Do Cities matter or is Urban Theology Trendy? tagged: , , , , , ,

Do Cities matter or is Urban Theology Trendy?

Posted by in Baptist Life, Church & Missions

Carl Trueman, a Professor at Westminster Theological Seminary and contributor to Reformation 21, wrote an article questioning the legitimacy of reshaping the evangelical landscape to be urban-centric.  He says:
One thing Paul and I did discuss was the current nonsense about cities being special which so dominates the popular evangelical imagination.  Not that cities are not important: as areas where there are the highest concentrations of human beings, they are inevitably significant as mission fields. Rather, we were thinking of the `from a Garden to a City’ hermeneutic which jumps from scripture to giving modern urban sprawl some kind of special eschatological significance.   Was there ever a thinner hermeneutical foundation upon which so much has been built?  OK, there probably has been, but this is still a whopper.
Cities are Important, Just not Too Important
Without going on a statistical jihad and claiming its about the kids, l simply offer a few points of critique for the article (For some reason Reformation 21 doesn’t open their posts to discussion) and a rationale for why Southern Baptists need to stay focused on the city.

I admit that I was a bit frustrated with the article.  Perhaps I was looking for an argument but found a narrative.  It is unclear exactly what he is arguing for or against beyond the fact that he thinks that some people are putting to much theological emphasis on the cities though they are nonetheless important.  Perhaps a good question for Truman would be “who exactly is doing this?”

I am not an expert on the subject, I have spent a sufficient time reading on the topic.  The majority of people writing on urban sociology and missions, from secular and Christan perspectives, are doing so descriptively, not prescriptively.  If they take a side at all, the majority of them (the secular authors) fall on the side of arguing that the city is a bad idea.

While he is correct that some such as Marx capitalized on the urban masses, most of the missiologists writing on the topic are arguing for a city focus based on the opportunity it presents.  Add globalization into the discussion and you can live in the right neighborhood in a city and have a truly global impact.

If we are going to say that city promoters are theologically legitimizing secular sociology, as Trueman does, then we could equally say those who by practice or theology focus on rural world are simply legitimizing Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage.”  Although I believe neither to be accurate descriptions of our motivations and actions, in modern times, the church is predominantly geographically rural, if anything we are more guilty of legitimizing Rousseau than we are of blindly supporting secular sociology (Which contrary to the article, tends to take a pessimistic view on the city).

I do agree with Trueman that the trendiness of modern evangelical theology is a little gross.  People put missional in their name because it is the “in” thing to do.  Some people surely focus on cities for the cool-points.  When the trendiness shifts from actually being missional and city focused (perhaps the new trend is to deconstruct that…) to something else there will still be a lot of work to be done in the cities.  They are currently the area of greatest need and lostness.

I am open to the fact that I may have completely misread or misinterpreted Trueman and am open to clarification.

Why Cities Should Matter to Southern Baptists
As Southern Baptists we have many forces outside our control that put us at a disadvantage.  The first disadvantage is that we live in the South.  This is not a subtle dig at the south but a sociological observation that historically the South has been predominantly rural.  When Europeans first came to America they predominantly settled in the northeast.  They were the first to establish trade routes west, and with the completion of the Erie Canal, they all but solidified their economic dominance to this day.  Even when we look to the western states, they have a historical advantage over us as their development was predominantly city driven from the beginning.  This was such a focus that between the army establishing forts and speculators buying up land and pre-planning cities to attract the railroad, the west started as one big city-planting exercise.  This is one reason that most of the western cities have a wonderful grid pattern to them, even in places where the geography would dictate against it (San Francisco).  With northern economic dominance in the early years, the southern states were begun primarily as agrarian enterprises.  Sociologists Spates and Maciones argue that in a certain sense the Civil War was a war between urban and rural cultures.  As the majority of our churches are in the South, we are predisposed to be rural focused.  I do not believe that we have consciously rejected cities, per se, we have just been focused on other things.

Another disadvantage for Southern Baptists comes from the puritanical and Victorian roots which have shaped evangelicalism and fundamentalism.  These forces were notorious for some of their social aversions, and contributed to what Carl F. H. Henry calls “The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism” (his book by the same title is a must read).  Modern fundamentalism, as Henry notes, is consumed by asking questions such as “can Christians play Rook?” while the world is burning down around us.  He says “whereas once the redemptive gospel was a world-changing message, now it was narrowed to a world-resisting message” (p19).  The ethic that some things, and even some places, are to be avoided, gives is the Village-esque view that the cities are evil and to be avoided.  After Bible college, served on staff at a rural church.  The church did wonderful ministry and was missionally focused on reaching their area.  When I announced that I was going to be moving to the city to complete my seminary education and then go to one of the world’s largest cities, the basic impression was “why would you want to leave such a nice place as this?  The city is no place for good families.”  Bunyan’s depiction of Vanity Fair summarizes their sentiment.  God made the whole world, and he wants to redeem the whole world.  He wants to redeem even (especially) the dangerous, wicked, rundown places and transform them for his glory.  Some of these places are village and tribal; by and large, however, they are urban.

We have much to overcome culturally and geographically speaking in order to have a holistic view on reaching all parts of the world.  When I went to the IMB training in Virginia, they asked for a show of hands as to how many people came from a city of one million people or more.  In a room of over 200 people I was among the eight people who raised their hands.  This influences where we want to go.  If we do not ring the bell of reaching cities, it would not occur to most of us to ever try to make the sacrifice and reach them.

I’ve Got a Dog in the Fight
I am not without personal interest in this discussion.  My personal story begins for the most part on a dairy farm in Scotland where we rented a house when I was a child.  It was pristine, safe, and functional.  Imagine a scene of the countryside from Braveheart only without all of the angry highlanders.  I remember moving to a big and dangerous city in the states and, from that point forward, everyone I knew had the dream of a home in the country.  I remember being 12 with a map of the states on the wall with a highlighted trail to Oregon and Alaska.  This is the classic American narrative which explains why we are no longer 13 small coastal states.  I remember my first trip to NYC.  I had been attending a Independent Baptist Church which viewed people like Paige Patterson as too liberal.  Needless to say, NYC was a shock to me.  In arrogance, I felt a righteous (or not so righteous) indignation and fear.  I asked God to hold the fire till I left.  Then something changed.  At Southeastern, I took another trip to NYC on a mission trip.  I had long since been shunned for going to a SBC school with the liberal Paige Patterson as the President, and was now operating under a new more Schaeferian paradigm.  We have lost people where I am from, but there was something different here.  It challenged me.  We went up to the observation deck on the empire state building and I realized it would take an incredible amount of resources and attention to see the gospel proclaimed in each building in this city.  I am now in one of the largest cities in the world.  There are days where the streets are clogged and the air is brown and the Imam is shouting through the loudspeaker and all I can think about is some pristine mountain lake in Wyoming passing time ranching, prairie dog hunting and snowmobiling.  It is times like those I am grateful for men who took “new” (read the early apologists and these are not all that new) if not seditious looks at the scriptures to urge me out of my selfishness and comfort-zone and into the urban throng.

I believe that we should never read the Bible to say something that it never said or ever even could have meant.  When have historically focused on the agrarian nature of the parables or how Abram was holy in the tend while Lot was wicked in the city (the good guys stay on the farm).  At the same time we have overlooked the urban nature of books like Daniel and how instructive his life can be for those of us surrounded by the intense lostness of our cities.  We relish stories of wilderness wanderers and peripatetic prophets and completely overlook the secular dynamics of urban planners (Moses and Joseph) generals, Kings, and civil servants.  If anything, this hurts the laity.

Trueman ends his article with a quote from Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band: “I’m the urban spaceman, baby, here comes the twist – I don’t exist.” and so I shall also end mine with a pop culture theologian, Horton the Elephant: “A persons a person no matter how small.” and will add: regardless of where he lives.  I do affirm the work of the rural pastor and the rural church.  I affirm the work of the village and tribal missionary.  Historically, we have done this before and done it well.  Contrary to the Bonzo band, the urban spaceman does exist, and right he is soon to be the world’s majority citizen.