THE PLIGHT OF AMERICA'S GREAT CITIES

                                                                                                                                                                        Vol. XIII, No. 3, March 2000

[This is the fourth and last excerpt from the convention sermon of SBC President Paige Patterson last June, 1999.]

For the last twelve months, I have traveled the United States of America in an attempt to raise the consciousness of Southern Baptists regarding the spiritual destitute, often rudderless, inhabitants of the great cities of America. I have received the customary responses one might expect such as a letter asking why I had no concern for the people in the rural areas of America. But overwhelmingly, the response has been exactly what I knew would be the heartbeat of most Southern Baptists, "Let's get it done for Christ's sake."

Southern Baptists were conceived and born as a rural and agrarian people. We were butchers and bakers and candlestick makers; and of all the mainline denominations, we were the least respected and as a rule our people the poorest. But our forebears had a heart for God and a love for lost people. They prayed and preached; they sang and they witnessed; they gave and they sacrificed until we grew into a great convention. But yesterday's greatness will not suffice for today's challenge. Now we must change. Certainly we will not forfeit our heritage in the countryside. Every one of those rural churches is a vital part of the body of Christ -- salt and light in its own environment and intimately involved in the global missionary effort through giving, prayer, and increasing personal participation.

However, in his famous book on missionary strategy Missionary Methods: Saint Paul's or Ours, Roland Allen said that Paul's strategy was to go to the cities. He knew that if he established a thriving church at the byways of the agora where the agrarian inhabitants came to market with their produce and the intellectuals, the military, the merchant, and the common man milled about together, that which was established in the agora would surely inevitably permeate the countryside.

This, of course, is exactly what happened with the Christian faith in the first century. Although there were undoubtedly those experiences like Pentecost when thousands came to Christ at once, it was more often one by one and two by two in the marketplace, in the upper room, and sometimes in the prison that men and women came to Christ and to life. Just as Jesus stood looking down at Jerusalem and was moved to tears of heartfelt compassion, so the Apostle Paul viewed Philippi and other great cities. We, too, must view Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Seattle, Cleveland, Portland, and San Francisco in the same way.

While others devote their best energies to morality legislation and to the political process, and although we Southern Baptists must not fail to be good citizens in our involvement and the exercise of our civic duties, yet we must see our mission not so much in terms of civic and political activism as in terms of a witness to the gospel of the Lord Jesus. We must do this because we know very well that however you change the environment, it is but a band-aid on an egregious wound and does nothing ultimately to heal.

If our social order is to be sustained at all, it will be because there is a sweeping revival with its centerpiece the renovation of soul and spirit that we refer to as regeneration or the new birth. Whether our part of that kingdom endeavor happens to be an educational function of equipping laborers for the vineyard or a prophetic function seeking religious liberty for all, or an ethical function calling to holiness of life, the goal must forever be established. Our goal is to win men, women, boys, and girls to faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

In the sixteenth chapter of the book of Acts a remarkable event unfolds that brought into the life of the Apostle Paul people he might otherwise never have met. First, there was the slave girl possessed of the spirit of the Pythia, demonically in the service of human masters as well as of the oracle at Delphi. As a result of that encounter, the apostle soon met a group of prisoners whose access to him would "'not have been possible without his incarceration. Paul understood it to be the mission field to which God had assigned him. As a result of that experience he met the jailer, a man whose future was precarious enough before the earthquake and who now sensed that all he had ever hoped for was going to be lost. And before all that, there was Lydia the seller of purple, originally from the city of Thyatira and a wonderfully successful business woman whose heart the Lord had touched through the Apostle's ministry. What a polyglot of contacts and what an incredible foundation for the church at Philippi -- a jailer, his prisoners, a slave girl who formerly had been demon -- possessed, and a wealthy female entrepreneur.

In the next chapter at Athens, Paul found himself in the academic community presenting the superiority of Christ to the claims of the Stoic and Epicurean failed philosophies of the, hour. And there, even if the results were small, they were significant, for the sacred book chronicles that some men joined him and believed. Among them were Dionysius the Areopagite and Damaris, individuals who must have been of great prominence to be thus mentioned by name in the text.

So would you not join me today with a heart for the cities. That little slave girl hasn't gone very far. You will find her in New York City with a hopeless look in her eye and the signs of abuse on her body. And that jailer. Oh yes, he is there, too. He is a minor official in Philadelphia, and the grind has just about ground him down. It is the same thin every day -- leave for work early, return from work late, watch television, drink a beer, go to bed. No hope. Do you care if he perishes? Yes, and Lydia is there in Los Angeles. She is fabulously successful, even in a man's world. But though she dresses elegantly and has the ability to move in high society, look behind the makeup into the emptiness of her eyes with their direct connection to her heart. She wonders if anybody will ever come to her with something other than a business deal or a sexual proposal. The prisoners are there, too, where they have always been. They populate the prisons in increasing numbers -- many of whom grew up without the benefit of a biblical family and a father's example to teach them the right way. Is it enough simply to let them be in and out of prison the rest of their lives? Do you care that after a life primarily of imprisonment, punctuated by occasional liberties, they are confined forever to separation from God in a place called hell. Does it make any difference to you today?

Consider Damaris and Dionysius the Areopagite. Yes, they are there, too. Eminently successful. The bankers, the professors at the universities, the city and nation-hopping businessmen with their portfolios and accountants. They live and walk through the cities, fly from the metropolitan airports in a voracious search for something that always seems to elude them. And even when they are relaxing at the country clubs, in which their success affords them membership, they return home at night empty and often in heartbroken sorrow. The rich, young ruler now lives in a fashionable Chicago suburb, but he is still attempting to decide between Jesus and his Dunn and Bradstreet rating. Rahab wanders the streets of San Francisco wondering if someone from God's army will again bring her the message of salvation. Bartimaeus still begs in the Bowery, and there is a widow in D.C. whose oil is exhausted and with it her hope. Nicodemus still plies the dark streets of Seattle by night dissatisfied with his own religion and looking for someone to take him to Jesus. The woman of the night who once washed the feet of Jesus is no less despised now, but waits still in Detroit for someone to lead her back to Christ. And the little children -- oh, do you see the little children? The den of the hustle and bustle of the city has almost choked the Savior's invitation -- but look in their eyes as they await some tender voice to echo the invitation, "Let the little children come unto me and forbid them not." Of course, they are not all responsive, at least initially, to the claims of Christ, but all are hungry for love. And if we love them, if we care, if we sacrifice, if we give, if we pray, God will give us Lydia. And He will give us the slave girl. And He will give us the prisoners, and He w give us the jailer. And He will give us Damaris, and He will give us Dionysius for Christ.

There it is Southern Baptists, ladies and gentlemen, precious saints of God; can we get beyond ourselves? Can we discover the new way? Can we grasp the Jerusalem and Judean phases of the Great Commission and win our cities to Christ with a view to incorporating all in one last great worldwide missionary effort? To do it, individual churches must think beyond themselves and beyond their cities. Associations such as the Atlanta Baptist Association and hundreds of others must say to the North American Mission Board, give us a city to take for Christ, and we will pool our resources an our people and pour our prayers into that city. So, Athens, Georgia, and the surrounding churches accept Rochester, New York. And all year long, teenagers, young adults, businessmen, and senior citizens pour into Rochester to give the message of Jesus Christ, and every year four to five new church starts are superintended in that city. Can you see it? Can you see it begin to build? This city and that city and the other city. This church and that church and the other church until so many people are pouring into the Kingdom of God that revival breaks out one last time in this country.

My sainted mother, known to those of her generation as Honey Patterson, who was the author of Candle by Night: The History of the WMU of the State of Texas, never viewed a newscast on television quite like anybody else. It was her reaction to the evening news that established the missionary impulses of my own heart. In those days before we ever even owned a color television, mother would sit and watch the newscast, and I would see her weeping. Finally I ventured to ask, "Honey, why do you cry when you watch the news?" She pointed to the television, to the milling throngs of people photographed in an Indian city in a moment of crisis and said: "Look at them. They are dying, and they do not know Jesus." And she wept. Honey was like Jesus in many ways, but I do not think she was ever more like Jesus than she was when she wept over the multitudes without Jesus in the cities.

Southern Baptists will you pray? Southern Baptists will you go? Southern Baptists will you give? Will you get your church to take a city? Will you ask your association to accept the challenge of an inner city? Southern Baptists will you weep before God? Will you wet your pillows and discolor the varnish on your church pews until God gives us the souls of our cities? May God grant it.