A New Kind of Urban Christian

Tim Keller's article from Christianity Today is up: "A New Kind of Urban Christian."  A must read if you are urban or not.  I've also added it to my Keller resource page.

(HT: Justin Taylor, who emailed me in order to shame me since he found it first)

A few blurbs...

Once in cities, Christians should be a dynamic counterculture. It is not enough for Christians to simply live as individuals in the city. They must live as a particular kind of community. Jesus told his disciples that they were "a city on a hill" that showed God's glory to the world (Matt. 5:14-16). Christians are called to be an alternate city within every earthly city, an alternate human culture within every human culture, to show how sex, money, and power can be used in nondestructive ways.

[...]

This is the only kind of cultural engagement that will not corrupt us and conform us to the world's pattern of life. If Christians go to urban centers simply to acquire power, they will never achieve cultural influence and change that is deep, lasting, and embraced by the broader society. We must live in the city to serve all the peoples in it, not just our own tribe. We must lose our power to find our (true) power. Christianity will not be attractive enough to win influence except through sacrificial service to all people, regardless of their beliefs.

[...]

So we must neither just denounce the culture nor adopt it. We must sacrificially serve the common good, expecting to be constantly misunderstood and sometimes attacked. We must walk in the steps of the one who laid down his life for his opponents.

Comments

[centuri0n]

I'll admit I didn't get past your blurbs here to the article because the first blurb made me edgy.

As Christians, we are not called to live in merely "nondestructive" ways -- in fact, when we know what we are called to, there are some things we will destroy both spiritually and physically. For instance, idols and idolatry.

We are called to live in redemptive ways as Christians. A large part of redemption is making sure the price gets paid. While I can buy the concept that Christians ought to be a counter culture to the worldly system, and I can buy that we aren't doing a great job of that today, when we start substituting terms like "nondestructive" in missiology for terms like "redemptive" or "sanctifying" or whatever, we are knocking the legs out of what we are actually trying to do.

[centuri0n]

BTW, I am wrong often enough to be well-versed in admitting it, and in this case, I was wrong to post before reading Keller's whole article. He may have used the word "nondestructive" in the part Steve cited here, but in the following paragraph(s), Keller plainly moves from merely "not destructive" to "spiritually and morally constructive".

Sorry bout that. I'll do better next time. :)