That City Dwellers Might Believe and Obey (1979)

Message from Urbana 79
by Michael E. Haynes

"The gospel must again be proclaimed not only in rhetoric but in courageous deeds of love in urban America showing forth a living, redeeming Christ!"

It is a privilege and challenge for me to be invited to share and participate in Urbana 79. This is my third Urbana in four vital, world-changing decades.

You, undoubtedly, like I, have come here to this vast community of academia - strategically located in the symbolic center of this great country - hopefully to hear, consider and respond to "thus saith the Lord God" for your life in these changing and precarious times.

My assignment in this hour is to present the message and the burden which almighty God has laid on my heart for the cities of America and even, yes, the cities of the world.

I come before you in humility and love - grateful and rejoicing that the God of creation, in his infinite wisdom, grace and providence did, one day, confront, captivate, conquer, change and, ultimately, consecrate my life to his service - as an Afro-American, born to a welfare family in the heart of the Roxbury district of Boston, a low income, urban metropolis of Northeast America, USA.

I pray that our Lord will use me to challenge not only individual students to an understanding of the urgency of the urban call, but also the corporate body of Christ and those who have been given the grave responsibility to be its leaders in this age of the eighties.

Because a small, very significant and spiritually powerful Bible college was located in metropolitan Boston, and because this school granted an opportunity for academic training to this somewhat academically inadequate (thanks to the negligence of the city of Boston public school system) city lad, the Christ who had called me to himself for the blessings of redemption, made me a prince, gave me a further and distinct call to go forth and proclaim his salvation even to the ends of the earth.

Berkshire Christian College was my Arabia of contemplation, orientation, preparation and consecration.

It was while a student in college that my mind was led by God to respond to an opportunity for God's worldwide mission - yes, even in the Orient. So, in 1948 I took my longest trip in the United States - hitchhiking from Boston to Chicago to Urbana.

I can recall the stirring congregational singing of Urbana 48 led by Homer Hammontree. I was lifted and moved as I heard the key address given by the young leader of Youth for Christ, Billy Graham.

I came to Urbana as a black city lad, wrestling to clearly ascertain God's will for my individual life. I had an urgent, overpowering sense that he was leading me to a foreign mission field. God seemed to confirm that at Urbana 48 through messages and Bible studies here on this campus.

I did not know as clearly then, but I know so well now, that God brought me to Urbana 48 to receive a special, person-to-person, highly confidential, direction-changing message just for Michael E. Haynes. Today God may well have a highly confidential, direction-changing message just for you.

I left Urbana with many serious ethnic, political and philosophical problems nagging my mind. But, praise God, I left Urbana convinced that this streetwise, hip lad from the city had been called of God to go out, like Abraham, to a place I could not adequately then perceive nor comprehend. At Urbana 48 God gave me an inner peace which assured me that he could and would use even me in his worldwide mission. Today, I humbly testify that I think he has. So, in fear and trepidation, overcome by love, faith and assurance, I said, "Yes, Lord, I'll go where you want me to go." That is an awesome commitment to make to the God of the universe!

Very soon after this 1948 commitment to the Lord's service, the scenario drastically changed. The international scene changed. Revolution struck China. Its mission doors shut quickly, dramatically and very tightly.

My dilemma was then, "Lord, where are you leading me?!"

After a further period of seminary study, I became engaged in a mission of youth evangelism. I served and supplied in mostly white evangelical churches, some urban, but mostly suburban and rural.

I spent most of my time in the towns, hamlets and villages of New England, upstate New York and the Canadian Northeast.

Personally, I was somewhat glad to escape the noise, tension, clutter, racism, deterioration and pressure of my natural urban habitat for the small quiet towns where I became seemingly comfortable and seemingly well accepted.

But then, unknown to me, in the words of the black spiritual, to my Lord [was] getting me ready for that great day!"

I soon received a very direct, distinct, challenging call in the early fifties - to "come on home to Roxbury!" Come on home! Come home to rapid physical deterioration, to "teeming masses yearning to breathe free," to rampant poverty, "to multitudes in the valley of decision." God knew that there was precious gold in the Roxbury hills!

Friends in Christ, I come to you this day as a living example in dazzling beautiful color to proclaim that God revealed distinctly to me that he has a special love and a very special concern and plan for the cities of America which when implemented can ripple over to the key cities and suburbs and rural areas of this world, making many souls ready and qualified for eternal citizenship in an everlasting just, equitable and harmonious society!

Urbana 79! I declare to you on the authority of God's Word, that at this time in history, God has placed urban America - the city dwellers of this nation - as priority number one on his agenda. This gospel must again be proclaimed not only in rhetoric but in courageous deeds of love in urban America showing forth a living, redeeming Christ!

I declare to you loud and clear, that the cities of America are pivotal! They must be given priority - priority number one!

Jesus Christ, who in his earthly ministry had spent so much time loving, studying, watching, preaching, healing and proclaiming the way to new life in Jerusalem, sent this city dweller on a very circuitous path in order to call me and prepare me for my Jerusalem - yea, even my Nazareth - a ministry in Megalopolis, USA.

Beyond my wildest dreams, desires or expectations, the Lord picked me up, turned me around and placed me smack-dab right in the middle of my own home town, the place of my birth, urban America, USA, the heart of Roxbury, the megalopolis of which Boston - the Athens of America - is the core.

Right in the middle of this so very troubled and tense city, the Lord has placed me, his child, his prince, his servant to become a part of "Caesar's household," and stand deep in the political hub, even in elected office; to become a vital part of the social and human welfare authority; and top level part of the criminal justice system. God placed me dead in the center, at the raw nerves and fiber of the religious world. In so doing the Lord has said, show my love to these my people! Hear the cry of these my people and try to help them! See the political and economic bondage of these my people, and help set them free! And above all, see the spiritual death of these my people and proclaim to them "the acceptable year of the Lord!" Tell them that Jesus is mighty to save!

God, in his infinite wisdom, called me to urban America because it is locked in bondage and sin at high exclusive places of the social aristocracy and down to the often inarticulate and sometimes understandably rebellious and revolutionary masses.

When God assigned me to pivotal Roxbury, USA, the white upper and middle class had just about completely deserted the city. Even Bible-believing institutions had gone, leaving behind tired sanctuaries and buildings which poor but determined groups of newcomers would purchase through exorbitant mortgages.

Poor minority brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ bearing such urbanistic names as African Methodist Episcopal, AME Zion, Apostolic Faith, Church of God in Christ, Missionary Baptist and a host of others became the new religious urban vanguard. They were to be followed by waves of Spanish-speaking Pentecostal assemblies, French-speaking Haitian believers and other similar modern immigrant groups.

While the established church and religious institutions - portfolios, endowments and property-sale-profits in their hands - fled the so-called urban blight to find open space, build colossal, expansive modern structures, rehab Victorian mansions amidst lakes, streams, hills, trees and the beauty of nature, God called me to come home and lift up a blood-bought standard in the name of the divine, resurrected and living Jesus Christ who loved and prioritized the city!

The cities were left to die! Masses of hopeless people had come! Good people had to flee, so they said.

The word city became synonymous with poverty, racism, violence, welfare, unwed mothers, abortions, prostitution, hookers, pimps and drugs.

The familiar language and behavior of the city was expressed in such words and terms as: "dime bags," "coke," "shooting galleries," muggings, stolen cars, rent supplement, pocketbook snatching and rapes.

The city became identified with demonstrations, sit-ins, pray-ins, police clubs, courts, vicious attack dogs, abandoned houses street after street and block after block, and complex, inadequate, crime-breeding, unmanageable housing projects. The city became security guards, metal window grills, storefronts and busing, high prices, poor quality goods, red-lining, religious charlatans, racketeering faith healers, prisons and more prisons, murders and more murders, violence and more violence amidst dirt, decay, congestion and exploitation of humans by other humans.

The city was dying! It was just about dead.

God seemingly had "removed his hand" from the city. No good thing could come out of Nazareth! No good thing could come out of Roxbury! No good thing could come out of the city!

Sin had cursed the city! It was dark, evil and hopeless. It was dangerous, demented and volatile. Was there any hope for the city? Would my Jesus dare walk the backwaters, the alleys, the marketplace of the high-rise projects of the city? Could Jesus still save in urban America? Could Jesus still save in the cities of America?

How many so-called responsible people declared the city as contagious and dying and off limits? "Call me anywhere Lord - but please don't call me to center city, USA!" That's how many Bible-believing Christians reacted and responded.

How very vivid in my mind are the details of the true story of a beautiful Christian brother who happened to be white and from the Southland.

Hank was a student at a local Christian college. He had violated cultural mores as a Christian and an athlete when, against the wishes of his fiancée and family, he had established a deep, genuine and healthy friendship with a black classmate - visiting his home, entering his social world, worshiping in his church and inviting his black friend to do the same. He developed a burden for the city.

One day Hank asked me if he could be allowed to do his senior year Christian service internship in Roxbury at the church I pastored. I joyfully and prayerfully told him, "Sure Hank, if it is the will of God."

A whole negative, carnal chain reaction followed. His girl emphatically opposed him. His parents opposed him and from long distance called his dean to support their opposition.

"Those people are not like you!" "It's dangerous in the city." On and on the weak, rationalistic excuses flowed. But Hank had heard and loved the Lord of the city. He knew and had seen the Lord walking in Roxbury! He had talked with his Lord right in Roxbury. He had seen the Lord - the same Lord who had saved him - emanating from the lives of black people, brown people, elderly and poor whites, even red people right in the old city.

So Hank followed his Lord to the city. The Lord used him - white, Southerner, athlete, tactful, consecrated - to work with a team of black-led youth workers. He was not paternalistic. He was not patronizing. He was willing to follow, to be a yoke-fellow in the city for the Lord Jesus Christ. The people in the city didn't see Hank. They didn't see his whiteness. They saw Christ. Through Hank souls were saved, lives lifted, good-will established. Hank discovered that beneath the poverty, customs and decadence of my city there was raw, precious gold - just waiting to be mined. He found out that there were rare diamonds just waiting to be dug out. He discovered that under the stratas of difference and need there were treasures for the eternal kingdom of God, just waiting to be unearthed.

Hank discovered what Jesus knew: that the societal gathering place of the poor masses of this country and other countries was a spot dear to the heart of God! Jesus loved the city for its dwellers' sakes! He even wept for them! And he beheld the city and he wept - for three decades.

For three decades the inner city of urban America has been stricken from a place of top priority on the agenda of evangelical Christianity. It has wrongly been advertised as being less important on the church's agenda of mission work as compared with so-called foreign or international ministries. In most instances American cities could only gain a minor, incidental, tokenistic, low priority, so-called home missions gesture!

John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, touched on a most significant national issue. During his campaign and the transitional period after his election and throughout his short tenure in office, through executive, legislative and voter initiative, he sought to bring about a new, most significant cabinet post with first-class political clout! He recognized the overwhelming demands of a changing American society, a shift of focus to the key cities.

He did not live to see this vision fulfilled. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, had the historic and significant all-American privilege of instituting the new secretariat of housing and urban development. Further, in an unprecedented, bold action, he appointed a black, Harvard graduate, the grandson of slaves, Robert Weaver, to fill that vital post.

President Kennedy and a host of other perceptive, prophetic, political scholars realized the vital importance of the city to the overall health and future of the nation.

As goes the city - so goes the nation! As goes the city - so goes the world!

It is in the city that most vital operations and institutions of government, finance, business, banks, insurance, education, medicine and communications exist.

It is in the key cities of our nation and the world that we see great cross-sections of God's special human creation gathering and struggling to survive. These cosmopolitan motifs of cross-culture are potentially symbolic of the universal kingdom of our God and of his Christ, for the reign of whom our hearts so deeply yearn.

What is more beautiful than entering any open marketplace of center city, USA, and observing red, yellow, black and white people crisscrossing, intermingling and sharing life together? How much more beautiful it is to see such a body gathered together around the table of Jesus the Christ, then moving out into the world as one body in Christ, lifting his name in this world. How beautiful it is to see the community of believers together. I got a sense of this the Sunday after Thanksgiving when I had the privilege again to attend All Souls Church in Langham Place in London. I was able to sit and sense the universality of the church of Jesus Christ and to see blacks and whites, people of all languages and all colors coming together in the body of Jesus Christ in the middle of London.

Jesus knew the sin of the city. But he also knew that "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound" (Rom. 5:20 KJV).

God assigned me to center city, USA. In a little more than a decade, I have seen God marvelously at work. He took one of the oldest black Baptist congregations in the nation (organized in 1804), steeped in a dying theological liberalism, stifled by a form and fashion of cold traditionalism, bound by a rootless veneer of religious practices, closed for almost a hundred sixty hours a week, dying, empty, impotent, with no testimony of a living Christ. God, through a dynamic, demanding, durable Christ brought new life to that fellowship in the center of the city, Roxbury, Massachusetts. Twenty-two representatives of that church in the city, assisted by a suburban church, have been able to come to Urbana 79.

God allowed me to see this ministry serve the felt needs of needy people in the inner-city community. I had the responsibility and opportunity to help point them to the divine Christ. This work became a seven-day-a-week, fourteen-hour-a-day center of Christian service and witness to all kinds of people.

Senior citizens, black and white, Muslims, Episcopalians, Catholics and the unchurched are served in a community out-reach program ministered by committed Christians.

Karate classes, sewing classes, an inner-city minority ministerial training program sponsored by a leading seminary, an indigenous lay school of the Bible, daily and weekly social, recreational and spiritual programs for all ages, referral services, a vital social-action ministry which commands the attention of government officials and holds them accountable - an innovative array of programs given by the Holy Spirit in Boston, Massachusetts, to be used as a part of God's worldwide mission so that city dwellers can know and receive Jesus as Christ.

Now in key cities of America we witness a new phenomena. Some call it gentrification: the return to the inner city of young, educated, upwardly mobile, aristocratic whites and upper-class types. The politicians and the bankers have supported and joined this trend. They have rethought and re-evaluated. They are a part of a new, fast-moving trend to recapture and reclaim the inner city - almost at whatever means possible, even exploitation and/or oppression of the powerless and poor. They know the unique significance and value of the city.

But the churches of the living Christ should reclaim the city for Jesus Christ!

It was the great Afro-American Booker T. Washington who said, "Drop your buckets where you are!" I call the Christian establishment to see and behold our Lord as he walks through and weeps over the core cities of America. I call upon you students to hear the call of God to this important battleground against sin and Satan - urban America.

I adjure you, in Jesus' name, to personally confer with the God of creation! Ask him, through the Holy Spirit, to illuminate the challenge of central city, USA, and show you what your role should be!

As Jesus approached and beheld the city he wept over it (Lk. 19:41)! He saw huddled masses, black, poor white, Hispanic, native Americans, Orientals, refugees, the angry poor, the disenfranchised, the unloved, the hungry, the hated and the despised. For them he left his kingly throne, came to earth, suffered, bled, died and rose again. Now Jesus lives and walks today through the cities of America and the cities of the world!

Jesus lives today and he walks today, from Boston to Baltimore, New York to Newark, Philadelphia to Port-of-Spain, Los Angeles to London, Kinshasa to Kansas City, Nairobi to New Orleans, Bridgetown to Buenos Aires, Pittsburgh to Paris, Caracas to Calcutta, Jakarta to Jerusalem.

Where cross the crowded ways of life,
Where sound the cries of race and clan,
Above the noise of selfish strife,
We hear Thy voice, O Son of Man!

0 Master, from the mountain side,
Make haste to heal these hearts of pain,
Among these restless throngs abide,
0 tread the city's streets again.
(Frank Mason North)

I submit to you this day that Jesus Christ, the sovereign Lord of the universe, has declared and willed that city dwellers shall hear and believe the message of the gospel of eternal life. God this day may be directly calling you to personally covenant with him in a partnership to fulfill the most exciting, yet demanding and critical, mission of the church of Jesus Christ in this age and for the 1980s right in center city, urban America, USA.

Brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, our Lord is waiting for you to walk and work the city streets with him in a divine mission for redemption. Would you be willing to go to the city?

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That City Dwellers Might Believe and Obey (1979)

God's Word

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December 27-31, 2009