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Revolution and Renewal:
How Churches Are Saving Our Cities
By
Tony Campolo (with Bruce Main)
Westminster John Knox Press,
2000
Review by William H. Hudnut
III
Citistates Group Associate
This is a heart-warming
book written by a professor of sociology from Eastern
College who is a confessing evangelical Christian.
Deeply concerned by the plight of urban America,
"crime, homelessness, urban blight, disintegrating
families, teen-aged prostitutes, growing joblessness,
racial conflict, and the alienated elderly," as
he puts it in one place, Tony Campolo and co-author
Bruce Mann unabashedly maintain that faith-based
programs and institutions, generically lumped together
as "churches," can give the city (in this case,
Philadelphia, Penn., and Camden, N.J.) "some new
signs of life," and indeed, help it to be "born
again."
Appreciation for
the role of faith-based institutions in solving
some of the problems deeply ingrained in urban America
has been growing for more than a decade. In this
book, that appreciation comes to full flower. Campolo
suggests two levels for action:
The first is to minister
to the needs of individual persons and provide them
with services such as counseling, child care, safe
havens, assistance in becoming home owners, soup
kitchens, AIDS hospices, tutoring and schooling.
But at a deeper level,
the church needs to confront, with courage and truthfulness,
the "systemic evils that are eating up the cities
of America." It must take on "the principalities
and powers" and "the rulers of the darkness of this
world." Translate that as "the entrenched interests"
-- banks that redline, real estate salesmen who
steer, slumlords who permit properties to deteriorate
while exacting exorbitant rents from poor people,
corrupt and incompetent public officials, the international
drug cartel. Revolution and renewal are the goals
for which the church should strive.
The church has a
high calling, Campolo believes. "If the blight and
destruction that is growing like a cancer in the
old cities of the nation is to be eradicated, we
believe that the church must step forward . . .
and assume the mantle of change agent." He maintains
that the urban crisis "will surely worsen" unless
city churches "respond to the challenges that now
confront them."
The obvious question
to ask is whether this book is written solely for
people who have embraced CampoloÕs evangelical Christian
faith, or whether it can appeal to a wider audience.
Certainly people who share his faith will be moved
and challenged by it. But others who care about
cities cannot fail to grasp CampoloÕs central thesis,
and grow in their understanding of the contribution
faith-based organizations can make to renewing AmericaÕs
cities. His chapters about how churches can help
create jobs, promote home ownership, break the culture
of poverty, buttress the public school system, reduce
crime, and revitalize neighborhoods contain an abundance
of useful ideas and thought-provoking insights which
could assist in the creation of partnerships between
persons of religious faith and others who want to
address these problems.
The chapters on urban
education are particularly insightful and helpful.
His critique of conservatives who take their children
out of public schools, and liberals who have crippled
those schoolsÕ ability to communicate moral values
to their students, is amazingly even-handed. It
paves the way for constructive suggestions about
what church members can do to fill the void: they
can tutor, support "released time," adopt inner-city
schools, recognize and undergird good public school
teachers, combat racism, participate in PTAÕs and
school boards, and demand competency of teachers.
Not everyone who
reads this book needs to be an evangelical Christian
to profit from it. Nor should they assume that Campolo
is calling for faith-based activity to become a
surrogate for the public sector. His suggestion
is simply that the church -- whether it be cathedral
or storefront, congregationally based or a more
generalized type of urban ministry -- is the "one
institution left amidst the debris of those other
social institutions that have been devastated by
the onslaught of post-World War II suburbanization
and de-industrialization."
On that belief, Campolo
rests his case. And who, among those of us who care
about the cities and are looking for resources to
bring them new life, is to quarrel with that?
Last updated October
3, 2000
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