"The realization I clearly get, in reading various passages from Srila Prabhupäda’s books, is that devotees should not live in the cities.
We should not build our homes and the future of our children in the cities. We should only go or commute to the cities to do our business; we should avoid them as much as we can.
If a devotee is living in a city and is not preaching, he is in the wrong place; he should not be there. We are in the cities because the majority of people are there and that we want to preach to them. But Srila Prabhupäda pointed that our preaching will be ineffective if we do not have a model to show.
So who is working on creating that model? Even in the few farming communities that we do have, we should not restrict our vision only to farming. What we need to do is actually establish villages or, like in India, Indonesia, and such countries where we still see villages, somehow save the existing villages from becoming deserted—which is the trend right now.
Devotees have to either save villages, by inspiring villagers to accept bhakti, or build villages from scratch."
- Make Vrindavan Villages book Chapter 4
