On their website (http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/index.html), photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have a pictorial montage from their work “The Ruins of Detroit,” which is about to be released as a book. The work is a series of images formerly grand buildings, now desolate in the city of Detriot. The images of extravagant buildings like Michigan Central Station and United Artists Theater, as well as more simple but beautiful buildings such as First Unitarian Church and East Methodist Church, present us with the symbolic death of a city – a once great American city.

 

I know some people who began planting a church in Detroit a few years ago. Certainly many people – certainly many churches for that matter – would consider such an effort to be worthless; and unfortunately, I don’t know how things have gone for them. Yet I know from the works of Rodney Stark, Wayne Meeks, and others that this sort of supposedly purposeless work played a considerable part in the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Christianity was born out of dying cities. When sickness and famine struck in the Roman Empire, Christians stayed behind and cared for those who seemed worthless to the rest of the world. These images call to mind a great cultural tragedy, but more than that remind the church of its clear calling to seek out those which the world has not valued.