Here is how Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, answers the question, emphasizing the importance of cities:
I’m throwing in with Jim Boice on this one (cf. his Two Cities: Two Loves.)
The evangelical church must stay true to its biblical foundations, and it must maintain and enhance the effectiveness of its expository preaching, the holiness of its members, the ‘thickness’ of its counter-cultural community, the fervor of its evangelism. But if it doesn’t learn how to do this in our biggest cities then we don’t have much hope for our culture.
If our cities are largely pagan while our countryside is largely Christian, then our society and culture will continue to slide into paganism. And that is exactly what is happening. Christians strengthen somewhat away from the cities and they have made some political gains, but that is not effecting cultural products much. It is because in the center cities (NYC, Boston, LA, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington DC) the percentages of people living and working there who are Christians are minuscule.
Jim Boice proposed that evangelical Christians need to live in the major cities at a higher percentage than the population at large (See Two Cities, p.163ff.) Currently 50% of the U.S. population live in urban areas (and 25% lives in just the 10 largest urban areas.) Boice proposes that evangelicals should be living in cities in at least the same percentages or more. As confirmation of Boice’s belief consider how much impact both the Jewish and the gay communities have had on our culture. Why? Though neither is more than 3-4% of the total population, they each comprise over 20% of the population of Manhattan (and in other center cities. )
So we have two problems. First, evangelicals (especially Anglos) in general are quite negative about U.S. cities and city living. Second, you can’t ‘do church’ in exactly the same way in a city as you do it elsewhere, not if you want to actually convert hard-core secular people to Christianity. There are churches that set up in cities without adapting to their environment. Ironically, they can grow rather well anyway in cities by just gathering in the young already-evangelicals who are temporarily living in the city after college. But that is not the way to make the cities heavily Christian-which is the crying need today.
– Hat tip: Justin Taylor. Photo by Francois Schnell
May 12, 2008
Sometime in the early 20th century, American Christians forgot the importance of the earth.
The reasons are complex, but they boil down to a pessimistic view of the future and a vaguely Gnostic distrust of the physical. This view led not only to prohibitions on good things like alcohol, but also to an overemphasis of the spiritual and Heaven versus the physical and Earth.
In a recent sermon (PDF), Doug Wilson encapsulated why Christians should care about creating a good city:
Many Christians believe the cosmos has an upper and lower story, with earth as the lower and heaven as the upper. You live the first chapters of your life here. Then you die, and you move upstairs to live with the nice people in part two. There might be some kind of sequel after that, but it is all kind of hazy. The basic movement in this thinking is from Philippi “below” to Rome “above.”
But what Paul teaches us here is quite different. We are establishing the colonies of heaven here, now. When we die, we get the privilege of visiting the heavenly motherland, which is quite different than moving there permanently. After this brief visit, the Lord will bring us all back here for the final and great transformation of the colonists (and the colonies). In short, our time in heaven is the intermediate state. It is not the case that our time here is the intermediate state. There is an old folk song that says, “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” This captures the mistake almost perfectly. But as the saints gather in heaven, which is the real intermediate state, the growing question is, “When do we get to go back home?” And so this means that heaven is the place that we are just “passing through.”
Or as Paul Marshall puts it: “Heaven Is Not My Home.“
Hat tip: The Native Tourist. Photo by laffy4k
May 11, 2008
In preparation of Wednesday’s talk about walkable communities, take a 10-minute stroll through Melbourne. Go here to watch the video. Here’s a paragraph about Melbourne:
There is an invaluable lesson here. In the early 90s, Melbourne was hardly a haven for pedestrian life until Jan Gehl was invited there to undertake a study and publish recommendations on street improvements and public space. Ten years after the survey’s findings, Melbourne was a remarkably different place thanks to sidewalk widenings, copious tree plantings, a burgeoning cafe culture, and various types of car restrictions on some streets. Public space and art abound. And all of this is an economic boom for business.
Check out StreetFilms, the producer of this and many other short films about cities.
photo of Melbourne courtesy of surfergirl143
May 6, 2008
In an essay with the provocative title, “Bring me my arrows of desire: cities shaped by love,” Gayle Doornbos writes a review of Philip Bess’s book, “Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred.”
For those who are unaware, Bess is a Notre Dame architecture professor who spoke to a Fort Wayne audience about urban design and sustainable development last month.
Doornbos begins her essay with dreams: Where do you dream of living?
Here are excerpts:
Bess’s gambit challenges us to reevaluate the current state of our cities, how we think about urbanism and the suburbs, and our visions of the good life. For him, a vision of the good life is paramount. It is not enough to merely have good design. Philip Bess argues that good city-building cannot be reduced to design. Good design aids flourishing and can reflect flourishing, but it cannot by itself create sense of community, a neighbourhood, or even a good city. …
… Bess’s work calls us to restore Christian thought about the city in a time when Christians have appropriately fought for justice in cities but neglected to develop sophisticated frameworks about the specific structure, design, policy, and theology that constitutes a good city. Finally, we must recapture the old Christian idea that architecture shapes the fabric of a city — it is not inconsequential to faith or to building community and place — belonging and identity in a broken world. Community, belonging, and cities must aspire to reflect this vision of good city life. “Our greatest cities,” writes Bess, “are products of love. Cities should be shaped and driven by the dream of a world made new.”
Read the essay here.
Also, Books & Culture magazine reviews his book here. Below is an excerpt:
Designs for a good urban experience, Bess explains, would take into consideration the ecological, economic, moral, and formal well-being of a neighborhood. Whether on the outskirts of a city or in the urban core, each neighborhood would enjoy “a walkable and mixed-use human environment wherein many if not most of the necessities and activities of daily human life are within a five- to ten-minute walk for persons of all ages and economic classes.” Such neighborhoods would embody the best social and aesthetic features of historic urban life, and to bring this vision to fruition would be to occasion human flourishing. Good urban planning is good theology.
Read the Books & Culture review here.
Photo courtesy of calm a llama down
May 6, 2008
The Spaulding brothers do a great service by pointing us to the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index, which shows the affordability of your Fort Wayne neighborhood based on housing and transportation costs. As you can guess, everything’s cheaper the closer you get to the core of the city.
As the Spauldings say over on their Web site, be sure to click the Advanced link for more data.
And you can go to the home page and examine the other metro areas the index covers. Chicago is among those included, but not Indianapolis.
May 5, 2008
There’s plenty to say about Parkview Hospital’s expansion up north and contraction on State Boulevard, but first, I wanted to address another angle of the proposed Shoppes on Broadway (sits plan shown above).
Why do all new retail developments look like suburban strip malls? Why is the parking lot almost twice as large as the footprint of the building?
A major reason is that every 180 square feet of retail space built in Fort Wayne requires its own parking space.
So the Phase I building at the top with 6,050 sq.ft. of space requires 34 parking spaces. And the Phase II building at the bottom with 10,200 sq.ft. of space requires 57 parking spaces.
The law doesn’t care what kind of stores are in the building. The stores could be low traffic or high traffic. There could be on-street parking, nearby garages or an abundance of pedestrian traffic. You still need a parking space for every 180 square feet of store.
But how often do you see a parking lot so full that you cannot find a space? Maybe, just maybe, the lot fills up on the day after Thanksgiving. But for the rest of the year, the lots are seldom more than half full. It’s parking built for the apocalypse and not for normal day-to-day shopping.
Not only are these hugs empty parking lots expensive, they separate stores from each other, making walking or biking unpleasant and sometimes dangerous.
We shouldn’t seek laws that force developers to create retails centers that shoppers would avoid. Instead, we should seek to loosen the existing, overly strict mid-20th-century zoning laws that are slowly dismantling our urban fabric by forcing suburban parking on inner-city blocks. The Shoppes on Broadway development is a great example of why the city of Fort Wayne should not just ease the rules for downtown development, but also expand such freedoms to other center-city neighborhoods. Downtown isn’t the only part of town that needs help.
April 30, 2008
If we had believed the workers at the Waynedale Bureau of Motor Vehicles, my son would not be voting in the primary next week.
They kept insisting that 17-year-olds cannot vote in the primary if they turn 18 before the general election in November.
But the following is from the Indiana Secretary of State’s Web site:
Q: I’m turning 18 right before the election. When can I register? When can I vote?
If you are turning 18 before or on the next general election date, you can register. You can vote in both the primary and general election, even if you are not 18 on the primary election date. However, you will not be eligible to vote on school board members, political party precinct committeemen, or political party state convention delegates elected at the primary election. (emphasis mine)
Are BMV workers not trained on the rules of voter eligibility? How many other eligible voters have they turned away?
April 29, 2008
This comment by Michael Bates of BatesLine in Tulsa was too good to be ignored:
Two generations have been raised to see the tidy segments of the suburbs as normal and the city as a messy mix that needs sorting out. That’s starting to change, and a significant number of people have experienced the pleasures of urban living, either directly, or vicariously through TV shows like Seinfeld and Friends. (And it could be argued that the appealing depiction of urban life on those programs was made possible by Giuliani’s cleanup of New York in the ’90s.)
I think the starting point is for cities like Fort Wayne and Tulsa to create and preserve urban places for the many who already know they want to live there. As these areas thrive, others will see that urban excitement is possible close to home, not just on the East Coast or in Europe. Over time there may be enough demand to redevelop badly aging post-war suburban neighborhoods in a new urbanist fashion.
Politics still matters: You need councilors and planning commissioners with the courage and vision to approve a pilot project for form-based codes or special zoning with design guidelines to protect traditional neighborhood development from suburban-style redevelopment.
But mostly you need entrepreneurial types willing to reuse old buildings in traditional neighborhoods, and others who are willing to build new in a traditional style. Recreating a vital urban core will happen the same way it was destroyed: one building at a time.
– beautiful vintage photo of Fort Wayne posted to Flickr by Zach Klein
April 29, 2008
This is great news: Revamp of zoning in works — City wants to ease the rules for downtown development
The city hopes to rezone much of the downtown into this district, or a slightly less dense variation, and away from other commercial and industrial zoning.
The rules are more conducive to a downtown, (city planner Sherese Fortriede) said, because they ease parking restrictions and allow for multiple uses. They also allow buildings to be closer to the street, creating more of a dense urban feel. But the rules aren’t perfect, which is why the city also plans to take a closer look at its zoning laws. For example, Fortriede said the city probably shouldn’t allow anyone to just build more surface parking lots downtown when there is already ample parking.
April 29, 2008
