city

Derek Thompson for The Atlantic:

In high-density cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children, according to Census analysis by the economist Jed Kolko. By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places. In the biggest picture, it turns out that America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.

Cities were once a place for families of all classes. The “basic custom” of the American city, wrote the urbanist Sam Bass Warner, was a “commitment to familialism.” Today’s cities, however, are decidedly not for children, or for families who want children. As the sociologists Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark put it, they are “entertainment machines” for the young, rich, and mostly childless. And this development has crucial implications—not only for the future of American cities, but also for the future of the U.S. economy and American politics.

More in the full piece, including that even the paragon of urban renewal — NYC — experienced decline this year, principally because there is no room for families.

After 20 years of living in major city centers, I can attest to them feeling more and more difficult for kids and families. Just last week, I reached out to several local churches as I searched for youth groups for our two teens. “Not much going on for youth here in the city,” was the universal response.

Of course, there is more evidence of family-unfriendly cities than my youth ministry anecdote. In the area of construction, for example, the vast majority of new housing that has been installed during the “urban rebirth” is made up of studio, 1-, and 2-bedroom units. My neighborhood was built around 1910, almost entirely with families in mind: three-bedroom units in “two-flat” buildings that were explicitly created for the emerging middle class. Every year there are fewer of these buildings because they are either being replaced with 1-bedroom multi-units for young singles, or they are being converted into urban mansions for the very wealthy.

For sure, cities face many obstacles that are inherent to urban life and population density. But this kind of population decline not one of them; it’s a self-imposed problem resulting from a couple of decades of policy-making and profit-chasing without children and families in mind. If left unchecked, these trends will undo the very urban renaissance that has benefitted the developers and policy makers.

Yewande Komolafe for the NYT:

There is a saying in Yoruba, one of the languages spoken by the people of southwestern Nigeria, that translates as “The soul that does not eat pepper is a dead soul.”

The saying refers not to just one single element, but to the variety of ingredients in Nigerian cuisine that add heat to a dish: the mild tingle and smoke of selim peppers, the sudden rush of alligator peppers, the sustained heat of a habanero. We don’t say a dish is spicy — we say it has pepper. Pepper is not meant to overburden your palate, but to stimulate it with an interplay of flavors, and to bring your mouth to life.

Daniel Hertz for City Lab:

In other words, possibly the only thing worse than a world in which homeownership doesn’t work as a wealth-building tool is a world in which it does work as a wealth-building tool.

This also means that the two stated pillars of American housing policy — homeownership as wealth-building and housing affordability — are fundamentally at odds.

I think that Hertz has it backwards; people are in fact better off when home ownership builds wealth. Nevertheless, the thesis that housing policy mandates are contradictory is incredibly insightful.

Armin Rosen for City Journal:¹

In Lagos… nothing is guaranteed. Everything is relative. Your yellow cab could be driven by a drug dealer, or it could be driven by a banker who wants another income. You just don’t know.

Poverty, confusion, and moral fluidity haven’t stopped Lagos from achieving global prominence. Maybe an all-pervading looseness has even been a source of the city’s growth, since it has expanded with a velocity that prudent planning would avoid. Lagos is now West Africa’s economic and cultural hub, as well as perhaps the continent’s largest city, depending on which population figures one accepts. By most accounts, Lagos has twice as many people as London, along with a GDP greater than all but six African states. In its successes and failures, the city offers a cautionary preview of where an urbanizing developing world is hurtling.

Much more in the full piece. This profile of one of the world’s most overwhelming cities reminded me of of another quote I read a couple of years back: “Lagos is chaos theory made flesh and concrete.”

When I lived and worked in Mexico City, we were astounded to discover that its population was growing by 500 people a day. As a church planter, that meant that a new church of 500 needed to be launched every single day to reach only the new arrivals — never mind the city’s extant millions. According to this City Journal profile, Lagos has four times Mexico City’s number pouring in: 2000 people every day. That’s 730,000 new arrivals a year, more than the entire population of Washington D.C.²

There has been, perhaps, no other city in history with this kind of population growth. It makes me all the more thankful that we get to know and serve Femi and Tosin Osunnuyi and their work to establish a new church in Lagos.

After all, like the above article also states, “the world is sure to look more like Lagos in the coming decades.” In other words, we have work to do. As the world becomes more urban, so must the church.

Footnotes

1. h/t @nickoparsons for the link to this article. ↩

2. List of most populace cities in the US. ↩

Emily Badger for the NYT:

For $1,200 a month, Patricia Torres and her family were renting a bedroom, a share of time in the bathroom, one vegetable drawer and one shelf in the fridge, and two cupboards over the stove. They rented not so much a home as a fraction of one…

…San Francisco’s housing crisis had meant living without essential elements of home. A large affordable housing development rising downtown promised what they did not have: 95 complete homes, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments with privacy, a sense of peace, a place to cook.

Louis Scheepers, a friend and colleague, writing about the water crisis in Cape Town:

Since 2015 Cape Town and its surrounding area have experienced the worst drought in over a century. As rainfall decreased, dam levels slowly started falling. The demand for water increased significantly as the population grew from 2.4 million in 1995 to an estimated 4.3 million in 2018….

If Day Zero comes, I do not know how a city of this size will respond. Will people help each other or trample each other? I hope we will not find out! I pray that despite grave weather predictions, God will continue to send rain to fill our dams. However, my biggest prayer is that he will fill the empty spiritual dams in people’s lives, that people will seek God in this crisis and that Cape Town will turn to God, who is capable of doing much more than we can ask or imagine.

Update 05JUN:Cape Town dam levels recover to 30% after higher may rainfall.

Short film by Anthony Pellino:

Church planter (and colleague of mine at Orchard Group) Jordan Rice on preaching that connects:

I would define contextualization as using the gospel to answer the questions that people actually have—to approach a text first seeking Biblical truth and a commitment to what God has revealed to us in scripture; then, answering the questions that people actually are asking in this present time.

Take, for example, a text about Jesus and the leper. It’s a great theological truth that Jesus became unclean so that we can become clean, or that Jesus would touch the untouchable. Those are great theological truths. But no one is asking questions about leprosy because it’s a foreign concept to us. Contextualizing that passage is answering the question, “What makes you feel unclean? What would make you feel like you’re not touchable, like God doesn’t want to come near you?”

Great interview.

Wisdom from Hidden Christmas by Tim Keller:

Here’s the challenge, though: We need Christians everywhere. That includes centers of power, where people of influence, talent, wealth, and beauty reside. But everything about Christmas teaches us not to have our heads turned by such people, not to be prejudiced in their favor. Christians must also live among them and love them and serve them as neighbors. There are temptations for those who do this. They must do so with no need or desire to get into the “inner ring” of coolness and power. [Because of the extraordinary circumstances of the Incarnation,] Christmas means that race, pedigree, wealth, and status do not ultimately matter. It means not being prejudiced against the poor — and not being biased against or for the well off. We must not be snobs or snobs about snobs.¹

Footnotes

1. Keller, Timothy. Hidden Christmas : the surprising truth behind the birth of Christ. New York, New York: Viking, 2016, 78. ↩

A minister blogs his experience of visiting a traditional church and an “atheist church” on the same Sunday:

Both were attended by a crowd of fashionable-looking young adults, mainly in their twenties and thirties. Although the sizes of the venues differed — HTB was bigger — both were nearly full. The form of the gathering was also very comparable. Both had a variety of notices and announcements, a collection taken during the ‘service’, tea and coffee for those attending, and ‘welcome’ information was available for newcomers. However, the parallels went deeper, too.

Emma Green on Radio Atlantic:¹

I think that the urban/rural divide is the single most overlooked fracture in American religion, and particularly in the American church. With religious minorities… the enclaves are urban, concentrated populations where everybody in those communities is religious. But I think in Christianity, because it’s so huge and spread out, there are radically different orientations for those people who are in cities, and those people who are in suburbs, and more rural country.

More in the full podcast, including conversation about “how everyone, ‘religious’ or not, wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves, something transcendent.”

Footnotes

1. Only a couple of weeks since launch, Radio Atlantic is already climbing to the top of my favorite podcasts. ↩

James Vincent for The Verge:

Amazon’s drone delivery program stopped being a joke a while ago, but the company still has to overcome serious challenges to make the technology actually work. One of these is getting drones near enough to large populations so they’re more efficient than regular road delivery. Amazon has an idea for that though: Huge. Drone. Beehives.

The article goes on to question whether this is possible because of the risks of noise, congestion, and crashes. (Seems like we’ve lived with that stuff with cars for a long time now.)

Elly Fishman for Chicago Mag:

If Sullivan High School had a motto, it would be “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Its immigrant population now numbers close to 300 — 45 percent of the school’s 641 students — and many are refugees new to this country. This academic year alone, the Rogers Park school has welcomed a staggering 89 refugees — nearly three times as many as last year and far more than at any other high school in the city. The recent surge, fueled in part by an influx of Syrians, has turned the school into a global melting pot, with 38 countries and more than 35 languages represented.

Much more in the full piece including infographics, photography, video, and what it means to educate kids like the girl who “says she misses the smell of jasmine in her native Syria but not the sound of bombs.”

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra profiles “the life and times of Redeemer Presbyterian Church” for TGC:

The spiritual scene wasn’t much better: Less than 1 percent of those in center city Manhattan self-identified as evangelicals. Without a lot more connections, experience, and money, you’ll have a really hard time, New York insiders told them. Odds are you won’t last five years.

But Keller’s plant has lasted nearly six times that long. When he preaches his last sermon on June 25, Redeemer will be 28 years old. Over nearly three decades, attendance has soared from around 50 to more than 5,000. The congregation expanded into two, then three locations. They ministered to thousands through Hope for New York, re-imagined employment through the Center for Faith and Work, and launched a church-planting hub now called City to City.

Through it all, Redeemer proved the impossible: You can grow an evangelical church in the middle of one of the most post-Christian, least Bible-minded cities in the United States.

Over the past 15 or so years, perhaps no single church (Redeemer) or person (Keller) have been as influential in educating the Western church at large about the importance of and strategy for urban church planting.