First, this is great news.

But Keller is concerned that Christians are disproportionately absent from cities. He pointed to some reasons for concluding that American Christians are more anti-urban than any other nation. He pointed out that the French are proud of Paris and other countries have representative cities, but the US population doesn’t have that sort of feelings for those cities.

Second, he pointed out that a Christian culture must be both comprehensible and confrontational to the nonchristian society. In fact, it can’t be really confrontational unless comprehensible because one needs to be confronted (and attracted) by a version of oneself that has been transformed. If Christian culture gets too isolated and weird, then all the different sorts of nonchristians will never have any idea what they might look like as a Christian.

I thought it was a good point. Bear in mind I put it in my own words, not Kellers for the most part.

One of the things I loved about Providence back when I was security guarding at a baptist college was that I knew, when i got into “theological discussion” with an interested student, that I didn’t have to leave a discussion of Reformed theology to imaginary abstractions. No, I had a healthy church to invite them to visit. And that has more power than all the talking in the world. No matter how convincing you are, people raised as Arminians are going to fear what they will look like if they adopt these “new” (to them) beliefs. Seeing humanity flourishing is a great help.