 Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Alan Roth. We're in Brooklyn, New York City, and we're actually in, this is a church and a school, if I understand correctly, that you were involved in starting. This is America's largest city, New York City, but you haven't always lived here. So can you walk us through some of that journey of coming to Brooklyn? Well, I grew up on a farm out in Oregon. I remember when my parents took us to the rescue mission in Portland, and I remember thinking, I am never going to live in a city. Never. I hate cities. But when I was in Bible Institute, the Lord really opened my eyes to what is happening in the world. The growth of cities, the over half of the population of the world now live in cities. Eighty-some percent, eighty-three, I think it is, of the U.S. population live in cities. So if we're going to reach people, we have to go to where the people are. So the Lord changed my mind on that, and we've been living in cities then since 1978. Oh, wow. So for a while, how long have you lived in Brooklyn specifically? Since 86. So you came to the city with clear intent for ministry, basically. Can you outline why is that such a good opportunity? I mean, you said that's where the people are, but what makes coming to a city more effective for God's kingdom? The key question is, where does God want you to be? Because we can serve him anywhere. But we came here actually just intending to be here for a year, and to get a church planning team started, and then we would go on to a Muslim country in South Asia. But the Lord kept us here. The importance of it is that where churches are established, then they influence their communities, and cities are places of influence. They're places where people intersect, they come together. So as I look at it, we ought to go to where the people are. How are we going to reach them if we're not there? I'm going a little off-script here, but how has it been the last, we've been here a couple of decades. Do you feel that this was the right strategic decision? I do. We never intended to live here in this city that long, but the Lord has his own plans, his own sense of humor. I tell people, we had planned to come here six to 12 months, but the Lord, he didn't tell us that the six to 12 months would be at the end of 30-some years. So we've actually raised our children here. This has become home to us. We really enjoy interacting with people from so many different parts of the world. Can you kind of walk through some of that journey of how you went from coming here for a short time to being here 30-plus years? When we moved here, it was at the invitation of a Nicaraguan family that we had known from our years in Central America, and they invited us to come and help them get a church planted. So we moved here. Eventually, they washed out spiritually, which was very painful, but we knew nobody else. So we had to find ways to get to know people. That was hard. It was wintertime, and people don't like to open their doors when it's cold. They don't like to invite you in. We had to find ways to meet people. So we just started going door to door, started handing out literature in the nearby train station, and little by little we began to meet people, found people that were open to having Bible studies in their homes. We started having small group meeting in our home, and then we outgrew our home, and the rest is history. So you basically came in and you're starting from scratch. Did you really have, well, you had some experience, I guess, in cities, but not really in Brooklyn then. When we came here, we thought, oh, all of these Hispanics here, this is just like Central America. So we felt quite at home. Two to three years down the road, we said this is not Central America, and we don't know what it is. Because it's a blend of different Hispanic communities, cultures, and when people come to the big city, the big city changes them too. So for those first two or three years, we're trying to figure out, you know, how does this thing work? I'm not sure that we still know, but at any rate, we're still here. Did you have a support group around you? There were two couples that moved with us to help start the church, and a single. After one year, one couple went back to their home. After three years, the other couple went back. But by then, there were locals that were beginning to be a part of the church. And over the years, with the development of the school here, and so on, others have come either for education or for teaching in the school or for helping in the choice books, which is located nearby as well. Bringing it back to the urban challenge, I guess you could call it, when it comes to engaging the cities around us. What biblical passages or parts of scripture would you say speak into this, and which sets some light on that? Well, the Bible begins with God placing man in a garden, so you wouldn't foresee the city component there. But then we do see that God really loved Jerusalem. He chose to put his name there. When the Israelites were exiled, he tells them in Jeremiah 29, seek the good of the city, settle down there, marry, plant, and pray for God's blessing upon the city. And that was an alien country, very brutal. But they were told to look out for the good of the city there. When you go to the New Testament, you see Jesus going about through all their towns and villages in their cities. You see him caring about Jerusalem and weeping over Jerusalem. He was crucified just outside the city gates. When the Holy Spirit came, it was on a group of believers in a city, in Jerusalem. That's where the church, the whole Christian movement began. And then you watch Paul, and you see that wherever he went, he strategically chose cities. Cities are the places where people come and go. There's trade, there's communication, there are politics, there are movements. And then the Gospel follows those networks of relationships back into the smaller towns and villages. But then it's interesting in the Bible, at the very close of the Bible, the last two chapters talk about the city. For those of us who love the country, we're all going to end up in the city. The New Jerusalem, but to comfort us, it's a garden city. So it's going to be the best of both worlds. I was alerted to this theme throughout Scripture by reading a book by Jacques Elul, who's a French theologian, and it's just simply entitled The City. And he traces that theme throughout the whole Bible. The first city was started in rebellion against God and his mandate to scatter out. But eventually, God breaks through into the city and he transforms it, and we end up in the glorified city. That's a part of Scripture that we often don't think about. No, because we're rural people. At Sadler College, our goal is to produce well-rounded students who, as the Scriptures say, can rightly handle the word of truth. To do this, we integrate discipleship with academic excellence. For our academics, we believe in implementing a rigorous and well-defined Christian core curriculum. These are classes that everyone takes regardless of your major. These classes include expository writing, oral communication, history, biology, and statistics. But in addition to that, every student will also take courses in Old Testament, New Testament, Apologetics, Biblical Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Church History. You get those classes regardless of your major. For more information, please schedule a call with our admissions team, download a course catalog, or even better, come visit our Boston campus. So these videos and podcasts go to a very diverse audience, but mostly it would be Anabaptists living in a country setting, not in cities. What would you say to those people that are watching or listening, who don't necessarily share your vision for the cities or live in the country somewhere? Yeah, what would you say to them? Well, I would say, first of all, just remember that Christianity started in a city, in Jerusalem. Anabaptism started in a city, Zurich. And in both movements, those Christians were active in those cities until they were persecuted and hounded and harassed, and they fled to the countryside, which we've enjoyed ever since. But God calls people to live in both cities and towns and villages and countryside. It's not a matter of either or. There are different callings. And all across this country, small towns and villages are being neglected. There's a place for that. There's a good little book I discovered recently that gives a vision for small towns. It's called No Little Places, the Untapped Potential of the Small Town Church. And one of the things that encourages me is the number of among Anabaptists of young couples who are intentionally looking at small towns, small cities, for a witness there. It's not either or. It's both and. It's all. And I am concerned as well that the small towns and the countryside are being neglected. All across this country, there are churches that are being abandoned, vacated, because there's no one there to really care about that area. That's the last question I had. Is there anything else you'd like to share? We really need to care about cities because that's where people are moving. The whole world's going to town, whether it's to Walmart or wherever. And there are reasons why people move to cities, because of better health care and jobs and entertainment. So it just makes sense. If you're going to go fishing, you can't catch fish if there ain't none. You've got to go where they are. And you know God gives grace. I know that one of the big fears in our circles would be raising our children in cities. But you know God cares about cities and He cares about our children and He'll help us find creative ways to raise them there. Well, thank you very much for sharing. You're welcome. Yeah. I mean, I don't live in the city. And being here in Brooklyn, it just kind of opens my eyes like, whoa, this would be a challenge for me to come to a place like this. And that's what we want to put out there. Have people embrace that challenge. So thank you for sharing. You're welcome. Yeah. You're very welcome. And blessings in your work as well. Thank you.