Reclaiming the city: a church stays put

Christian Century, April 19, 2003 by Eric O. Jacobsen

This is unfortunate. Churchpeople have a deep history of interest in the city, one that is rooted in biblical tradition. Long before the New Urbanists began envisioning some thing inherently redeemable in our cities, John the evangelist was engaged in urban visioning. When he is given a picture of our redeemed state during his exile on Patmos, he does not see Eden restored in some kind of an agrarian utopia, nor does he see the American ideal of a single-family detached house surrounded by a huge yard for every inhabitant of the kingdom. What he sees is a city--New Jerusalem descending from heaven onto earth.

And because a city is what John sees, we Christians must take this vision seriously and not replace it with our own visions of the ideal human environment. For the past two decades, Christians have been tempted in this direction. We have been abandoning our strategic locations within city cores and traditional neighborhoods, and trying to create a new kind of society in the form of suburban megachurches. We have marched along with the rest of our culture and moved our homes outside of the urban core into the sanitized world of the suburbs. Even when we have not participated directly in this radical shift, we have come to view the particularities of functioning in the midst of the city (restricted parking, unsympathetic neighbors and pushy transients) as inconveniences rather than as opportunities for ministry.

After a brief discussion, our church decided to forgo the greener pastures of Reserve Street in order to continue doing ministry in the place to which we had been called. In order to meet our growing program needs, we ended up doing a major renovation of our current site. And we still haven't solved our parking issue. But the possibility of doing ministry in this neighborhood in this city has more than compensated for the trouble and expense.

Eric O. Jacobsen is associate pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Missoula, Montana. His article is adapted from Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith. [C] 2003 Brazos Press, a division of Baker Book House Company. Used with permission of the author and publisher. The book will be published in May.