• Under God: the city is the place where God dwells in the center—in the earthly city of Jerusalem, the temple stands as the central integrating point of the city's architecture and as apex of its art and science and technology. Even now, the city's intensity makes people religious seekers.
• Under sin: As in ancient times, the city was built around ziggurats, "landing pads" for the god of the city, so today people are drawn into skyscraper temples worshipping the self and money. Cities are hotbeds of religious cults, idols, and false gods. Since cities breed spiritual seeking, when Christians abandon the cities the seekers fall into the hands of idols and heresies.

Summary: In every earthly city, there are two "cities" vying for control. They are the City of Man, and the City of God. (See Augustine's City of God.) Though the fight between these two kingdoms happens everywhere in the world, earthly cities are the flashpoints on the battlelines, the places where the fighting is most intense, and where victories are the most strategic. Because of the power of the city, it is the chief target of the forces of darkness, because that which wins the city sets the course of human life and society and culture. Therefore, in general, the city is the most crucial place to minister.

• If the Christian church wants to really change the country and culture, it must go into the cities themselves, not just into the suburbs or even the exurbs. Three kinds of persons live there who exert a tremendous influence on our society, and we cannot reach them in the suburbs. They are:
  • the 'elites' who control the culture and who are becoming increasingly secularized,
  • the masses of new immigrants who move out into the mainstream society over the next 30 years, and
  • the poor, whose dilemmas are deepening rapidly and affecting the whole country.

2. Why we can best reach them in the city?

• Wayne Meeks of Yale, in The First Urban Christians, points out that Paul's missionary work was urban-centered. He went to population centers, and ignored small towns and the countryside. Christianity spread better in the urban Roman empire than in the countryside. Why?
  • People in the city are less conservative, more open to new ideas.
    
  • Christian evangelists found that in the city the gospel could spread faster into the influence centers—law, politics, arts, etc.—and into diverse national groups. By the year 300 A.D., over half of the urban populations of the Empire were Christian while the countryside was pagan (the word paganus means country-man!) The early church was urban. There is no intrinsic reason for urban people to be less religious, only less traditional.