Rebuilding Home: 13 Days in NehemiahSýnishorn

Why should Christians get upstream in culture?

My wife Grace and I have been doing ministry together our entire marriage, always in larger cities, having even moved a few times in response to God’s calling. We know many ministry families, including international missionaries, who have done the same thing. For people who are not believers, the thought of moving your entire family to a large city where you know few people, in the hope that you will be able to put life together for your family, and minister to others, can sound a bit crazy. From the days of Abraham and Sarah to the present, this is exactly what God has repeatedly asked some of his people to do. We see this very thing happen in Nehemiah 11 for at least six reasons.

1. Cities are strategic to God’s plan for the world. While there must be faithful churches wherever there are people, cities and surrounding areas are strategically important. Sociologists such as James Davison Hunter have shown that culture flows downstream from urban areas where government, education, healthcare, information, entertainment, trade, travel, and industry are concentrated. An urban area is marked by density and diversity. According to some estimates, over half of the world’s population lives in cities, and over two-thirds of Americans live in a city of some size. The Bible opens with a garden and the cultural mandate to build culture, which would result in cities. The Bible ends with unveiling the heavenly city of the New Jerusalem, an urban paradise for God’s people.

While we need churches and ministries in rural areas, cities are strategic centers from which to send out ministry and gather people.

2. Some believers should intentionally live in major cities because of their strategic importance. This is exactly what happened in Nehemiah’s day, as roughly 10 percent of the people were chosen by God through the casting of lots to determine who should relocate to the city for mission purposes. Those who moved into the city relocated to the neighborhoods in the city where their families had resided in previous generations. In our day, this would be akin to various families taking responsibility upon themselves to be missionaries to their neighborhood and maintaining that ministry from one generation to the next.

3. Believers living in cities should love the whole city and serve the common good. Christians and churches in cities are to live as Jesus taught, as a city within the city whose beliefs and behaviors are countercultural to the city so that the Kingdom models what a truly great city could look like under the rule of King Jesus. This happens as our beliefs and behaviors are guided by the Scriptures so that how we do such things as gender, sex, work, money, power, family, and pleasure is in a manner that is different or holy.

4. Urban believers will pay a price to do so. Cities tend to be statistically non-Christian and filled with people who are not vocally Christian. Therefore, opposition and criticism are to be expected. Sin also tends to be concentrated in cities because of the anonymity they provide people. Lastly, cities are expensive, especially for families raising children.

5. Cities are worth the effort to reach because they are ripe for the gospel. Despite the obvious difficulties in the doing of urban ministries, such as occurred in the days of Nehemiah all the way to our own day, there are many reasons, including the following, why cities are worth the effort:

•Jesus said that the harvest was ripe, and the workers were few, and that is especially true of cities.

•Because the city has a higher concentration of sin, it is exactly the kind of place where the gospel of forgiveness might be most easily understood.

•Because the city is more open to change than more established traditional areas, people may be more open to changes such as converting to Christ.

•Because cities make it difficult for large churches, the new opportunities to be multiple campuses and church-planting church that sends congregations out to various parts of the city is an opportunity for Christians to scatter on a mission, just like the days of Nehemiah.

•Because cities are expensive and less charitable, the generosity of faithful Christians is a very visible demonstration of their true priorities and love for both Jesus and the whole city.

•From a city, outlying areas and even the world can be reached.

•The high concentration of innovators, emerging leaders, and highly creative people in the cities means that their conversion results in the ongoing reformation of the church for good.

6. Jesus Himself relocated from Heaven to demonstrate to us how to be missionaries in our city. In John’s gospel, Jesus tells us no less than 39 times that He was a missionary from Heaven who came to minister incarnationally (literally God “in flesh”) in an earthly culture.

Furthermore, Jesus also commands us to be missionaries in culture as He was, saying in John 17:18,

“As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” He also said in John 20:21, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

In closing, I want to share with you a historical example of what happens when the principles of Nehemiah are practically applied to a church-planting church in a city. In the 1550s, John Calvin saw the population double in Geneva as Christians fled there from persecution. One of those refugees was the Englishman John Bale, who wrote,

“Geneva seems to me to be the wonderful miracle of the whole world. For so many from all countries come here, as it were, to a sanctuary. Is it not wonderful that Spaniards, Italians, Scots, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, disagreeing in manners, speech, and apparel, should live so lovingly and friendly, and dwell together like a...Christian congregation?”

God forced Geneva to become a short-term training ground in urban missions in His loving providence. Christians from varying cultures lived together there under the teaching of John Calvin, and they had to determine what to receive, reject, and redeem from their culture to effectively contextualize the gospel and evangelize.

After such wonderful theological training and missiological experience, many Christians returned to their cultures once persecution subsided. The result was an explosion of contending, contextualizing, and church planting. There were only five underground Protestant Churches in France alone in 1555, but by 1562, 2,150 churches were planted, totaling some three million people. Furthermore, some of the churches were megachurches, with anywhere from 4,000-9,000 people in attendance.

Additionally, church-planting missionaries were also sent by Calvin to Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and the free imperial city-states in Rhineland. The Atlantic Ocean was even crossed by church-planting missionaries Calvin sent to South America and what is Brazil today, often starting in cities and spreading out from there into regions and nations.

Question:

What are some of the greatest needs that only the gospel and Christian faith can meet where you live?