The plan to save the city was Messianic and Americans love messianic plans. We are a “can do” people even when we’re wearing sandals and holding a steaming hot cup of mocha latte with our name written in cream on the top. Utopianism is the notion that we can build the heavenly city on the earth. It leads to towers, (Babel), to Egypt, and to Rome. It tends to confuse the creature for the Creator. Christians, however, love to part of the “hip” and “in” crowds. The ideas of “doing church” and “saving the city” make a powerful elixir to which American Christians, historically, have had little resistance. It turns the gospel into law and it puts the future of Christ’s church back in our hands, where we want it.

 
So I Googled “redeeming the city” and produced 5 million results. The first link, from 2006, captures the spirit and the rhetoric of the movement. The writer uses catch phrases such as “being the church” and “redeeming the city” without a hint of self consciousness. The assumption seems to be that, “Of course this is correct and of course this is how we should speak because this is God’s mission.” I dissent. The expression “being the church” is not biblical and it isn’t grounded in Scripture. The church is not something that we are to be, it is the assembly of the redeemed gathered by God, out of Egypt, as it were, and placed before his holy mountain. It is the Christ-confessing covenant community.

To say “be the church” is to confuse the law and the gospel. The good news is that God has established his church for us, in Christ, and has graciously included us sinners in it by his free, undeserved favor alone, through faith alone. The church, first of all, is that assembly of Christ-confessors where God comes to us with his Word (law and gospel) and his sacrament. It is not something that we “do.” The church is what we are, by grace alone (sola gratia). It’s not a man-made institution. The church existed from the beginning, with our first parents. After the fall, God gathering his church out of fallen humanity. He promised a Savior. He covered us when we were naked (see Genesis 3). He gathered us into the ark (Gen 6–9), and he made a covenant with us: “I will be a God to you and to your children” (Gen 6, 12, 15, 17).

Consider the exhortation: “Be those huddled in the ark being tossed about by waves and hoping for dry land.” It makes no sense. How about “Be those wandering in the wilderness living on miraculous manna for forty years”? Again, it makes no sense. It doesn’t make any more sense if we apply the exhortation to Pentecost. The church is what we are, not what we do. We do what we do in response to God’s grace. That’s the proper order. God delivers and we respond, by his grace, in union with Christ, in the Spirit.

What about “redeeming the city?” Well, this isn’t any more biblical than the first. It is quite simply a prejudice more than a biblical datum (a given) that God has special affection for cities as such. Just think about it. If we read Scripture in context, according to its original intent, whence would we derive the notion that God has some special affection for cities as such? In the Ancient Near East and in the 1st century AD, how many actual cities were there? Where did most folk live, most of the time until the Industrial Revolution? (Hint: It wasn’t in cities). Yes, he saves his elect in cities and he saves his elect in the most rural villages too. There is just as much rural imagery in Scripture as urban. After all, “The Lord is my Shepherd” not my barista.

The real question is why such language was ever plausible or attractive in the first place. The answer seems to be this: It is another example of baptizing the culture and calling it Christianity. My dear friend David Hall, Sr Pastor at Midway Presbyterian (PCA) in Powder Springs, GA (Atlanta metro) has pointed me to an interesting essay by Joel Kotkin exposing the roots and collapse of the movement to “save the city.”

Read More