Monday I saw this tweet from @joeholland:

I clicked through to the article from the Washington Post and became engrossed. The Post article profiles the town of Clarksville, MD, “a bedroom community midway between Washington and Baltimore where the median household income tops $181,000, more than triple the national average.”

Clarksville is not like other towns:

Clarksville sits in one of the nation’s “Super Zips” — a term coined by American Enterprise Institute scholar and author Charles Murray to describe the country’s most prosperous, highly educated demographic clusters. On average, they have a median household income of $120,000, and 7 in 10 adults have college degrees.

In meritocratic capitalism, Clarksville is the final destination if you’re not inclined to life in a major city. Living in a place like Clarksville is the reward for working hard, getting an education, paying your dues, etc. But at what cost?

Although the wealthiest Americans have always lived in their own islands of privilege, sociologists and demographers say the degree to which today’s professional class resides in a world apart is a departure from earlier generations. People of widely different incomes and professions commonly lived close enough that they mingled at stores, sports arenas and school. In an era in which women had fewer educational and professional opportunities, lawyers married secretaries and doctors married nurses. Now, lawyers and doctors marry each other.

This kind of income inequality is not the problem. Income inequality is not inherently bad. People are content to trade their time for money at different rates of exchange. The truly negative downside to income disparity happens when there is also geographic distance separating the haves and the have-nots.

This contributes to the American Dream being something that is out of reach for many; something spoken of only in hushed tones and with an air of utter fantasy.

“So much of opportunity in America depends on what sociologists call social capital,” said Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociologist. “Who you know. Who’s willing to invest in your skills.”

As the affluent become more isolated, the working class and the poor become confined “to communities where no one has a college education and no one has connections to the world,” Klineberg said. “The social capital that’s so necessary for upward mobility is more difficult to come by than it was in the old days when there was broad-based prosperity.”

In the past, if your kid showed an aptitude in math, you knew an engineer who lived a few houses down even if you were a blue-collar worker. Now your child might never personally know someone with a college degree who he or she can learn from if you don’t already live in an area dominated by collegiate professionals.

This is madness.

Wealth and opportunity are meant to be used to create more wealth and opportunity for others.

As if we needed an object lesson to go with this idea, the Atlanta Braves announced on Monday that they are abandoning the city of Atlanta and heading for the suburbs. They offer a lot of reasons for the move, some of which are compelling if you also accept the idea that an extremely wealthy group of people should have publicly funded places of business built for them. But this picture is perhaps the best explanation possible for the move:

Atlanta has suffered from a decades-long trend of having the people with the resources to help the city thrive and prosper choose to relocate to the north to avoid getting involved. They’re taking their ball club and going to the Super Zips. Something as simple as our hypothetical engineer neighbor from earlier taking his kids and your son or daughter to a Braves game to build a mentoring relationship just got a whole lot less likely to happen. And it was already a pretty far stretch to begin with.

So why am I writing at length about this? Because I see the Braves moving as being indicative of something deeper—something we don’t want to face but that we need to.

Because I see a huge opportunity for the people of God to model what to do with money, power, and influence. What is the point of accumulating trinket after trinket when it’s only going to wind up at Goodwill or the dump? Is our comfort that important? Should we as Christians long for a Jesus + suburbia existence where the only difference in our behavior from the world’s is that we go to (a very nice) church on Sundays?

What if we started taking back the cities? What if enough of those people on the map above were passionate about Jesus and moved south into the heart of the city? What if they had never left to begin with? What might the much-derided neighborhood surrounding Turner Field have been like?

I don’t think it will be easy. But I do think that it will be good. There was a time when Christians understood that everyone needs access not only to education, but to educated people. Our faith is inextricably tied to being educated since the object of our faith is revealed to us through the written Word.

To keep that ultimate treasure to ourselves in well-educated conclaves is sinful. And to see cities as only places to evangelize and use but not to live is disingenuous.

Don’t abandon the city. Love the people of the city. Tell your city about Jesus. Stay for the long haul. Use your money, power, and influence to give other people money, power, and influence. This is the slow, beautiful work of gospel renewal.

And the finished product is truly glorious.