The church’s urban focus overlooks working class whites

Christians have a clear Scriptural mandate to love and serve those who are suffering wherever they find them (Deuteronomy 15:11, Ezekiel 16:49). In recent years, the church’s well-intentioned excitement about urban city centers has created a substantial blind spot, where the suffering of people living in working-class white communities, small towns, and rural areas—where the prince of this world is at work—are often overlooked.

The church must do her best work outside the cities as well.

When it comes to their vision of the 21st century church and church planting, many prominent Reformed and Calvinist church leaders cite the missionary work of the Apostle Paul and point to the teachings of Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.

“Tim Keller is … a big proponent of targeting cities with the gospel through church planting,” wrote Ed Stetzer, executive director of LifeWay Research. Amanda Adams of The Daily Beast observed, “[M]ost likely, the rise in urban church planting is due to a guy named Tim Keller.”

While Stetzer does caution about being too urban-focused, his warning may not go far enough.

Keller and other leaders who focus on reaching urban professionals are free to promote their perspective using their particular interest, skill, and expertise. There’s nothing wrong or sinful about their preferences. In fact, Keller’s influence and work in New York City and around the world should be celebrated. But the definition of “missional” has inadvertently been reduced to the pursuit of urban professionals in cities and has become the church’s default vision for a generation of young Christians.

Earlier this year, Stetzer described “missional” in light of Keller’s emphasis on Paul’s mission to target urban centers, evangelize the city, and plant churches. In this view, Christians target cities because cities have, according to Stetzer, “the greatest potential for gospel impact and gospel multiplication.” After all, evangelization and multiplication were “the missional model of the Early Church.”

While the city church planting emphasis emerged as a needed corrective to the suburban focus of evangelicals in the 1980s and ’90s, today’s “missional” efforts tend to neither encourage future leaders nor raise money to reach the white underclass, people from Rustbelt towns, and working-class white populations in metropolitan areas. Why? Because those people don’t live in urban centers, and there won’t be much “multiplication” due to low population density. These communities, however, are the very communities where we get America’s white police officers, construction workers, truck drivers, mechanics, teachers, and active voters.

By overlooking the working class and small towns, we are inadvertently missing new opportunities to bring the gospel and holistic redemption to areas where the majority of America’s poor people live, where suicide rates are surging, where we find the new frontier for America’s worst HIV problems, where the mortality rates for middle-aged white women are at all-time highs, where manufacturing is dying out, where Americans are the most depressed and nihilistic about life, where America’s drug use is the highest.

Do we need to revitalize and plant more churches in large cities in light of current international population shifts. Yes, absolutely. However, to move away from suffering people in rural or suburban areas for the purpose of reaching urban elites has no prescriptive basis in the Bible or the Christian tradition.

I don’t believe that those who champion the planting of churches in cities think we shouldn’t go into white working-class areas. But these leaders don’t offer the same amount of enthusiasm, training, fund-raising, and sending outside of urban areas and inadvertently blind people to real needs beyond their city focus. Working-class white communities, rural areas, and small towns must be included in the American Christian mission—not based on Paul’s travels but by looking for areas that are affected by brokenness of the Fall, where the Devil is busy, where God’s people are, and where there is a need for salt and light.