I already stated, the urban world, increasingly large as it is, is an agent, a servant to its other dimension: the city. The structure is uniquely made to hold and promote the goods of civilization. Therefore, thinking of the urban as an incubator is helpful. The urban world is a node of cultural power. It captures and sustains the spirit of its citizens. It can do so for good or for the detriment of humanity. The urban world is as good as it is built to be, and that reveals its inherent flaw. It will only ever reverberate the character of its maker. In my studies of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, I discovered the research of Kristin Schaffer. She argues that Burnham believed the urban world is:
An iconographic reservoir that is capable of inspiring belief in the larger social body and in one’s duty to it. Thus, the city is a physical as well as representational realm that organizes the life of its citizens and promotes them to social affinity and proper behavior in public spaces. The citizen would be instructed to be sure, in the schools, the day-care centers, the orphanages, and the adult citizenship classes given at the neighborhood park field houses, but the citizen would also be taught symbolically through architecture. [14]
With the incubator image still in mind, we should consider the second image for the city.
The City as Fire
The ancient Greek philosopher, Lycurgus, claimed the city was the only unit of government capable of establishing a relationship with the individual strong enough to make it (the city) a formative agent.[15] In other words, the city is of greater influence on the character of its people than the state or nation. This explains why people in cities like New York, Tokyo, Seoul, and London are likely to have more in common with each other than with the non-urban citizens in their own countries.[16] Remember, these global cities are connected to one another and are promoting (i.e. incubating) a similar form of life.
In a previous article, I argued that culture is what we make of the earth. It is what we make in two senses: 1) it is the stuff we produce from the natural resources around us (i.e. the urban apartment and all its furnishings), and 2) culture is the meaning, the sense, we make of the worlds that we create. This is where the name, World Outspoken, originates. Culture is the world we make and live in together. We already saw that this world is urban in design, and its built to foster human culture-making. Now, I want to turn our attention to the meaning, the sense we make of this urban world order.
The cultural world can be broken down into four spheres: story, space, community, and time; the most important of these being the story. Stories are foundational to human life. We cannot make sense of our actions without the stories that guide them. These stories, however, are not enacted in a vacuum with no regard to space and time. The city, then, is not merely a dense collection of buildings made of brick, glass, and steel. It is the setting, or space (second sphere), where a community of persons (third sphere) live out a story (first sphere) according to a specific rhythm of life (i.e. time, the fourth sphere).[17] Urban environments help us act out our stories.[18] They also serve as instructors for new community members, helping them understand the values implicit in the community narrative. The objectification of virtues – the work of making ideas and values concrete in objects – is part of the city’s program for the formation of its people. Values are embedded in narratives and narratives take form in places. The human spirit is externalized in stories that give shape to life and setting alike. To return to the original metaphor, the urban incubator is powered by the fire of the human spirit. The city dimension, then, is this fire.
In her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs uses this metaphor to explain what a city is. For Jacobs, a city is a large field in darkness being illuminated by scattered fires of varying sizes, each representing intense, diverse, and complex human community. As the community works for mutual support and benefit, they give shape to the “field” around them; their life together brilliantly reveals the necessary form for the space they coinhabit. As the community teems with flourishing people, a city is born. It is important to acknowledge that this fire is intended to benefit the citizen. It’s meant to illuminate a good way of living. As Aristotle once wrote, “Men come together in the city to live; they remain there in order to live the good life.”[19] The pursuit of this good life is the end of the city, the revelation of this fire. This image reveals three basic functions for the city that we can now explore in our next question.
How does The City work?
I will only briefly detail the functions of the city since many of them have already been described in the answer to the initial question. First, cities are places of human advancement. Human advancement is a phrase meant to capture the reality that cities are not full of poor people because they “make poor people, but because cities attract poor people with the prospect of improving their lot in life.”[20] Secondly, cities are places for technological advancement. Finally, cities are places that enable human cooperation.[21] Of course, these functions can and generally do become corrupted. The city can enable systems for human oppression, the development of technologies that result in human harm, and the cooperation of a society that sustains a city resembling Babylon. Park’s ominous warning is worth remembering: if the city is the home we build, it is the world we are condemned to live in together.
As the incubator and burning focal point for cultural power, the city maintains the basic functions of society. Political legislation is written in the city. Cultural trends begin in the city. Economic enterprise is run from the city; even the farmers travel into the city for their market. Its influence is felt emanating through the suburbs and out into the rural communities of the surrounding region. So, the culture we make in the cities of the world has the potential to shape whole regions for good (or evil). Therefore, we must choose the city. We choose to intentionally make the city according to a better, truer, more beautiful story than those that created Babylon.
Before moving to the final question, I want to address the secularity of the city. The truth is that the city runs on the interface of several stories. Immigrants move to the city with narratives from their home culture. The rich and the poor each present their own vision for life in the city. Religious groups proclaim their meta-stories, and the social elite and media outlets (journalists, entertainers, artists, etc.) channel stories directly into the family’s living room. For these narratives to coexist the city maintains a a variation of a secular, or non-religious, dominant story. The modern city is pluralistic. Secularity, as Marty notes, is the basic reality of urban life. This presents challenges to the Christian mission. However, there is no reason for Christians to fear this reality. Instead, we must adapt to and embrace the new context for Christian mission.
Why should we choose The City?
In the Bible, there are two important images for the city. I’ve introduced the first image already: Babylon. This ancient city was a display of power for its kings, who often boasted great conquests and war victories.[22] It was the symbol of their ability. It was an expression of boast. In City of God, Augustine presents the City of Man – an image synonymous with Babylon – as governed by libido dominandi (the lust for mastery). This lust to dominate others is a perversion of power. Indeed, Mumford notes that many of the cities of the ancient world grew into their full form on the parasitism of surrounding areas and the use of slaves. He argues that capital cities like Babylon expanded by imposing required tributes and “by bringing about a negative symbiosis based on [the] terrified expectation of destruction and extermination.”[23] Babylon, and all the cities after it, harbors this base abuse of power. Cities can and are the places of great injustice, severe violence, and deep-seated inequality.
However, the Bible has a second image for the city, an alternative that drives Christian mission. This city is called Zion. Just as Babylon is an image that captures a certain behavior, so too Zion is an image that drives a Christian ethic. This is vital to the Christian mission in the city, but we must be careful not to present our message as nothing more than a Utopian future. To present Zion as simply a hope for a future heaven will not suffice in the context of the secular modern city. Instead, Zion introduces a dual identity for the Christian in the here and now. In fact, I argue that Zion is the urban future for a present city that is inherent to the Church’s very character. Allow me to explain.
City on a Hill
Jane Jacobs’ image of the city as an illuminating fire resonates in one sense with the city-image in the Biblical story. Jesus connects the nature of the Church with the nature of the city by envisioning the Church as “light of the world … city set on a hill” (Matt. 5:14). The Church is the radiant-city. It stands in a fire that burns but does not consume, illuminates but does not destroy. In the darkness of the field, the Church is built as part of a city all-together good, beautiful, and truly conducive to human flourishing. In their life together as resident aliens and travelers, immigrants, the Church is given space and instruction to make their current place resemble a future urban place, one built by God (Heb. 13:14). The Church is God’s alternative to man’s failed attempts at building an urban world and the modern city’s plague of loneliness, rootlessness, alienation, and injustice.
In one provocative piece of writing, famed missiologist Leslie Newbigin argued for the possibility of a Christian government. “He contends that the logic of the cross should lead such a government to be non-coercive toward minorities, committed to the common good of all, and therefore could still allow a pluralistic society to flourish.”[24] I am by no means advocating for a Christian government or the literal construction of a Christian city, but Newbigin’s “logic of the cross” presents the way for Christian mission in the modern city. We should choose Babylon that we might reveal to Babylonians a way of life that fits their aspirations. For instance, people all over the world desire justice and societies of equality, but the cities they make are built on stories and uses of power that cannot engender commonwealth. This is essentially Augustine’s critique of Rome. In City of God, Augustine critiques another writer named Cicero for suggesting that Rome is, in fact, a commonwealth. He does this on the basis that justice is part of the very essence of a commonwealth. Augustine suggested, however, that Rome only created a semblance of justice. It is his contention that Rome, like all other earthly cities, is still inherently charged with humanity’s self-love and the libido dominandi.[25]
Conclusion
In 1965, before the world exploded into urban life, Marty concluded his booklet with a simple charge to the Church. He observed in his own day that the modern city “cut off” the Church from “the kinds of decisions in which basic life … is affected and formed.”[26] Christian leaders and pastors are relegated to specialized roles in modern cities and kept from engaging more and more in the public elements of life. Marty notes that many conservative Christians have accepted this new place in the city, saying “that the only responsibility of the Christians toward the environment is to rescue and snatch people out of it.”[27] These same sincere Christians, observes Marty, “then turn around to criticize most vocally the secularizing of life to which they abandoned society and its people.”[28] Instead, Marty proposes a different way of engaging Babylon with the Christian message.
Because the pastors of the world are marginalized from many of the public and powerful functions of the city, Marty suggests the Christian lay person - the scientists, teachers, historians, artists, marketers, chefs, and bankers – are the necessary workers for Zion. They must carry on the Christian Mission and lead the exodus from Babylon to Zion. “They will be effective from the human way of speaking to the degree that they penetrate the varieties and definitions of urban life.”[29] Secondly, Marty challenges the Church to deep unity in a city of frayed relationships. “While “we” work in division, the city “closes itself off” without us.”[30]
World Outspoken is an echo of both moves in Marty’s charge. Our mission is “to inspire, train, and equip culture-makers speaking good news into the cities they make.” We focus on culture-makers because they are the leaders in Christian mission. We also work with Christians and non-Christians alike because we are committed to the common good of the cities of the world. Finally, our desire is that the city we make resemble the unity born from the death and resurrection of King Jesus. World Outspoken is the city we make.
Footnotes
[1] Timothy Keller, Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City, 8.9.2012 edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012).
[2] “Books | Sean Benesh,” accessed September 27, 2018, http://seanbenesh.gutensite.net/Books.
[3] For more on this phenomenon, see Eric O. Jacobsen, William Dyrness, and Robert Johnson, The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012).
[4] Keller, Center Church, 253.
[5] Martin E. Marty, Babylon by Choice: New Environment for Mission, 4th Printing edition (Friendship Press, 1965), 18.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Raymond J. Bakke, A Theology as Big as the City (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic, 1997).
[8] Jen Pollock Michel and Katelyn Beaty, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Books, 2014), 83.
[9] What follows is an excerpt of Babylon by Choice (pg. 10).
[10] Ibid., 16.
[11] “From Megacity to Metacity,” Financial Times, April 6, 2010, https://www.ft.com/content/e388a076-38d6-11df-9998-00144feabdc0.
[12] Ralph H. Turner, ed., Robert E. Park on Social Control and Collective Behavior: Selected Papers, 2nd Print edition (Phoenix Books, 1969).
[13] Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (San Diego New York London: Mariner Books, 1968), 30.
[14] Kristin Schaffer, Introduction to Plan of Chicago, by Burnham and Bennett, First Edition (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), xiii.
[15] Burnham and Bennett., xii.
[16] Keller, Center Church, 155.
[17] Time can be understood as the plotline, or rhythm of life, for the story. Jacobsen suggests one could ask, in light of human life understood as the actions of people in a drama, “When are you” with regard to their position in the story (i.e. opening scene, climax, resolution). Each story lives according to a different rhythm.
[18] Note: Because cities are the physical settings for cultural narratives, they can be created with unique forms. In other words, cities have peculiarities and nuances just as people have peculiarities that distinguish their unique personalities.
[19] As quoted by Mumford, The City in History, 85.
[20] Sean Benesh, Blueprints for a Just City: The Role of the Church in Urban Planning and Shaping the City’s Built Environment (Urban Loft Publishers, 2015).
[21] Benesh.
[22] Genesis 10:8-10 identify Nimrod, a mighty man and hunter, as the founder of Babylon.
[23] Mumford, The City in History, 160.
[24] As noted by Keller, Center Church, 223.
[25] Augustine, Augustine: The City of God against the Pagans, ed. R. W. Dyson, y First edition edition (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), xviii.
[26] Marty, Babylon by Choice; 61
[27] Ibid., 62.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid., 63.
[30] Ibid. Marty is quoting Roger Schutz here.