Lectures
The Church in the City: Redeeming Our Civic Common Life
Synopsis
Seek the welfare of the city into which I have sent you” so the prophet Jeremiah instructed the Israelites who had been exiled in a land that embodied a very different set of values than the ones with which they had been nurtured. Christians throughout history have taken Jeremiah’s instructions to the Babylonian exiles as foundational for how they are to interact with the wider civic culture. To seek the welfare (or in Hebrew: shalom) of the city, therefore, has been understood variously as a divine imperative for churches to pursue within their specific geographic and civic-political context. Shalom is a rich word that implies not only absence of conflict, but also delight and wholeness, relationships and justice. Perhaps even more essential to the vision of shalom is the fact that it is essentially social, even political—shalom is a shared vision of common life and the common good. In light of this injunction, it can be argued that the typical American neighborhood of the 20th and 21st centuries does not do a very good job of expressing shalom. Our urban and suburban neighborhoods typically are income and age exclusionary, heavily regulated by abstract legislation, and designed to maximize privatized consumption. In this context how can churches advocate for and provide a model of shalom in their own neighborhoods? In this lecture the Rev. Dr. Jacobsen will be explore various ways that churches can help redeem the civic life of their city by working in and through their own neighborhoods.
