The multicultural American experiment is done. The city-to-city era of church planting is living on borrowed time. The church “for the life of the city” is a slogan that proved presumptive. Churchly emphasis on artistic engagement is even worse, and has proven a costly three decade case study in mission drift.

The brilliant, late Tim Keller continues to polarize conversations for his church planting genius. Key to the New York Presbyterian pastor’s success was his ability to analyze trends, get in front of them (but not too far in front), and implement strategies to meet people where they were.

A few of the legendary church planter’s underlying assumptions, groundbreaking at the time, no longer apply. This is no more a criticism against him than it is a criticism against Napoleon that he didn’t live long enough to plan for trench warfare. But to continue to command open-field infantry charges wearing red pants in the age of machine gun warfare would be foolish.

Wisdom must be contextualized.

Consider three of Keller’s assumptions about the landscape of America for church planting that I now argue no longer apply.

De-Urbanization

Keller loved cities. He saw them as the place from which movements, energy, and ideas were successfully started. For Keller, ministering in cities was ministering to the future. To plant churches in rural or suburban areas was a losing proposition.

This is no longer the case.

Many rural areas are no longer declining in total population, and in fact are getting younger on average. COVID was an unpredictable, “black swan” event that drove many people away from the centralized planning and conformist attitudes that can characterize big cities.

Suburbs, and even many rural areas, are once again growing across the nation. While they might be an hour and a half from a city and still rely upon cities as a center of gravity, cities themselves are no longer the undisputed place of the bustling future. They’re entertainment and business districts for suburbanites. Is that sustainable? I don’t claim to know, when is America ever sustainable? But it is the new reality.

White America’s Premature Obituary

A related assumption that has expired is that investing in White America is investing in declining America. Whites, on average, once seemed irrevocably downwardly mobile (The U.S. white population experienced its first on-record decline between 2010 and 2020). Simultaneously, immigrant populations were generously funded through Medicaid and other government programs to facilitate migration to the United States. A Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) investigation this year revealed how subsidized they were.

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