Mennonite Weekly Review

The urban landscape always seems to need renewal that never quite happens. The media often portray cities as cesspools of crime, vice, cheap thrills, immodest dress and coarse manners. Chances are, if you put the word “urban” in front of anything, the image will not be positive: urban youth, urban schools, urban crime.

Mickens

In comparison, we’re told that rural folks are the real, salt-of-the-earth Americans. Not like those decadent city dwellers.

Yet Christianity started as an urban movement. It only penetrated Europe’s countryside many centuries after the Christianization of the cities.

In the United States, widespread migration from rural areas to the cities reached its climax in the 1920s as immigrants, rural whites and Southern blacks poured into urban areas to work in the new industrial centers.

In the 1960s, urban decay began to infect America’s cities. White flight, unemployment, suburbanization and outsourcing caused our nation’s urban areas to be characterized by poverty and de facto segregation. Once-vibrant areas essentially died out and have yet to be revived.

I see evidence of this in my own city of Atlanta. Historic Vine City, home to the Atlanta University Center and the neighborhood that Coretta Scott King called home, is now mostly known for being the site of crack houses, prostitution and violence. The large housing projects that were supposed to end urban blight instead became emblematic of the city’s inability to handle poverty and crime. Attempts to integrate public schools have been abandoned, leaving minority students in educational institutions just as segregated and inferior as the ones from the Jim Crow era.

Despite the amount of time, effort and money spent trying to revitalize urban areas, the efforts have not been successful. You might call them “negative resurrections.” Large public housing projects inadvertently spawned crime and destroyed tenuous neighborhood solidarity. Gentrification improves the economic appeal and physical appearance of a neighborhood while pushing out working-class individuals.

However, even as cities decay, nature reclaims. In Detroit, the ruins of the industrial age — factories, movie palaces, houses — are being reclaimed by moss, vines and trees. Amid the debris and the broken dreams symbolized by abandoned buildings, God says even to inanimate objects, “You are not forgotten, even in your brokenness.” God finds a use for these battered shells even if the residents of Detroit can’t.

The return of city infrastructure to the Earth is probably not the kind of resurrection that most people have in mind.

A more mutually beneficial resurrection for our cities would mean the revitalization of areas as depicted in the Bible. The New Testament illustrates the disciples as leaven, building up churches in the cities that are supposed to act as leaven for the whole community.