Photo courtesy of Andy Crouch

August 14, 2012 | Editor’s note: Andy Crouch will be a featured lecturer at “Form/Reform: Cultivating Christian Leaders,” Duke Divinity School’s 2012 Convocation & Pastors’ School, Oct. 15-16.

For generations, American Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, has been built on suburbanization, with the church at best ignoring -- and at worst pathologizing -- the city, Andy Crouch said.

But that is changing as cities have become attractive places to live and a new generation -- valuing location over occupation, place over job -- is flocking to live there, Crouch said.

The author of “Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling,” Crouch is the executive producer of “This Is Our City,” a multiyear effort by Christianity Today to examine how Christians are seeking the flourishing of cities.

“We wanted to ask, ‘What does it mean for Christians to be fully involved in the life of thriving cities?’” Crouch said of the project.

Crouch spoke with Faith & Leadership recently about the church, cities, culture making and power. The following is an edited transcript.

Q: Tell us about “This Is Our City,” the project you’re heading for Christianity Today. What’s that about?

At a conference a few years ago, I heard Richard Florida, a well-known student of cities and urban life, say that when baby boomers meet each other, the first question we often ask is, “What do you do? What’s your job?”

But the first question younger people ask is, “Where do you live?” I think he’s right. The cocktail party question has changed, and that resonated with me.

There is a shift happening in American life in how people identify themselves. The roots of identity are shifting from occupation to location, from job to place.

There are a number of dimensions to this. One is that Americans are moving less than they have in at least 40 years. The high-water mark of mobility in America was the 1960s, when roughly one in five families moved in a given year.

That was the era of suburbanization, when people were leaving central cities -- and rural areas, too -- and moving to this in-between, bucolic place where you could have a place of your own and be relatively disconnected from other people. Maybe you commuted into a city, but your identity was in what you did, which is why people could move so readily.

Now, for a couple of decades, mobility has been declining, and in the 2008-2009 financial crisis it fell off a cliff. But at a deeper level, what’s going on is that we are questioning the suburban narrative.

And by that I don’t mean that we’re questioning suburbs, which are still attractive places to live for many people. What’s being questioned is the narrative of being cut off from the cities that ultimately sustain the suburbs.

What’s being questioned is this vision that where you live doesn’t matter; it’s what you do. There’s a new generation that’s not so sure that’s the best life.

If you ask younger Americans where they want to be, they want to be in cities.

That’s because of a couple of things. One is that many cities have addressed the reasons people did not want to live there. It used to be that cities were just a place to work and emptied out at night. Crime was a huge issue.

Well, crime has diminished dramatically. The city has become the place where people want to live and work and play. There’s art and restaurants, and it’s so different from 20 or 30 years ago.

Q: What’s Christianity Today’s interest in this?

American Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, was built on suburbanization. Evangelical Christianity thrived through very entrepreneurial moves to embrace suburbanization, although in many ways the mainline churches, especially in the first wave of urbanization, were there as well.

It felt like we needed to look at how Christians are re-engaging with cities -- not just providing services out on the edges or in suburban neighborhoods. We wanted to ask, “What does it mean for Christians to be fully involved in the life of thriving cities?”

But rather than stay at an abstract level, we picked geographically and historically diverse cities. Our first two were Portland, Ore., and Richmond, Va.

I don’t know if you could pick two more different cities. Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, founded in 1737, a city of churches, a legacy of Christian presence -- but also a legacy of implication in some of the most tortured parts of American history, site of the second-largest slave market in the United States.

Portland, on the other hand, is a relatively young city in the Northwest, not a city of churches -- never been churched. When we started, we thought Portland would be an example of post-Christian culture, but we got there and we realized it’s not post-Christian; it never was Christianized. It was never part of Christendom. It never had that dominant Protestant establishment that Eastern cities have.

We also have a “seventh city,” which is wherever you live. We’re encouraging people to alert us to stories of Christians in other cities that are interesting places where people are doing really good work.

Q: What are you finding? Do you have any lessons to share yet?

Yeah, I think so.

We are especially interested in stories that go beyond the walls of churches. Churches in every city are doing incredible things to serve their neighbors. But we were looking for something different, and that was models of Christian public participation that are connected to other institutions.

In Richmond, for example, we found out that the director of the city’s Department of Public Health and one of his key lieutenants are both people whose Christian faith has shaped the way they see their vocation and the city’s public health problems.

They work in a secular context, but they bring their faith into their work in a very explicit way, and they’re partnering with churches in that work.

For example, they have identified “fatherlessness” as a core public health issue in Richmond. They felt like many traditional public health issues are symptoms of the absence of fathers in families.

That’s an empirical judgment they made, backed up by data, but it also was shaped by Christian conviction. Then they’ve worked hard to get the faith community involved in addressing fatherlessness.

That’s the kind of story we have found not just in places like Richmond, a city of churches, but also in Portland. There, a movement of churches and Christian organizations partners with city leaders to volunteer. They’re doing it in coordination with the public schools and with neighborhood associations.

There’s this close interaction between Christian individuals and institutions and the citywide institutions.

That is new, especially for evangelicals. Evangelicals have a history of not being closely involved in the institutional life of their cities. But this is changing dramatically.