Rooted in the Cities
Seven years ago, in 2014, a group of would-be founding pastors and wives began meeting to pray and discuss whether God might be calling us to plant a church, and if so, what kind of church might that be. In those days, we began talking about God’s calling on us to be worshipers, servants, and missionaries. We worship Jesus. We love one another. We serve the Cities.
From the beginning, we sensed a particular call to this metro. It was not a call to just be the church anywhere. We met here, we lived here, God had sent us here, and we sensed the call to be the church, and plant more churches, in these Twin Cities — so much so that we put the word Cities in our church name. Not Prairies Church. Not Lakes Church, or North Country Church. Cities Church, as in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
And so, when we went to create a logo for our church, the designer astutely put a river through the middle, with one downtown on one side, and other downtown on the other. And whether you live in Minneapolis or Saint Paul, you can say which one you think is right side up, and which one upside down.
And of course, “the Twin Cities” refers not only to the two downtowns, but also the whole metro area that has grown up around the two cities. We had this in mind too when we named it Cities Church. We hoped to be “in the city,” in the central metro, near downtown Minneapolis or downtown Saint Paul, or in the “central metro” space between them, and we wanted to plant churches all around the metro.
And, as you may know, land is hard to come by in the city. It was hard enough to find space to rent where hundreds of people can gather to worship. We expected that eventually finding a place to buy would be even more difficult. We drew an eye with the corners on the downtowns, basically along the I-94 corridor, about ten or twelve blocks north or south, and asked God to give us space in “the central metro.” First, to rent. Which we did for five years, and then just over a year ago, we bought. And here we are: 1524 Summit Ave in Saint Paul, with a call to be rooted in these Cities, and in the central metro, with downtown St Paul about 3 miles east, and downtown Minneapolis about 3 miles west. Here we are.
How Does God See the City?
We began our Rooted series two weeks ago with our first and most important value: Jesus. We worship Jesus. Then last Sunday: the church. We love one another. Today we focus on where God has sent us: the Twin Cities. We serve the Cities. Worshipers of Jesus, servants of each other, and missionaries to these Cities.
And in God’s providence, and through a patient discernment process, we think that now is the time, of all times — when the civic market has taken a serious dip with the pandemic, the riots, and unrest — to remember afresh our calling as a city church, and now to put down our roots as a church. In a rootless time, in a restless city, we’re putting down roots.
So what we want to do this morning is consider how God sees the city. What is the place of the city in his global purposes? And then what is our calling, particularly as a church, with respect to our city, and what it means to be a church in the city, for the Cities?
1. The Draw: Cities bring out our best.
First, consider the draw of the city, that it brings out our best.
Cities, as dense settlements, resource us as humans, enrich our lives, and challenge us to grow and improve. Cities expose us to new ideas, and more talent, and make us think outside the box and develop skills. We encounter people both with whom we can trade goods and services, and who are better than we are and push us to be our best.
Cities also serve as refuges for minorities and immigrants, and for the poor and homeless. Which, as Christians, is a draw for us. Cities are places of restlessness where people are often “off balance” and seeking spiritually. Urbanites are open to new ideas, like the gospel, and to change, like Christianity.
Also cities are influential to the surrounding region. “As cities go, so goes the world.” Paul’s missionary pattern was to impact the urban center and move on.
Cities are where people are, and increasingly so: 300 years ago, 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. Today, 80% are in urban areas. In Minnesota, now more than half our state’s population lives in the metro.
So, first there’s the draw of the city, that it brings out our best, and strategic for gospel advance. But secondly, as we all know far too well, there are the drawbacks of the city, that they can provoke our worst.
2. The Drawbacks: Cities can provoke our worst.
Cities are magnifying glasses that bring out both the best and worst in us. So, at the same time, Cities can be both the best of places and the worst. Every human city has its underbellies. And as many of you know, cities can be hard for young families.
There has never been a time where this city did not have its drawbacks, but the depravity of our city is all too familiar to us right now. We remember the sorrows and fears and anger of the last week of May, just nine months ago. We watched in horror as a man stopped breathing in the street in police custody, and as his death set ablaze a waiting powder keg, and our cities burned. In Minneapolis, 1300 properties were damaged — 100 of those being completely destroyed. In Saint Paul, 330 buildings were affected. In the end, right here in our city, was “the second-most destructive period of local unrest in United States history, after the 1992 Los Angeles riots.”
And jury selection for the Chauvin trial begins tomorrow.
When we ask how God views the city, we don’t ignore the drawbacks and depravity and danger. I saw an article just this week that said, “Today’s Minneapolis is where Minnesota Nice turns into Minnesota Nasty.” Let me be clear: that’s an easy swipe to take. It’s so easy to cynical. It’s easy to hate. Easy to serve division, easy to incite fear, easy to encourage flight. Doomsday chatter is easy.
You know what’s not easy? Service. Love. Solutions. Hope. The kind of heart that leads to prayer, and service that promotes peace. This is the battle for many of us right now. The best of the city drew us here. Now the drawbacks of the city threaten to provoke not just the worst out there, but in here, in us. Or just send us away.
For some of us, the roots have never been so loose. Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas never looked so good. Wide open space, and as few people as possible. What do we have here? Well, there’s the cold, the crime, and now the carjacking. It’s very easy to cynical.
To some extent, all of us have had our roots challenged in the last year. And here we are, as a church, talking about putting down roots, becoming Rooted, in a time like this.
Maybe God would have us get some perspective from outside our own time, and in a very strange place: Babylon, 2600 years ago.
Exiles in an Evil City
In Jeremiah 29, God’s people, after centuries of unbelief and idolatry, are in the process of being expelled from their promised land, just as God promised would happen in Deuteronomy.
In 605, Babylon marched on Jerusalem, installed their own puppet king, and carried off a first wave of exiles (including Daniel and his friends). Then Babylon came back seven years later and took away a second wave (this one included Ezekiel). Finally, a decade later, Babylon marched on Jerusalem a third and final time, and destroyed the city, and carried off one final wave of exiles.
Jeremiah 29 contains a letter from the prophet, still in Jerusalem, to the exiles in Babylon shortly after the second wave had been carried away in 597. The doomsday voices of false prophets had been prophesying that Babylon would soon fall, and the Israelites would be home in short order. Chapter 28 tells about one false prophet who said “within two years” God would break Babylon and bring the Israelites back. So, the message was the exile will be short. Don’t put down roots. Wait it out. Chapter 29, then, is the word from Jeremiah, the true prophet. Verses 5–7 are the heart of the message, and it’s a shocking word for the exiles, in the foreign, wicked city of Babylon:
Verses 5–7: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. 6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. 7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
The exiles must have been stunned at this letter from Jeremiah. Babylon? Put down roots in Babylon? Do you realize how puzzling this must have been? To the people who “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!” (as David wrote in Psalm 122:6), God now says to pray for the peace of Babylon?
Why? Because, to begin with, the false prophets are wrong (verses 8–9). It will not be “within two years.” Actually, verse 10, it will be seventy years. Seventy years is a whole lifetime. Seventy years is three generations. In other words, exiles, you yourselves will not see Jerusalem again. Your grandchildren will, but you will spend the rest of your days in Babylon.
So, Jeremiah begins with bad news: your exile, which you’re hoping will be short, will not be short; it will be the rest of your life. However, there is a double-edged sword to Jeremiah’s declaration in verses 10–14:
In the “death” of exile are the seeds of new life. The letter begins to reverse the hitherto bleak preaching of the prophet. (Gordon McConville, “Jeremiah” in The New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, 1994)
In other words, this letter to the exiles, telling them that their exile will be long, not short, is the turning point in the message of Jeremiah. Here is where the “bleak preaching” of Jeremiah, oriented on the coming judgment, now turns a corner and looks beyond the impending doom to brilliant hope to come for God’s people.
God is indeed disciplining his people, but he is not done with them. He has not abandoned them. Even in Babylon. Even in the very city that is proverbial for wickedness. It will not be two years. It will be seventy. But then, he says, “I will visit you” (verse 10) — that’s the same promise we saw about God rescuing his people from Egypt (Genesis 50:24–25; Exodus 4:31; 13:19). And he says, “I will [not may but will] fulfill to you my promise and bring you back” to Jerusalem.
This, then, is the context for the famous verse 11, that many love to quote, but few appreciate the context, in Babylon, with seventy years of exile ahead: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” In other words, there is a promise of a future city, and in that hope, since the exile will not be short, God calls his people to put down roots.
Our Exile
Now, what about us? Jeremiah 29 is old covenant. That’s 2600 years ago. That’s Babylon! It is not the same situation that we face today. However, we too are exiles, in a city that is not our final home.
The apostle Peter writes his first letter (which we plan to turn to after this “Rooted” series) to “those who are elect exiles,” he calls them. Then, in 1:17, he refers again to the Christian life in this age as “the time of your exile.” In 1 Peter 2:11, he says, “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles...”
And not just Peter but Hebrews, in the great faith hall-of-fame chapter refers to those who have gone before us in the faith as “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13). In Christ, “our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul says in Philippians 3:20, which makes us exiles for now, on earth, even as we are citizens here in a secondary sense.
If putting down roots in Babylon would be the way for God’s people, as exiles, to not only survive, but multiply, might putting down roots might be our calling in these Cities? Not just for our lives, but for our children and grandchildren.
Why Stay?
You might say, “Roots, yes, but why here, of all places?” The cold. The calls to “defund the police” and all the downsides of city life that we’re more conscious of right now.
Why stay? There are people here. The city is not its buildings and transportation. The city is its people. Despite the cold, people came to live here. More than 3.5 million people live here, and they need Jesus. And what the last year has revealed, with questions about justice and law-enforcement and rising crime, is we have plenty of needs here for Christians to serve. Our city needs more salt and light, not less. If the Christians leave, what does that say about our gospel? We come when it’s easy, and leave when it’s tough? No, what a place to be as a Christian. What a place to answer the call to love. God put us here for this.
Cities Church, this is where God has planted us. He sent us here. We are here. How, then, do we endure in the moments, in the seasons, like this one, when downsides of the city, not just the draw, are before us?
Third, and finally, we look to the destiny of the city: it anticipates the city to come.
3. The Destiny: It anticipates the city to come.
That is, the new heavens and new earth is a city. History began in a garden, and it ends in a city. In Revelation 21, what does the apostle John seeing coming down out of heaven?
Revelation 21:1–4: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
There is, in all of us, the longing for the perfect city, with no downsides, no crime, no carjacking — a city that actually doesn’t need police. No pain, no mourning, no death. Often our frustrations with our earthly city stem from our trying to get now, from this city, what only God will fulfill in the city to come.
The reason we can be rooted in these Cities, with all its problems and struggles and drawbacks, is because we’re looking to another city. And so our roots go down deeper than these Cities. We have deeper roots than Minneapolis, deeper roots than Saint Paul, deeper roots than this metro, deeper roots than any earthly city. And so we can love and serve and put down roots in this city, in its ungodliness, without demanding anything in return. Because this is precisely how we have been loved and served by Jesus: when we were ungodly. Romans 5:6: “while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”
Christ came, and he put down roots, for more than three decades, among us. And he gave himself for us, not when we were righteous and deserving, but when we were weak and needy and at our worst. This is why Christians can love and serve the city — not because the city deserves it, but because we ourselves have been loved and served like this in Christ, and it is our joy to do this for others. Our roots are in Christ. And as the church, we are not alone. Our roots are in Christ together as the church.
Three Calls
Let’s close, then, with Jeremiah 29:5–7 and three calls on us as a church in these Cities.
1. Pray for these Cities.
Pray for this metro. Verse 7: “pray to the Lord on its behalf.” If God’s people could pray for Babylon, can we not pray for Minneapolis? Let’s pray civic prayers.
Like Acts 5:28, that God would fill the Cities with faithful, gospel teaching.
Like Acts 18:9–11, that Christ would have “many in this city” that he would call to himself as we are not “afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent”
Like Acts 19:8–10, that the gospel would move out from the Cities into our surrounding region, as when Paul put down roots in Ephesus and, in time, “all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks.”
2. Seek the peace of these Cities.
Verse 7: “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile . . . for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” In other words, serve the Cities, which you can’t do if you despise the city, and don’t love its people. You can’t seek the peace of the city while despising the city. But as we love our neighbors, we will love the city.
And now, with this permanent address on Summit, there are ways for us to grow as a church, as we become rooted, in serving the Cities.
3. Put down roots in these Cities.
Verses 5–6: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.”
If God’s people could build there, in Babylon, plant there, marry there, give in marriage there, put down roots there, why not we exiles today? Let’s multiply here, not decrease. Let’s not wait and see. Let’s put down roots now, together, as a church. Let’s be the best citizens of the Twin Cities, who love this place, and its people, all the more, when it’s hard.
Here Together
As we come to the Table, just a final word to any who might be considering moving out of the Twin Cities because of new fears or drawbacks.
We want you to know that your pastors will not assume the worst. But we would ask that you seriously consider, amid the many factors, God’s heart for the city. Please, do not leave from fear. And consider this: as the body of Christ, it’s a good time to be in this city. We want to be the kind of people who move toward needs, not away from them. And if anything, perhaps it’s a good time to move here.
And look around this room: we are not alone as we share in this Table. We are the church. Let’s eat together, and put down roots together.