Misconceptions, Cities, and the Work of Urban Evangelism
A visit to New York City exposes how easily people misunderstand communities they don’t know. The author reflects on how limited perspectives—whether urban or rural—can distort what we assume about “ordinary” people. The piece encourages Christians to support and learn from those sharing the gospel in neighborhoods unlike their own.
- Everyday life in unfamiliar places often challenges stereotypes.
- Limited experience can distort perspective—whether in a big city or a small town.
- Christians can learn by supporting and getting acquainted with neighborhoods unlike their own.
By Mark A. Taylor
We were sitting on a bench in Central Park, eating a picnic and watching joggers and hurried businessmen on the sidewalks in front of us.
“Midwesterners don’t think about the ordinary people who live in New York,” I said. “You know moms and dads, middle managers, customer service reps, secretaries. We tend to view the city as one big, dangerous pit filled with rats and gang members and drugs and danger.”
We had seen none of that in our visit to the city. (OK, one rat on the subway track, but it presented us with no danger.) Instead, there were all these everyday types. The sheer numbers of them thronging around us wherever we went led me to realize I have a lot to learn about reaching urban areas with the gospel.
“Yeah, but it goes both ways,” my daughter in law told me. She and my son live in Brooklyn, where her dentist has spent his whole life. “When he discovered I grew up in Colorado, he asked me how the Indians are doing,” she said. “I told him fine, I guess, although I’ve never met an Indian.”
We remembered a conversation my son had with an East Coast dowager when he lived in Boston one summer a few years ago. He was doing landscape work around her imposing home. When she learned he was from Ohio, she asked him, most sincerely, “Well, how are the farmers getting along?” My son knows no farmers, either, but he told her he thought they were coping pretty well.
Likewise, when my daughter moved to Southern California, she was warned about one new contemporary worship service that might be unlike anything she had experienced “back East.” “Well, we do have guitars in Ohio,” she responded, but I’m not sure her friend was convinced.
“It’s amazing to me the small world a person can inhabit, living in the biggest city in the country,” my son said during our visit. People who have never traveled outside their New York borough share a perspective of life different from that of a backwoods bumpkin but equally distorted.
For Christians concerned about evangelism, maybe this means we should just concentrate on talking about Jesus with people close by. After all, we’ll never really understand the culture “over there.”
Maybe.
Or perhaps it means we should pray for and congratulate and support Christians trying to take the gospel to neighborhoods unlike our own. And we should get acquainted with those neighborhoods ourselves for our sake as well as theirs. When we learn how it is for them, we’re enriched by the diversity we discover. And we’re compelled to share hope with people much like us in an environment different from any we’ve experienced.
Author: Mark A. Taylor
Mark A. Taylor, who served as Christian Standard editor from 2003 to 2017, retired in June 2017 after almost 41 years with Standard Publishing (Christian Standard Media).
