For the Love of the City

Lately I've been listening through the audio archives from the Reform and Resurgence conference that took place at Mars Hill Church in Seattle this Spring. It's a pretty cool thing that I didn't have to fly to the West Coast or pay a single shiny dime to get all the goods from this conference; though after listening, it would have been worth a number of shiny dimes to attend...even if they were MY shiny dimes.

The average looking white guy directly above this sentence is Dr. Timothy Keller. Rather than recite his bio, I'll just directe you to the Wikipedia article. The short version is that Dr. Keller is one of the country's biggest advocates for Urban Christianity. The following quote is taken from this audio program, which I highly recommend for your edification.

"Christians should be living in cities in far greater numbers than they are now because they want to...not out of guilt. There's nothing in the Bible that says you have to live in cities. But there's everything in the Bible that says you ought to want to."

This is just one of a hundred quotable moments in the program. Did I mention that I highly recommend listening to it? I can hardly think of a better way to spend the next hour and twenty-two minutes...of course, my imagination has never been that impressive.

In another thought provoking part of the presentation Dr. Keller talked about Churches becoming dynamic counter-cultures in society. In his words, as Christians we are called to be "radically the same and radically different" with regard to the people who live in our cities. The key is to choose carefully--and on a Biblical basis--which aspects of culture can be adopted, which aspects can be adapted, and which aspects should be ultimately rejected. Said differently, none of H. Richard Neibuhr's categories is sufficient in and of itself.

So that got me thinking.

Where do we take our stand? What are the core issues of Christian belief on which we must stand firm against howling cultural winds? What are the issues that have been forced into the core of Christian belief that should not be there? How does this all affect the way we should live within culture?

I'd love to hear feedback on this. I'll try to post some of mine as well.