Five years ago if you asked me what role the city plays in God’s awesome plan of redemption I would have blinked and said nothing. If you told me the city was a stage through which God would parade His most awesome acts of redemption or that God loves the city dearly and delights in redeeming it from the inside out, I would have blinked again and wondered what you were talking about.

I always viewed salvation as purely individual: I sin. God saves. Hallelujah. The idea that God redeems entire communities and that God uses entire communities to redeem individuals was as foreign to my brain as Norwegian is to my black cat.

But in the last few years I’ve been challenged through the example of godly men—men who study and live God’s mission—to read the Word in large portions at a time, asking myself, “What is God doing in this story? What is His plan?”

The same theme keeps resurfacing: God’s greatest mission is to make Himself famous. And His favorite stage is the stage of pagan cities. Growing up, I viewed big cities as bad places where bad people do bad things, and any believer who dares to live there better shield himself carefully or he’ll get corrupted. I was more focused on protecting myself from them than loving them with the gospel. I viewed Lot’s choice to live in Sodom and Gomorrah as a mistake because of where he lived instead of realizing the problem was why he lived there. It was a problem not of location but of motive. But today I thank God that Jesus didn’t treat the cities of His days on earth this way, or we’d be lost forever.

Interweaving his personal story with a biblical theology of the city in Scripture, Ray Bakke shares “the map God used to get [him] into the city for life and work” (11). It’s an autobiographical story of ministry, book reading, Scripture, and application in the life of an urban pilgrim.

Bakke expanded my view of the city like no author has. The city provides the worst and best of everything, giving the gospel a climate where it will experience massive challenges yet immeasurable expansion. Bakke references shelves of biographies to prove that the importance of an urban gospel is not some late fad that will pass with the next generation. The great author and preacher, Charles Simeon lived this theology. The early apostles leveraged the city to bring Jesus into places He otherwise never would have been heard.

Bakke’s many years of ministering in they city has made him an expert on the psychological and spiritual challenges of how city life works. Following are some intriguing bite-sized nuggets from his book:

In a rural area, when you ask people who they are, they usually describe their family and geography. But in a city, when asked who they are, people describe their vocation: “I’m a teacher,” or “I work at the gas company.” Clearly unemployment is more than an economic issue; it’s an identity crisis (19).

Many years ago I was invited to the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, along with a few other Chicago pastors, to discuss with college trustees how Wheaton might relate to the city and its troublesome issues. It was a very frank exchange. At one point a trustee said, “Ray, I get very excited when you, Bill (Leslie) and the others talk about evangelism in the city, but I get very nervous when you talk about social action, social justice, and social involvement. Isn’t that the social gospel?

At first flush I felt some defensiveness, but then after a quick prayer for help I asked the businessman where he lived and why he lived there. He very calmly described his nice, safe, good, clean, suburban community where housing values increase and where he feels his family can be secure while he travels.

Finally, I said, “Every reason you’ve given for living where you live is a social reason. If those social systems of education, polices and fire protection, economy and such didn’t exist, you’d leave. If anybody believes in the social gospel, it’s you! You’ve committed your whole life and family to those values.

His response was, “I never thought of that.” (32).

In his marvelous little book Christianity and the Social Order, William Temple...observes that the Bible concludes with the photograph of our God cleaning up the cosmos after the final holocaust, and that this same Bible pictures a God who occupies real physical bodies, Christ’s and ours. His conclusion: Christianity is the most materialistic religion on the entire earth. It’s the only religion that successfully integrates matter and spirit with integrity (33-34).

For F. S. Webster...Jonah’s problem was his patriotism. I describe it as “wrapping the gospel in his flag” (98).

Solomon envisions a temple that could serve as a worship places for all nations (2 Chron 5-6). What a contrary worldview. Instead of imagining armies going out to conquer nations, he saw migrant streams of foreign pilgrims coming to Jerusalem to encounter and worship the cosmic God (2 Chron 6:18), the God who could be met in a temple in the city (103).

Frankly, if pastors and congregations do not have a concrete plan to move some resourceful, Spirit-filled laity into the worst sections of the communities around their church buildings, then I maintain that they really don’t believe in tithing. Furthermore, they inevitably will produce a commuting congregation and a clubhouse church building quite alienated from their nearest neighbors (111).

Unique behind this idea is Bakke’s suggestion that we not only tithe 10% of our finances to God but 10% of our people to the city.

For the first time ever, by about the year 2000 over 50 percent of the people on the planet will live in cities. Cities have replaced the nations. Yesterday, cities were in the nations; today all the nations are in our cities (117).

You see, if I have rightly understood the Hebraic and contextual rootedness of Jesus, the Gospels, Paul and the Epistles, then pastors have a dual role—as shepherds of God’s flock, to be sure, but also as chaplains to communities, including other pastors as well. I cannot just care about my church. At least one of my six basic ministry functions will be networking and evangelizing in my community—perhaps off the program map of my local church (134-135).

Although I’ve always “believed” in living missionally, Bakke’s brief recounting of the martyrdom of Jim Elliot when he went to reach the Auca Indians in Ecuador (111) pierced my heart with this thought: The typical American Christian moves to a city to get a good job, raise a nice family, go to a good church, and maybe share the gospel every now and then. Career and family comfort reach the top of the list. City problems like racism, poverty, rape, and drugs are very secondary. Making disciples is sort of an appendage glued on later, and if evangelism does happen, it’s like a military mission to go in, drop a few gospel bombs, and then get out before they go off.

When our reason for moving to a city or state is purely self interest, it is only natural that our life becomes self-centered and Christ becomes another tool to improve our life, in this case, in the spiritual arena, instead of letting Him be the reason for which we live (Gal 2:20).

But the more I read about how God chose and sent Israel, and how Jesus chose and sent His disciples—disciples with full time secular jobs—and how the apostles sent their followers out as Jesus sent them, the more convinced I am that God is calling every believer to ask a simple question: “God, where are You sending me to reach people with the good news of Jesus Christ? God, where do You want me to live and work and grow so that I can be a vessel for reaching out to others?” This doesn’t mean God can’t call us to a city through a job change or career opportunity, but the question, “God what city have You called me to so I can tell people about Jesus and lead them to follow Him?” should become the ultimate drive for where we live. But too often it’s an afterthought. When our kids watch our life revolve around finding the safest and most financially secure city, neighborhood, and career, is it any wonder that they grow up rarely sharing the gospel or talking to believers about their walk with Jesus and finding it very awkward to do so when they finally do?

Although I wholeheartedly believe that believers should join churches that preach God’s Word without compromise, when we ask—and only ask—”Where can I find a church to attend so that my family can be fed?” we have turned Christianity into self-centered individualism. If the question is coupled with, “God, where are You sending me to reach others?” it then becomes most concerned with God’s mission and God’s glory, because we should crave God’s Word so that we can love the lost and the saved and delight in obeying Jesus’ great commission to make disciples.

Would the Auca Indians of Ecuador have ever come to know Jesus had John Elliot’s wife and other women with her not moved in to live with the Indians, served their physical needs, and brought them the good news of Jesus Christ? Will we be content to keep the Elliot’s enshrined in a book on our desk or as a conviction-producing illustration for our sermon, or will we enter our city, and intentionally live among our people so they can see the gospel’s power (our life) and hear it’s life-transforming message (Jesus)?

Bakke’s message and its importance is wrapped up in a single quote towards the end:

If we penetrate cities, the gospel will travel. Large cities are both magnets, drawing the nations into them, and magnifiers, broadcasting the gospel out into the hinterlands (168).

One thousand eight hundred years ago, Tertullian verified this truth when he taunted the Roman empower with these words, “We are but of yesterday, and we have filled every place among you—cities, islands, fortresses, towns, market-places, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum—we have left nothing to you but the temples of your gods” (193). Bakke adds, “Early Christians penetrated the whole city, but not by claiming space for church buildings or programs of their own. They penetrated everybody else’s space instead” (193). God help us to do the same!

Pointing to our rapidly urbanizing world, Bakke writes to unfold God’s view of the city and how He works in and through the city.

I love Bakke’s conclusion. I don’t like how he got there. I feel that Bakke tries too hard to defend his theology of reaching the city by drawing exact parallels from Israel to America, cities of the Old and New Testaments to cities of the world today. If he just focused on Christ’s love for people (since people are what makes cities what they are) and God’s mission for people of every tribe and tongue to worship the Lamb, and the new city in heaven in which we will dwell, he’d makes his case soundly and in fewer words. However, I’m afraid that his stretchy exegesis of the text may cause many good theologians to dismiss the book entirely, even when there is so much to learn from Bakke’s experience as an urban missionary, a man who spent his life reaching cities around the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

If you want to learn about the sociological dynamics of the city, Bakke is your guru. If you want a full-fledged theology on God’s view of the city, take care that Bakke’s book goes too far.

The followed single Scripture gripped my heart above all others as I read this book:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, “Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and become the fathers of sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare” (Jer 29:4-7).

A search through Scripture reveals that more pagans came to believe in Yahweh, the God of Israel, when Israel lived in foreign nations than when they lived in their own land.  God, send us to the nations through the cities!

Ray Bakke. A Theology as Big as the City. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1997. 221 pp.