In this week’s WORLD, Marvin Olasky writes on Christians’ abandonment of urban America:

Urban Christians like [Jerry] McAuley throughout the 19th century dominated poverty fighting, and their teaching spread around the country. In the 20th century, though, evangelicals lost influence as they abandoned the cities. Some came to have a distorted sense of sin and how to fight it. They started to think that the countryside was purer than the city. They thought that folks who went to the city were likely to be corrupted by their surroundings.

Their fears had a basis in fact: Urban anonymity allowed newcomers freedom they did not have within small town social strictures. But they were wrong to associate rural life with purity, since the Bible teaches that sin comes from within. David in Psalm 51 and Paul in chapter 7 of Romans write of indwelling sin…

Early Christians followed Jeremiah and became blessings to their Babylons. The apostle Paul began his major ministry activities in Antioch, then the third-largest city in the Roman Empire. Paul sent his epistles to residents of the largest cities of the Roman Empire: He wrote to the Romans, the Corinthians, the Ephesians. The church grew fast in urban areas, while rural areas were filled with pagans: The word itself comes from the Latin paganus, meaning an old country dweller, one who lives in the countryside, a hick.

Today, sadly, the pattern is reversed: Christians are mostly in the countryside, and city-dwelling pagani dominate journalism, education, the arts, and so on. Today, we need Christians who will follow Jeremiah 29 in being good neighbors to the Babylonians around us. We need Christians who appreciate and learn from urban diversity, seeing people as people, good and bad, but all needing Christ.

Read the rest of Marvin’s piece here.