upstream / downstream
The more that I look around at the state of the church and the state of my nation, I’m coming to a few realizations that are all inter-related.
The first is that the United States is sliding further and further towards becoming a secular, post-Christian society. This statement, of course, is more true in the Northeast than the South, and is more true in urban, than suburban and rural areas.
Canada, our northern neighbor, gives me a pretty good idea of where the United States will find itself in 3 generations(give or take). In the census in Canada in the year 2000, what I found was that roughly only 8% of the population were evangelical Christians. To put it in plain speech, only 8% of the population believes that the Bible is true, hell is hot, and forever is a long time. In addition, the number of Catholics was down from the previous censuses, and Protestants were down from previous censuses. You can directly attribute much of this to the greater influence of Europe on Canadian society.
Interestingly, however, the number of people with no spiritual preference was up, paganism was up, witchcraft was up, and previously almost dead, the number of people practicing native Canadian Indian spirituality was also up.
If we want to influence our culture for change, both here in the United States and in Canada, we’re going to have to go about it in different ways than we have in the past.
Forming coalitions (like the Moral Majority) just isn’t going to get it done, and our recent history bears that out. Historically, Christians in the United States have lived downstream from where culture is formed, and then complain about all the pollution that is getting in the water. The answer to this problem is to move upstream where all the crap is getting into the water and change culture at its source, so that cultural change can thing ring outwards. That means planting churches in predominantly urban environments.
In an increasingly global society, major urban centers have a tendency to be more like each other than like their immediate outlying suburban zones. So New York City is going to have more in common with Paris, or Rome, than it has in common with Rochester or Watertown.
Urban centers, like Los Angeles and New York and Atlanta, are where you find your major universities, media outlets, transportation hubs, and artistic communities. If we genuinely want to see the laws in the United States changed, we need to move to the city and plant churches where the law professor gets saved, and then influences his students, who are future judges and lawyers. If we want to see art that isn’t perverse, we need to plant churches where the artists can be reached, and generally speaking, that’s not in suburbia.
Cultural transformation has to take place at the same level that cultural formation does. This means starting, not just new churches in urban areas, but starting church-planting churches, that spawn a church-planting movement in major urban centers.
