Month: August 2020

Mark R. Gornik.
Word Made Global: Stories of African Christianity in New York City.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011. 368pp. $30.00.

Diaspora missiology represents a discipline of increasing significance in a world where populations are constantly shifting. The need for creative strategies, dynamic theological reflection, and ethnographic research is not only apparent but imperative if we are to engage our world as it is today.

In Word Made Global, Mark Gornik effectively responds to that need. He offers a rich ethnography that brings together a dynamic convergence of globalization, urban ministry, and immigrant studies. He approaches the city as an anthropologist, displaying a portrait of churches representing New York City’s most recent African diaspora. Gornik conducted a number of interviews while visiting these churches, and nearly every chapter offers a “thick description” of church activity reflecting his experiences as a participant observer. He includes photographs connecting the reader visually with the churches he studied. For the average ministry leader or seminary student who has limited contact with New York’s immigrant communities, the added visual illustrations provides additional texture.

Throughout the study, Gornik follows three African congregations in New York City. By studying a mainline congregation, Presbyterian Church of Ghana in Harlem, a congregation from the Pentecostal tradition, Redeemed Christian Church of God in Brooklyn, and a congregation from the newly emerging African Independent Churches, Church of the Lord (Aladura), he provides a sweeping profile of African Christianity on the North American landscape. However, by focusing on only these three, he also is able to provide for the reader an in-depth description of their faith practices.

In his introductory chapter, Gornik points out the significance of the global city and its dynamic relationship to African Christianity as a transnational movement of faith. Since there has been such little work done in the way of studying African Christianity in North America, his work makes a marked contribution to both missiological and anthropological studies. In addition, his emphasis on the global city as a signpost for both present and future movement of the church cannot be overemphasized. The movement of African Christianity is important to understand not only for the student of New York City or of globalization; African churches are being established in Providence, Atlanta, Houston, Washington DC, and beyond. Gornik correctly points out that New York City is the global hub, but African Christianity is getting a foothold all over North America.

Gornik organizes his reporting into three sections. In the first section, “Formations,” he discusses the pastoral leadership and the liturgy of these three African churches. Reading the chapter profiling their pastoral leadership, I was not surprised to find that the pastor of each of these churches carries a significant authoritative position, but I was also encouraged to read how ministry is distributed amongst the members in these churches. Because leaders are so busy with the demands of urban life and ministry, delegation is imperative and results in an active congregation. Gornik’s description of the pastor as a cultural broker or mediator is compelling. In a diaspora community, leadership moves beyond simple clerical duties to address all aspects of life including immigration concerns.

In the second section, “Engagements,” Gornik describes the prayer life, the Bible reading, and the witness of these three congregations. It was these chapters that I found most encouraging and challenging. In my experiences interacting with African friends in New York City, I am constantly struck by their understanding of prayer as our complete dependence on God in every aspect of life. I was reminded of this reality again in Gornik’s description. If there is a gift that African Christianity has for the American church (and I think there are many), it is teaching us once again to pray. In addition, their all-of-life understanding of faith and dependence on God through prayer may pose a helpful challenge for Western believers.

As a missiologist, I also approached the chapter on witness with a great deal of personal interest. From my own observations on the street, I wonder how effective these diaspora congregations are at connecting with the more indigenous North American culture; but while reading this chapter, I realized that I was applying the metric of my own American worldview. These African churches, Gornik points out, do not measure their success by how many non-Africans are in their assemblies. Rather they see their witness as an all-of-life experience and their workplace as their primary mission field. The emphasis is on their own act of witness rather than upon increased church attendance. While I wonder how their methodologies may adapt to the Western landscape, they are currently acting as bold witnesses. What I found conspicuously absent was any mention of their engagement or desire to engage with unreached people groups in New York City. These churches apparently have a desire and a bold vision to evangelize the United States—which should be applauded. However, there was little mention of interaction with other immigrant communities and especially any mention of engagement with unreached peoples, especially those arriving from other West African nations. I’m left wondering if such missional engagement is outside of the vision of these churches or was simply left out by the ethnographer.

In the final section, “Directions,” Gornik discusses the dynamics of relocating sacred space and the spiritual nurture of the second generation. African congregations stemming from movements within African Christianity recreate events they once held dear in their African homeland. These seem to be more an extension of the original events with ambassadors of their denomination in attendance rather than an imitation. I was surprised and encouraged by the chapter on the second generation in African churches. In my observations, immigrant churches often struggle with how to care for the spiritual formation of their youth who are caught between their parents’ home culture and their new host culture. Indeed, this theme is reoccurring in diaspora missiology. While the youth groups in Word Made Global represent small samples, their Christian identity is being forged despite enormous obstacles. I believe further research on the second generation in African churches would be a significant missiological contribution.

Overall, I found Word Made Global to be a great contribution both to missionary anthropology and to the body of Christ in general. The flow of Christianity in the global city offers a glimpse into the present and the future, and connecting this flow to African Christianity draws on a rich global history.

Jared Looney

Global City Mission Initiative

Bronx, New York, USA

Since 2007, the Lipscomb Initiative for Education (LIFE) program has invited women at the Tennessee Prison for Women to enroll in the University and take college courses alongside “free-world” Lipscomb students. The LIFE program also offers college courses in partnership with Room in the Inn, which serves Nashville’s unhoused community. At first glance such initiatives may appear as familiar homeless and prison ministries, yet LIFE strives to think and act differently. Instead of a traditional outreach to the incarcerated and unhoused, the goal is to hold vigil with socially disenfranchised neighbors.

An Enduring Question

In To Change the World, author James Davidson Hunter poses the central question: “How do believers live out their faith under the conditions of the late modern world?”1 For my money, one of the livelier engagements of this enduring dilemma has been the James Gustafson-Stanley Hauerwas conversation. In this exchange, Gustafson articulates a classically “progressive” perspective, calling Christians to savvy and adaptive political leadership in our pluralist late modern society. The time has passed when Christians can assume that our God-talk will carry much influence in the contemporary secular context. Our witness still has the capacity to transform society’s policies and practices for a greater good, but playing the old “because Jesus says so” trump card will not win the hand. Stated otherwise, simple appeals to a first-century Nazarene have limited applicability in a world where many non-Christian neighbors are unlikely convinced by such claims. If Christians expect to make a difference in this late modern moment, we must employ language and logic that resonates with a wide range of individuals—not just fellow churchgoers. To discuss justice in the public square, for example, requires that we use terms accessible to those neighbors; that we creatively translate our message into a more recognizable, contemporary vernacular (e.g., political and social science).2

Stanley Hauerwas, by contrast, maintains a classically “Radical” perspective.3 With Gustafson he agrees that Christianity has an important message for redressing social injustices, but for Hauerwas this Christian ethic is largely alien to, and incommensurate with, the late modern world. In fact, beyond bewildering, the Christian ethic often attacks and subverts many of society’s principal tenets. In the pluralistic public square, therefore, the Christian kerygma is odd, outlandish, and scandalous.4 Efforts to recast or rephrase the Christian message so as to make it perceptible by, or palatable to, society are unwise and unwarranted because to do so eviscerates the very genius Christianity offers. Christians make a difference in this late modern world, therefore, by faithfully living Christianity’s strange, alien commitments amidst a world that simply cannot appreciate what Christians are offering. Be a colony of the kingdom in a world that cannot fathom such politics, Hauerwas encourages.5

We might view this Gustafson-Hauerwas exchange as a recent riff on the “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem” debate, a dilemma with which the church has wrestled since its earliest days. Notice, no one denies that Christians should address social ills and injustices. Neither side commends the church to hide its ethical candle under a bushel. The central question, however, becomes, how? How do Christians—as Christians—effect needed change in today’s social context? Toward the ends of social change, does the church use means (i.e., public policies, social theories, political practices) that have broad appeal in the late modern world? Or, does the church go it alone and on its own terms?

Understood in this long historical context, Hunter’s “how do believers live out their faith” question quickly becomes more than an academic debate, insofar as it prompts reflection on our interaction with the world (i.e., our lived theology). What in the world are we doing, and why are we doing that? To join this age-old question, consider the following case study—a recent initiative undertaken by Lipscomb University.

The LIFE Programs

In 2006, the University launched the Lipscomb Initiative for Education (LIFE) program, designed to relocate courses from the campus to the Tennessee Prison for Women (TPW) in west Nashville. Successful applicants from the TPW meet not only standard academic admissions criteria, but Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) behavioral criteria as well. Successful applicants, for example, need to be two years “write-up free” (i.e., without rules violations). In contrast to most college-in-prison programs, “inside” Lipscomb students (i.e., women residing at the TPW) take courses alongside their “outside” Lipscomb peers. Free-world Lipscomb students, therefore, travel to the TPW to take the course with their “inside” colleagues. Far from using the inside students as the subjects of study, the LIFE program replicates at the TPW a typical collegiate experience, where all students—irrespective of where they reside after class—are co-learners, collaborators, and contributors. From the pool of initial applicants in late 2006, the TPW Education staff selected the inaugural cohort of 15 inside students, whom Lipscomb enrolled in the Spring 2007 Judicial Process course.6

The initial plan was to provide inside students with a slate of courses over six semesters, enabling them to earn up to 18 hours on a Lipscomb transcript.7 As inside students quickly illustrated both solid aptitude and enduring interest in higher education, it became obvious that walking away from these students after two years would be irresponsible.

With the support of a grant from Tennessee’s Office of Criminal Justice Programs, in January 2009 the LIFE program continued with its first cohort, while also adding a second cohort of fifteen. Lipscomb University also began crafting an associate of arts degree specifically for the inside students.8 Today, the LIFE program celebrates 42 inside students working toward an accredited associate’s degree. Each term the University schedules three courses at the TPW, ranging from Art, Biology, or Communication to French, Math, or Business. Inside students take one course each term.

The Spring 2012 term saw the LIFE program begin a partnership with Room in the Inn (RITI). Founded in 1986 by Fr. Charlie Strobel, RITI is Nashville’s most storied agency providing a holistic range of services for homeless—from emergency shelter to educational programming—promoting stability and productivity in life. Among RITI’s many commitments, it also strives to transcend the barriers that often separate society’s housed and unhoused communities; to create opportunities for Nashville’s housed and unhoused to be directly involved with one another. It’s about changing people, guests and hosts alike, and serving without prejudice or pride. All serve all.

Because the missions of RITI and the University latch up so well, Lipscomb has started offering courses at the RITI facility in downtown Nashville, admitting academically qualified students from the RITI community to the University. “Street Law” served as the inaugural course in this context.9 More than credit hours, transcripts, or skill sets, the central commitment is community; to be in community with those of our community.

Occasionally individuals ask whether the LIFE effort really matters. Does the relocation of classes from the comfortable suburban campus to locations like a homeless shelter, or the admission of 40-plus felons into the student body, matter? Students often say it best. A participant from RITI confesses:

It has been a lifetime dream of mine to attend college; and thanks to Lipscomb’s generosity I am a student! Our professors and students are of the highest quality; and when it comes to making us feel as equals there is also no lack. The curriculum is challenging and has not made any of us feel less than. My life is changing in just a short time because of this monumental gift to myself and my peers. Thank you for the faith you have placed in us, and the blessings which you have bestowed upon us!

Or an inside student from the TPW explains:

With each class I take through Lipscomb, my confidence and self-worth grow. While I am still somewhat uncomfortable interacting with others, this program allows me to integrate a little at a time. With each paper I write, I find that I have far more to say than I ever dreamed possible. Because of the LIFE program, I am gaining knowledge and insight. More importantly I am finding my voice and learning how to use it. This is a wonderful feeling—knowing that I have a voice. Greater still is that people are willing to listen. I want to use this voice to show that what others meant for evil, God will use for his good. I want to use this voice to reach out to others who have been abused as I have and to help them triumph over their situation.

Explaining why a traditional student would travel from campus to take courses with a non-traditional colleague at the TPW, an outside student conveys:

The LIFE Program is an equalizer, where fellow students are other than convicted criminals. In prison ministry visitors attempt to bring encouragement, news of the outside world, and “hope,” but it is often, unintentionally, coupled with pity, resentment, and misunderstanding. Through the forum of a classroom, however, students are engaged with each other to produce innovative ideas and open their minds to new possibilities. The professors and their assignments are levelers, which initiate a teamwork mindset and a collaborative community. The woman sitting next to you becomes a peer, no longer shackled by her past.

As these voices attest, the LIFE program makes a positive impact.

Praxis

Universities, however, have many opportunities to impact society. Why this effort? What is the rationale of the LIFE program?10 On one level, research suggests that education is one of the few tried-and-true programs to break the cycle of prison recidivism. Today the US incarcerates about 2.3 million Americans, which means that one in every 100 American adults is locked up. Although 95% of those incarcerated will return to our communities, if recent trends persist the majority of those released will return to prison within a few months. Given such statistics, our prison-industrial complex is already beginning to bankrupt local, state, and federal governments. Multiple studies establish, however, that some college education alone reduces recidivism by 30-50%,11 while an associate’s degree reduces recidivism by nearly two-thirds.12 Thinking in dollars-and-cents terms, college education for the incarcerated is a fiscally responsible (even conservative) policy. In fact, according a 2009 Washington State Institute for Public Policy report, $985 spent on academic education (e.g., university courses) can save taxpayers $6,302 in future criminal justice costs.13

Homelessness is similarly expensive. According to The Key Alliance, an initiative of Nashville’s Homeless Commission, in 2010 the city spent $35,000 per homeless person to “manage” the needs of the unhoused with, at best, “a status quo” outcome.14 Across the nation communities like Nashville spend millions to provide the homeless with medical treatment in hospitals and clinics, and millions more to police and incarcerate some of the local jail’s so-called “frequent flyers.” In this light, higher education could ideally:

1. Mentor members of our community from a transient life on the streets to a safer, more stable lifestyle, which would;
2. Decrease budgetary pressures on local governments by moving individuals from welfare to taxpayer rolls.

The LIFE program, therefore, could be an expression of good citizenship, providing the local community needed resources for resolving a couple persistent social problems. In that light, the LIFE program could be a faith-based think tank, envisioning new and improved protocols for offender rehabilitation, or crafting public policies for transient populations. The LIFE program might even be an expression of the emerging “teavangelical” phenomenon, promoting so-called Christian solutions to such expensive public services as corrections and homelessness.15

In fact, however, the intention of the LIFE program is not to bring Christian public policy to bear on society’s flawed prison-industrial complex, or to eradicate homelessness in our cities. We don’t know whether the LIFE program will break the cycle of recidivism and save taxpayers money. Nor do we know whether the LIFE program will get unhoused folks housed and invested in the American Dream. We are offering, therefore, neither a conservative nor a progressive faith-based public policy proposal that will fix the problems of the “least ones”—if only we could get our legislative agenda passed and implemented at the local, state, or federal levels. In fact, we in the LIFE community hope to be chastened by two memories. First, the “white savior industrial complex” will be one of our greatest temptations.16 Advocacy for a down-trodden “other” is often well-intentioned, but in pursuit of solutions we’re inclined to think and act like paternalistic administrators managing “a problem.” Is it possible that the Christian ethic may not warrant our largess, even if we assume to know what the best policy option might be?17 Second, we recall the example of Christ. When tempted to use his power to fix the injustices that marginalized and oppressed in his first-century context, Jesus chose the path of being with, rather than working for, society’s disposed and exiled.18 As we travel to the TPW or RITI, therefore, we are simultaneously chastised and inspired by the wise words of Lila Watson: “If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let’s work together.”19

As Randy Spivey, Director of Lipscomb’s Institute of Law, Justice, and Society, notes, the being with starts with confession rather than policy proposals. “Confession, or ‘prophetic ministry,’ to use Walter Brueggemann’s phrase, is not simply criticism that ‘stands against’ the criminal justice system, but a confessed repentance that ‘stands with’ those who are hurt and oppressed by the criminal justice system.” This prophetic ministry “will not indulge the glib demand for quick fixes and cheap change; it demands more.”20 The LIFE program, he explains, is not about “spectacular acts of social crusading or of abrasive measures of indignation.” It is, rather, about “offering an alternative perception of reality and . . . letting people see their own history in the light of God’s freedom and his will for justice.” Being with is less about “strategies, tactics, and ministry programs,” and more about presence. “The Christian must be present within the system in order to confess his responsibility for it and to stand with those who suffer at its hands in a confessing community.”21 What’s the LIFE program up to? The short answer is, “not much,” at least nothing much more than a vigil.

Colloquially, we use vigil in a variety of ways. A family may hold vigil at the hospital where a loved one fights for life against a terminal illness. Abolitionists might hold a candlelight vigil outside a prison before an execution. In both cases, those holding vigil confess their fear, frustration, and impotence. They are committed to change, yet they don’t presume to control outcomes.

Historically, the church has practiced faith and expressed hope by holding vigils. In a moment when death, alienation, or injustice appears ascendant and unstoppable, the church holds vigil—witnessing to life, reconciliation, and shalom. Vigils serve as a countersign; that things are not as they appear. Death is not transcendent. Injustice will not triumph. Even at the darkest moment, the vigilant know that the desired, albeit delayed, alternative is coming.22 In the liturgy of the hours, for example, the office of Vigils comes when night is darkest and public awareness is nonexistent. Daily, those at prayer keep watch through the darkness until God provides a new day, which is celebrated with Lauds (praise).23 Vigils are not pep rallies to exert power, or incitement to change the world. In communities of silent compunction, with psalms and prayers, vigils are faithfully kept in abandonment to divine providence.

Conclusion

With the above in mind, let’s return to James Davidson Hunter’s recent version of an age-old question: “How do believers live out their faith under the conditions of the late modern world?” Perhaps we start by identifying a couple temptations. First, when we allow the “conditions of the late modern world” to define what constitutes “faithful living,” we’re apt to succumb to such seductive measures as social relevance and political influence. Presuming that those who make the biggest impact are the most faithful, we’re inclined to exert control and impose our program so that we can establish our cultural significance and importance. By contrast, God’s peculiar community operates from its own idiosyncratic times, imprudent accounting, untranslatable concepts, and inimitable rationales (e.g., the last are first, successful living comes through dying, self-abnegation is strength). Christian practices should be incommensurate with social and political science of the late modern world. Second, we should concede that our quest to change the world by our force, our wisdom, or our activism is not our calling. Instead, hold vigil. Away from the accolades of public prominence and the spectacle of social influence, form community with neighbors in need. With eschatological expectation, remain awake and present where God has called us, awaiting God’s liberation and reconciliation.

By convening higher education in some non-traditional settings, the LIFE program may, or may not, save society money by fixing its broken justice system. It may, or may not, solve the homeless problem in Nashville. Such uncertainty is fine because social, economic, and political impact isn’t the telos of the LIFE program. The famous passage in Matthew 25 suggests that our calling—our reason for being—is presence, being with women incarcerated at the TPW and with men transitioning from homelessness. In this way we can be faithful, vigilant witnesses, confident that God makes all things, and all people, new.24

Perhaps an awake, aware, and attentive presence with the dispossessed—a vigil—is how believers live out faith under the conditions of the late modern world.

Dr. Richard C. Goode is professor of history and chair of the Department of History, Politics, and Philosophy at Lipscomb University. He also serves as Coordinator of the Lipscomb Initiative for Education (LIFE) programs. Richard can be contacted at richard.goode@lipscomb.edu.

Migration to urban centers marks the contemporary global landscape. Examining the lives of migrant persons offers a unique vantage point for missiological reflection. This study considers the lives of migrant women in particular, in order to glean insight regarding the nature of the city and implications for missional engagement in a changing urban world.

For my master’s thesis in the Philippines, I studied how women in the vast slums and squatter settlements in Manila coped with a life that to me seemed unbearable. I dedicated months of living with these women in order to learn from them and thereby shape my own life. It was a life-transforming experience. And in my subsequent research in Kenya, Tanzania, Oakland, and Los Angeles, I have found common threads among these courageous women who, as the ancient Chinese adage says, “hold up half the sky.” This paper intends to help the reader not to focus solely on the mega-picture, on the problems and challenges of globalization, but to feel the humanity, the beauty, and the resourcefulness of people (specifically women) who live in this very urbanized and globalized world. We need that mega-picture, the mega-story, to shape our understanding of the world we live in, and to be able to be bridges to the gospel of Christ as we live alongside our fellow global citizen. Yet we must not forget the lives that give meaning to that mega-story, and that we must be the bridges between these two stories.

Poverty is an underlying theme in most cities of the world, particularly the developing world. As the Chronic Poverty Research Centre reminds us, millions around the globe are chronically poor, living on less than $1 a day.2 Clearly, poverty complicates the urban landscape enormously and one might say a great deal about its causes, both global and local, and its impact. I will not attempt to do that here but rather zero in on a few issues that I see as vitally important for mission in the next decade. My focus in this paper, therefore, is on the following issues, with a specific emphasis on women: (1) the challenge of immigration, (2) the faith factor or religion in cities, and finally (3) the impact of climate change. How do these come together in a way that can shape our living out the gospel and address the urban context? These issues are interwoven and vast, so this paper will not run in a linear fashion and will address each in a very limited and incomplete way.

Migration/Immigration

Drawn by dreams of economic opportunity, political freedom, social equality, and a brighter future for themselves and their families, immigrants flock in great numbers to Los Angeles as well as to other cities around the world. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs in 2008 there were 214 million migrants in the world and approximately 49% of them were women.3 While these migrant women leave their homes with their dreams and high expectations, too often they arrive at their destination unprepared for the realities that they soon face in their new land. Discrimination, prejudice, exploitation, fear of the unknown, isolation, and loneliness are but some of the challenges immigrant women (and men) must deal with on a daily basis. Nevertheless, thousands continue to migrate to cities, so clearly there is another side to the coin.

Cities as Spaces for New Opportunities

The city provides a space for new opportunities and new challenges, however difficult it might be to make a way within it. While on the one hand immigrant women often make up an invisible and disempowered class of workers, on the other hand they find new freedom and a voice within their own families. Whereas in their own country they may not have the opportunity to earn an income outside the home, in their new city they often find themselves as the main breadwinner for either the family with them or the one they left behind. Women in large urban centers find that they have more occupational flexibility and are often able to weave income opportunities into the home sphere. Thus, they strengthen their economic position in the family, and they begin to have more of a say in family affairs. It is important not to overlook this side of the coin when critiquing the unacceptable living conditions of the poor in cities around the world. I have found that no matter how hard the conditions, this stronger earning position encourages women to stay in the city and not migrate back home to the village or to their own home countries. Here a woman can forge a life that permits her to dream of a future for her children. No matter that her house is just a shack, as long as she can work and provide for her children. In the city women have access to better schools and better health care. They have opportunity. And from the mother’s perspective they face a better future than ever before. This hope is strong and overcomes the difficult living conditions.

Yet, the jobs they find are most often at the margins, precarious, underpaid, with no safety net. By tapping into a growing new labor supply—women and immigrants—global cities have seen an explosion of wealth and power supported by a host of workers “holding up half the sky.” At the same time, as Barbara Ehrenreich points out, these cities “have seen a gathering trend towards informalization of an expanding range of activities, as low-profit employers attempt to escape the costs and constraints of the formal economy’s regulatory apparatus.”4 While it is difficult to measure the extent of the informal economy in most cities, anecdotally it is estimated that in Nairobi about 68% of the population is engaged in the informal economy and in Accra 90% (an estimate provided by an officer of the United Nations Development Program). I recently heard from a fellow academic that it is 95% in Mumbai. The engagement in the informal economy without the possibility or opportunity of moving out of it is part of what makes poverty an overwhelming urban characteristic in most countries of the developing world. US cities are not avoiding growth in poverty. In Los Angeles, demographer Dowell Myers and his team projected a poverty growth of 59% in 2011.5 The informal economy of Los Angeles is approximately 25%. Many of these poor are immigrants. Yet in spite of their poverty, these people manage to send huge amounts of money home in the form of remittances. In 2010, over $400 billion is estimated to have been sent in remittances alone to home countries.6 These billions become a large percentage of the economy of the receiving countries, often being the only source for village and town infrastructure, from building schools to fixing the roof of the church, building bridges, clinics, and so forth, not to mention sometimes being the sole income for the families that depend on them. These remittances bring me to reflect on another aspect of migration that is deeply embedded in the contemporary urban context.

Cities as Centers for Transmigration

Sending remittances and supplies home are ways in which immigrants transcend the distance and stay connected with their families and communities there. Yet, remittances alone are not the only enduring bond that characterizes many urban migrants. “Their ties to one another are so strong,” concludes one study, “and the movement of people so great, that in many ways people belong to a single community that exists in different locations, on both sides of the border.”7 Living in the globalized world, the migrant uses technology to stay connected: phoning and emailing friends and family back home, sending packages, getting the news online or through local migrant papers, sometimes voting in absentia (such as happened with Salvadorans in the US when Mauricio Funes was elected), watching movies, eating traditional foods, and playing music to keep connected and to fill the empty spaces inside that long for home. Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton explain, “Immigrants are understood to be transmigrants when they develop and maintain multiple relations—familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political—that span borders.”8 Transmigration is a reality that significantly shapes the lives of urban migrants.

Cities as Spaces for Forging New Social Networks: Ties That Bind

Women form strong social networks that support them in their daily lives and help them while negotiating the complex issues of language, culture, survival, and caring for their children. Andrea Dyrness relates how a group of Latina women in Oakland gathered weekly in the kitchen of one of the mothers to strategize for reform in the schools their children were attending.9 For the mothers that came together for change in the small-school system in Oakland, the home became a site of healing and resistance and a base for community change.

Using the home as a center for community transformation and solidarity is a key coping strategy for many of the women with whom I have worked. For the Southeast Asian refugee women that I worked with in Oakland, the home became the center for forging ties with majority white women. By coming together in their homes, these women built solidarity groups of trust, learning from one another’s culture, and opening the door for the refugee women to finally be able to tell their story of traumatic war and dislocation and have these stories validated by their new friends. It was amazing to watch physical ailments disappear as these friendships grew, always within the hospitable confines of some home.

While these networks are most often forged for economic and moral support, they can also become the base for community organizing. Thus, women use their role as mothers and providers to join together for the good of the community. In Los Angeles, for example, women hotel workers (among others) have successfully organized to protest against their employers for better working conditions and health benefits.10 Indeed,community organizing provides a voice for people at the margins, empowering them to get engaged in working for change, in making a difference in their communities. It is particularly important for women.

As part of a research project at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, my colleagues and I interviewed a young Latina woman who was involved in the Active Citizenship Campaign of the Industrial Areas Foundation. She said that the community organizing process and the support from her congregation provided her with the space to develop her own potential. Suddenly, she realized she had a voice as an advocate for her people.11 Judy Reyes, a leader in another faith-based organizing group, explained how the experience in community organizing had affected her life:

That’s what we do; we get people engaged in things they never used to think made a difference. Before, I never did and I had no sense of power, of being able to affect anything in the political realm. . . . It’s really hard, especially for women. We don’t get a lot of opportunities to be leaders in society. Just to call myself a leader is a huge thing. I take a great deal of pride in it, because I’ve always had these abilities and I’ve tried to use them. But before I’d never found the place where they were valued. I was always shut out or shut down. . . . Here the more I put into this the more I got. I saw results.12

Religion in the City: A Space for the Immigrant Community

As they travel across the globe, immigrants often carry their religion with them. Sometimes the religion stays exactly the same. Witness the Cambodian women in Long Beach who want their temple to look and act exactly like the one they left behind in Cambodia; or the Pentecostal churches in El Salvador, Guatemala, or Brazil carried throughout the world by migrants who even preach the same sermon on Sundays as their congregations of origin. Not only do cities provide a variety of opportunities for employment, entertainment, living styles, culinary diversity, and so forth, but they also provide many options for religious engagement, a diversity of paths to spiritual and mystical presence. There is considerable freedom of choice in most cities and for migrants the cultural restraints on making choices are rarely as limiting as they are in their village or their home country. Although immigrants in Los Angeles expressed concern over the dangers of such pluralism, they also relished the freedom they experienced. In the city they can practice their religion in public ways that were proscribed in the homeland, where they had to confine their worship to the home.13

Religion addresses the problem of loneliness by providing entry to a familiar community with familiar beliefs and practices that give structure and meaning to life—indeed, worship and ritual have the potential to bind people together in ways that other institutions are not equipped to do.14

The religious institution is a place where one can speak one’s native tongue, eat native food, and, not insignificantly, find a husband (or wife) who shares the same cultural background. A group of Hindu women said that they didn’t mind doing the cooking for the temple’s activities on the weekends because it provided a welcome time for them to see their friends and talk in Gujarati, catch up on news from India, and explore the latest Indian fashions.15 Cambodian women send their young sons to the Khemara Budhikarm in Long Beach to be mentored by the priests in hopes that they will get engaged in Cambodian culture and resist joining the gangs in Los Angeles. Religion, therefore, welcomes the stranger, provides a community that helps replace the one left behind, and enables new generations to connect with their heritage.

Faith and the Transnational Parent

At a familial or individual level, the transmigrant relies on religion to provide a balm on the deep wounds of separation from family, but especially so when the parent has had to leave children behind, often in the care of the grandparents. Prayer not only helps parents cope with their daily challenges as urban migrants but prayers to God also help collapse the physical distance between them and their families back home. In sum, prayer is one way transnational mothers (and fathers) transcend distance from their families and cope with the separation.16

The Impact of Global Climate Change

People in cities are impacted severely by changes in climate patterns. This is not to exclude the impact on the rural sector; however, urban and rural environments are symbiotically interrelated. The rural sector is the agricultural center for providing food for the urban sector and thus what affects agriculture has a deep impact on life in the city. As the global climate changes, both sectors are impacted. If the world warms just 2℃ above pre-industrial levels, and some experts believe it already has, we are facing disaster in our world. A report issued in 2010 by The World Bank Group lists six areas that are most vulnerable to a rise of 2℃ in the earth’s temperature.17 There is not time in this paper to develop each of them, but in summary they are infrastructure, water supply, agriculture, human health, coastal zones, and extreme weather events. The best available information indicates that more than 170,000 people have been killed by floods since 1960, 2.4 million have been killed by droughts, and billions have been seriously affected by extreme weather events. It is widely agreed that climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of such extreme weather events.

The analysis in this report from the World Bank builds on empirical work and case studies that have documented the role of socioeconomic development in reducing vulnerability to climate shocks. Several studies have focused on the effect of rising income per capita: “as communities get richer, they have greater willingness and ability to pay for preventive measures.”18 Indeed, for the World Bank’s report several country case studies were conducted and preliminary analysis from those cases suggests that “social safety nets and other social protection approaches are widely assigned high priority by governments among measures to support pro-poor adaptation to climate change.”19 In Bangladesh, for example, participants in workshops named extension of citizenship rights to urban slum dwellers (as well as improved coverage of basic services) as key elements for their future. Safety net programs, when designed to address climate hazards, should include investments in risk preparedness and response systems, with attention to gender issues in disaster mitigation. When millions of people are living in the informal settlements within cities with poor quality housing (often just shacks put together with scraps of wood and zinc roofing) and lack of sanitation and water, they are most vulnerable to high intensity winds and floods resulting from stronger and more frequent hurricanes and typhoons. Settlements that exist along the ocean shores or riverbanks are especially vulnerable to higher tides due to rise in sea level.

The World Bank suggests that empowering women, as centers of the home, through improved education is critical for reducing household vulnerability to weather-related disasters. Thus, to neutralize the impact of extreme weather events requires educating an additional 18 million to 23 million young women at a cost of $12 billion to $15 billion a year.20

Implications for Mission

So what does all of this mean for missions in a globalized urban environment?

1. 1. Our missiology needs to embrace women as key instruments for God’s care for the city. For decades now we have been talking about gender issues, feminist theology, and women and development; but we still have a long way to go. Women need to be encouraged to become the bearers of good news, to study, to think through theological implications of our day. We therefore need to provide opportunities, scholarships, and support for family in order to allow this to happen. Women must be actively engaged in developing strategies for our missional work of transformation in the city. Our churches (local and global) need to provide space and resources to help women engage effectively in community transformation. As Christians we also need to be advocating for basic labor and other human rights for women. We can be determined to capitalize on things women do naturally and easily, such as forging social ties, serving their communities in a compassionate way, and advocating for justice for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. Their activism provides us a space for coming alongside them as we live out our mission within the city.

1. 1. Our missiology needs to embrace immigration and transmigration as opportunities for the gospel to move across boundaries and shape our urban environment while at the same time being aware that migration is also being used for evil, such as human trafficking. Fortunately, in this area at least, we are making some headway. But there is still a strong current of animosity in most countries against immigrants. We have a responsibility to gain from the best research,21 provide opportunities and space for partnerships that empower immigrants, and begin to look at ways that the church can continue being a center for welcoming the stranger. Unfortunately, this is often still a struggle for many of the established churches. It is vital that churches share resources, space, and power, and in this way model the biblical imperative that the poor shall be lifted up. This is central to the gospel teaching as we ourselves follow a Christ who humbled himself and became a servant to others. Just a few months ago I attended a summit on immigration at a high profile, primarily Anglo established Protestant church. I was excited, only to discover that the Anglos there were providing an introduction on immigration to a bunch of leaders in the immigrant community! Something is wrong with this picture. The teaching should have been the other way around! Unless our cities respectfully embrace immigrants, the future and hope of the city, its shalom, is denied.

1. As Christians we are sometimes slow to embrace creation care as an essential part of the gospel. Yet our understanding of the impact of global climate change in the cities in which we live and serve needs to be rooted in a theological understanding of care for the earth. If we are not prepared to do this, we may indeed be accomplices to further deterioration of our cities. And this has to be based on solid research to help us understand how our cites are being impacted by environmental change and degradation and then strategize on how to mitigate this. Our strategies for taking a wholistic gospel to the urban centers depends on this research. I believe it is not enough to be concerned with people’s souls when they cannot feed their children or their houses are consistently being flooded or, worse, destroyed by winds and storms. The good thing is that there is solid work that has been done and continues to be done on environmental impacts, even from a Christian perspective, but too often we are not prepared to follow through with the implications of this research. I was talking with a few people who are currently engaged in mission, and I brought this up. Their response was surprising to me: they felt that this is something that for people in the West is an issue, but out on the field they do not find this to be as important an issue. This, unfortunately, is a common response, but it is a response that is truly disturbing! All around them are signs of the impact of global climate change: thousands of climate refugees in Nairobi who have been displaced by drought, thousands upon thousands of people in Bangladesh and Pakistan impacted by floods because crops can no longer grow in flooded plains, and the melting of glaciers in Bolivia threaten people’s water supply. Caring for the environment is not just a Western issue but must become a concern for all of us engaged in mission globally.

I believe that the urban centers of economic and political influence are places where we can carry out mission in a holistic, comprehensive, compassionate way. However, we cannot do it alone. We need each other. We need people who can bring the essential, diverse, and necessary gifts to the table in a coalitional, collaborative way. We have come a long way in understanding and engaging in urban mission, but we have a long way to go.

Grace Roberts Dyrness is a part-time professor in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California from where she also received her doctorate in planning and development studies in 2001. She is the founder and senior researcher at the Institute for Transnational Research and Development, in Pasadena, CA. Raised in Costa Rica by missionary parents, she has lived and worked in many countries, including the Philippines where she was a missionary for 8 years with her husband and received her MA in Urban Anthropology. Her areas of interest include social context of planning, participatory research and planning, sustainability, cities of the developing world, and urban ministry with a focus on women and children at risk. She has conducted extensive research in Philippines, Kenya, Tanzania, Oakland, and Los Angeles and currently resides in Altadena, CA. Grace can be contacted at gdyrness@yahoo.com.

bibliography

Avila, Ernestine M. “Transitional Motherhood and Fatherhood: Genered Challenges and Coping.” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2008. http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/assetserver/controller/item/etd-Avila-20080715.pdf.

Bacon, David. “Communities Without Borders.” The Nation, October 2005, http://archive.truthout.org/article/david-bacon-communities-without-borders.

Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. “Our Victories.” http://clueca.org/1-our-victories.htm.

Chronic Poverty Research Centre. The Chronic Poverty Report 2008-09: Escaping Poverty Traps. Manchester, UK: Chronic Poverty Research Centre, 2008. http://www.chronicpoverty.org/uploads/publication_files/CPR2_ReportFull.pdf.

Dyrness, Andrea. Mothers United: An Immigrant Struggle for Socially Just Education. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2008.

Hanciles, Jehu J. Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008.

Margulis, Sergio, et al. The Costs to Developing Countries of Adapting to Climate Change: New Methods and Estimates. The Global Report of the Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change Study. Washington, DC: The World Bank Group, 2010. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTCC/Resources/EACC-june2010.pdf.

Myers, Dowell, et al. “Immigrants and the New Maturity of Los Angeles.” In Los Angeles 2010: Annual State of the City Report, edited by Ali Modarres, 5-8. Los Angeles: Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs, 2010. http://patbrowninstitute.org/documents/StateoftheCityReport2010-ShortVersion_001.pdf.

Miller, Donald E., Jon Miller, and Grace Dyrness. “Religious Dimensions of the Immigrant Experience in Southern California.” In Southern California and the World, edited by Eric J. Heikkila and Rafael Pizarro, 101-32. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.

Schiller, Nina Glick, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. “Towards a Definition of ‘Transnationalism’: Introductory Remarks and Research Questions.” In Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered, edited by Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, ix-xiv. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992.

United Nations. Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2008 Revision. New York: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2009. http://un.org/esa/population/migration/UN_MigStock_2008.pdf.

Wood, Richard L. Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in Amercia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

The World Bank. Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2011. http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/migration-and-remittances.

This article tells the story of Englewood Christian Church, a century-old congregation which has transitioned from being a late nineteenth century “suburban” congregation to a “successful” central city church to an innovative inner-city body of believers. The story offers encouragement to other congregations for finding needed resources for their own transitions, through the gifts of God’s Spirit, renewal through theological conversation, and trust in God’s sovereign provision to each local church.

Englewood Christian Church was established in 1895 on what was at that time the edge of the city of Indianapolis, Indiana. Her address to this day remains 57 North Rural Street. However, over the course of one hundred sixteen years a lot can change in any neighborhood in any city. What was once considered rural is now decidedly urban. A predominantly white, working-class neighborhood has become an ethnically diverse neighborhood which is roughly fifty percent Caucasian, twenty-five percent African-American and twenty-five percent Latino. Recently, the neighborhood (with the 46201 zip code) has had one of the highest housing foreclosure rates in the nation, the highest abandoned housing rate in Indiana and struggles in many other categories used to gauge the social condition of a community (i.e., crime, level of education, unemployment rate). Most congregations located in such a neighborhood are unable or unwilling to sustain a life together. Regardless of their past success, older urban congregations usually either relocate or close.

Englewood had experienced a “successful” past according to typical standards of evaluation. Sunday school and morning worship service attendance both reached over one thousand people in the early 1970s. The congregation was led by ministers with national reputations. The church was a key player among the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ; they hosted the second National Missionary Convention and helped to start the North American Christian Convention. This level of success produced the usual expansion of property and the building of large facilities. Unfortunately, Englewood continued to be typical in some detrimental ways.

The priority of numerical growth resulted in an emphasis on evangelism without equal energy spent on disciple making. There was a lot of “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” but not a lot of “teaching them to obey everything” Jesus commanded (Matt 28:19-20; niv). One particular thing Jesus had commanded, loving one’s neighbor, was unlikely if the neighbor happened to be dark skinned. Englewood’s loose and shadowy affiliation with the KKK was an issue on more than one occasion. The changing socio-economic landscape of the neighborhood coupled with a growing segment of the membership taking flight to the suburbs resulted in a congregation that was spiraling downward in number and waning in her witness to the community at large.

In the midst of the decline, which began in the mid-1970s, the leadership of the church made a courageous commitment to remain in the neighborhood. Some members embraced this commitment to a challenged neighborhood. Others “voted with their feet,” leaving the congregation to join one of the many new suburban congregations “closer to home” or leaving under the pretense of theological disagreement. Those who remained expressed their commitment to be the church in that place in a wide variety of ways.

During the 1980s, Englewood was led by a gifted, respected, and much-loved pastor into the charismatic renewal movement which was sweeping the nation (and world) and had found its way into the Stone-Campbell Movement churches. Resistance to this development resulted in the sudden resignation of the pastor and the exodus of a handful of very active members. While the congregation healed from this painful fracture, new developments began among some of the remaining members. A group of long-time members, some who were elders and their wives, took over the leadership of a shelter for homeless women and their children. The facility located next door to the church building became a center for “outreach” to the homeless and to the struggling families of the neighborhood. Assistance with donated furniture, clothing, food, and occasionally money took place in ways typically associated with urban ministry. But contrary to the noble and kind intentions of those involved, the results of this form of urban ministry were typical of the model: no transformation in the community and negligible change in those served.

A new approach was needed, not just a new toolkit of techniques. The church needed to reconsider its essential nature, its deeply held convictions, and develop new practices. The majority of the members who had remained were committed not only to stay, but also to discern together God’s purposes for this struggling congregation. But, as with most congregations that find themselves in challenging circumstances, the problem was at least two-fold: practices inconsistent with stated convictions (or practices consistent with actual but unstated convictions) and inadequate practices for communal discernment.

About the time the congregation was celebrating her 100th anniversary (1995), major changes were underway. Small and informal groups began to meet together for conversations. Some of these conversations revolved around reflections on a wide variety of books being read together, but mostly discussions were a result of questions generated by internal concerns related to the nature of witness and life together in what had become a challenged urban neighborhood. There were unsettling questions concerning the apparent lack of effectiveness of activities involving neighborhood ministry (including uncertainty about what “effectiveness” would look like). There were even more difficult questions related to the practices of loving one another. One long-time member suggested that the church did a better job of loving strangers than members. All of the conversations began to converge on issues related to the nature of the church and the mission of God. For instance, books like Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines focus attention on discipleship but demonstrate an inadequate ecclesiology.1 Consideration of various works on urban mission like Robert Linthicum’s City of God, City of Satan and Jacques Ellul’s The Meaning of the City, while very helpful in some ways, also proved to be inadequate to provide an ecclesiology comprehensive enough to guide Englewood in faithful witness.2 Writings by authors as divergent as Watchman Nee and Leslie Newbigin were helpful and encouraging, but represented the heart of the classic dilemma: the more academic writings lacked practicality for the life of the congregation, and the more popularly written theology lacked the depth and rigor needed by a congregation in such a complex and challenging cultural context. Relief for the church’s struggles came in the summer of 1996.

One of the church members was involved in a class at Emmanuel School of Religion (now known as Emmanuel Christian Seminary) listed as “The Resurgence of Ecclesiology” and taught by Dr. Phil Kenneson, a professor at nearby Milligan College. As notes of class lectures and discussions were shared with interested members from the congregation, Dr. Kenneson’s syllabus became the critical reading list for many of the ongoing discussions. Three books from this list were particularly formative: The Church between Gospel and Culture, Jesus and Community, and Body Politics.3 But the reading list and class notes were only part of the benefits: Dr. Kenneson became the gateway to a whole new network of relationships which placed Englewood in fellowship with numerous churches and intentional Christian communities who were diligently seeking to live faithfully and consistently with God’s kingdom “come on earth as it is in heaven.” These were robust expressions of God’s church living out radical discipleship in a variety of forms and contexts. Englewood suddenly had mature examples from which to draw encouragement. (These relationships continue to be broadened, deepened, and nurtured through a fellowship of what has been called “subversive friendships,” many of which began at the annual gathering of the organization known as The Ekklesia Project.)

Within a year, the volume and intensity of discussions, the complexity of the urban context, and the wide variety of theological perspectives that had accumulated over a century at Englewood begged for a more formal and “institutional” place to have critical conversations that were open to anyone. The answer came in 1997 when the church discontinued their Sunday evening worship service and started what is simply called The Sunday Night Conversation. Over the last fifteen years, as few as twenty and as many as seventy adults have gathered in a circle on most Sunday evenings to talk with one another concerning God’s kingdom, God’s mission, and a shared life together under the lordship of Christ. These ongoing conversations have proven to be as earthy and gritty as the neighborhood in which they take place. Most often, they were tense and strained. Sometimes they were loud and insensitive. Occasionally, they were verbally violent. However, over the years of enduring with one another and remaining engaged in this uncomfortable practice, the church has been formed into a more resilient and visible unity which allows for deeper levels of commitment to God’s purposes.

Before naming at least five essential elements which have characterized Englewood’s transformation (for better or for worse), below is a list of some visible expressions of the church’s work in the community and beyond:

1. The church operates a childcare ministry (Daystar Childcare) with about one hundred children enrolled and employing about seventeen full-time and part-time staff. Daystar has been featured in the newspaper and on television for its excellence in early childhood education.
2. The church operates a five bedroom/two-and-a-half bathroom hospitality house which has hosted church groups, missionaries, scholars, ministry groups, and visiting families from around the world. It has even served as emergency housing on a couple of occasions.
3. The church provides space free of charge for a police substation located on our church campus, a mission organization (Mission Indy), and numerous monthly and special meetings of our community. (This includes a weekly group of about one hundred from Alcoholics Anonymous.)
4. The church hosts a weekly supper (Wednesday nights) which is open to any of our neighbors or their guests. The first visit is free, subsequent visits are $2 for adults and $1 for children. This covers the cost of the food only. Members take turns cooking and cleaning.
5. The church’s best known venture was the founding and operation of Englewood Community Development Corporation (ECDC). This separately incorporated 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization was formed over a decade ago to facilitate the church’s work in economic development. ECDC operates a bookstore, a publishing company, the Englewood Review of Books (see http://erb.kingdomnow.org), a bookkeeping service, a lawn-care service, home repair, a recently started silk-screening business, and a community garden. Their property development work includes three different commercial properties. But ECDC’s largest enterprise is various activities related to housing: purchase and rehab of many houses for homeownership, operating thirty units of scattered site affordable rental housing, and, most recently, the completion of a $7.5 million development next to the church building called The CommonWealth. The CommonWealth is a thirty-two unit apartment building which used a unique combination of funding sources (including government grants and private investment) and has a great diversity of residents, from the recently homeless and those who have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness to an Englewood member who is a college professor. The building includes ample public use spaces, a full gym, an exercise and activity mezzanine, and a rooftop sports deck which features Indianapolis’s only (and maybe the world’s only) rooftop deck hockey rink. These experiences have paved the way for ECDC’s commissioning by the city government to lead a multi-agency effort in redeveloping a two-mile section of the Old National Road (Highway 40) which is the primary east/west artery leading into downtown Indianapolis.

These activities happen in a congregation of about two hundred adults (including our Spanish-speaking members collectively known as Mano de Amistad or “hand of friendship”). The funding for the daily operation of this work is generated by the activities themselves with the exception of about $225,000 in annual church offerings. Besides the Daystar Childcare and ECDC staffs, the only other staff is a full-time preacher, a full-time church secretary, and a full-time building supervisor. The staggering amount of work which gets done in any given week is a tribute to God’s grace and the loving service of the unpaid members. Yet, the church members avoid the designation “volunteers” because it misrepresents the relational obligation they perceive as disciples in Christ’s church.

Many different elements have led to Englewood’s current place of maturity, but the “fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:13) remains the prize worth attaining. Provided below is a brief sketch of five particular points of emphasis which have been critical to her transformation.

A Renewed Sense of Identity (Ecclesiology)

To reiterate, Englewood’s recognition of a need for change grew out of dissatisfaction with the church’s shallow and vague ecclesiology. It became evident that if the church really is the continuing expression of Christ on earth as the body of Christ, then the church’s witness is the primary way God is manifest in the world. Throughout the first three chapters of Ephesians, God’s purposes for the church became more and more compelling. Ephesians 3:9–11 became a theme for the vision of Englewood: God is revealing his multi-dimensional wisdom to the principalities and powers through the church. How the church lived and served together became more important than the spiritual growth of individuals, but being a mature disciple had both meaning and purpose when understood in relationship to God’s mission through the church. Hours of discussion of the implications of passages from 1 Cor 12 and Rom 12 yielded the general consensus that personal expressions of growth and discipleship could only be understood as expressions of God’s Spirit in the context of the local church. While recognizing the importance of the essential unity of the one body of Christ on earth, the congregation began to read Scripture as a local expression of the one church, not simply as a portion of the one church. This approach to hermeneutics and ethics followed the development outlined in the excellent book written by Steve Fowl and Greg Jones entitled Reading in Communion.4 A Sunday school class spent a year discussing Richard Hays’s book The Moral Vision of the New Testament; a change in missional practices emerged as some members of the church began to read the Bible through Hays’s focal images of community, cross, and new creation.5 The difficulties resulting from this changed perspective were viewed by most as dialectic tensions that need not be resolved but should be embraced. This wisdom emerged when some members read many of the works of Jacques Ellul.

Lohfink’s language of the church as “contrast-society” provided an excellent and subtle correction for a church worn out from attempting to fix all the problems and help all the neighbors in the distressed urban neighborhood.6 Englewood thus understood “being” a real and healthy embodiment of Christ’s presence as the mission. God would fix problems, the church concluded, through their faithful loving of one another, neighbors, and enemies. This way of thinking led to substantive changes in other aspects of Englewood’s life together.

Restoring the Practice of Congregational
Conversations

Englewood’s story highlights how significant change began to take place when the congregation created space for regular, sustained, and purposeful conversation. A biblical practice like “binding and loosing” (Matt 18:15–20) was seen not so much in the narrow context of church discipline but as a positive series of conversations which might not only lead to broad expressions of reconciliation but also serve to bring greater unity in the church’s shared convictions. The teaching of Paul found in 1 Cor 14:26–33 equipped the church for discerning the voice of God in conversations which took place when the church gathered. These conversations were happening not under a hierarchy, but among brothers and sisters who were equally under the authority of Christ and yet valued the particular gifts each member brought to the various conversations.7 Instead of developing more intricate processes of marketing or attractive presentations of worship or sophisticated techniques of evangelism, Englewood was learning how to listen and talk with one another as they learned to listen and follow the leading of God’s Spirit.8

Becoming a Thankful Community

How a community sees the surrounding world greatly affects how its members talk about important matters. A constant refrain for the redeemed communities addressed in the New Testament is that they should give thanks in all things (Eph 5:20; Phil 4:4–7; Col 3:17). This extended even to the point of rejoicing in the trials of adverse circumstances, recognizing the formational opportunities resident in adversity (Jas 1:2–4). Englewood cultivated attitudes of appreciation that dynamically bind together the spiritual wisdom of honoring the work of others, living in peace with one another, correcting the undisciplined, responding to those who do evil, and discerning the community’s next steps. Notice the ways that the Apostle Paul uses constant gratitude to coordinate these seemingly disparate activities (1 Thess 5:12–22).

The Englewood neighborhood on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis could be identified by its blighted houses, high rate of unemployment, illegal drug trafficking, prostitution, high concentration of those who have been diagnosed with serious mental illness, crumbling infrastructure, and impoverished families. One could choose to focus on the needs which seem so rampant there, but to do so would mean likely missing the rich gifts abundantly distributed through all the neighbors. The following is the testimony of one of the Englewood members:

You could miss my neighbor, Bob, who is one of the funniest people you will ever meet, and who could probably give Ken Jennings a run for his money on the TV game show Jeopardy; a man who has written numerous unpublished novels, and at the age of sixty is headed back to college. Yes, Bob also lives with mental illness, is unemployed, and is often socially awkward. Focusing on Bob’s deficit traits seriously risks missing the asset he is to our community. You could miss my friend, Melody, who has an Associate’s Degree in Graphic Design, rebuilt my laptop in an evening, completely reorganized our church library, and has knitted scarves for over half our members and a few of the cashiers at our local convenience store. Yes, Melody often struggles with effects of her mental illness as well as numerous physical limitations, which has caused her to be unemployed most of her adult life, but these are only one side of the woman who is a dear friend and blessing to our community. You could miss the beautiful, historically sensitively restored CommonWealth apartment building which is now home to me and fifty of my diverse and gifted neighbors. This former Indianapolis public school building, which was closed in the 70s, was vacant for a time, got a second life as a women and children’s homeless shelter, fell into disrepair, and was at one point targeted for demolition, has become a symbol of what happens when people and places are valued for what they are instead of what they are not. I say, you could miss these things, because that is exactly what I did when I first moved to my neighborhood, so overwhelmed and focused on helping all the needy people I saw around me, but God in his wisdom and patience has taught me to see the many rich blessings he has given our community.

In the world of community development, focusing on a community’s assets—its neighbors, associations, clubs, and institutions—to solve the community’s “problems” is an approach known as Asset Based Community Development. For Englewood, the very foundation of their living into the fullness of God’s kingdom flows from discerning the gifts given by God in their members and residing in their neighbors, and thanking God constantly for the many ways he has blessed their community. This approach is not optional if one believes that the essential nature of God’s kingdom is abundance.9 This approach is the difference between reading Paul’s words in Phil 4:4-9 as really “practice-able” or reducing them to liturgical hyperbole. Rejoicing always and focusing on the things which are true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, and worthy of praise may be the only way to experience the presence of God’s peace in any community, including challenged urban places.

Re-thinking Eschatology

As Englewood discerns together how God would have them live, an essential concern must be a consideration of the mission of God. As Jesus was driven by only those things given to him by the Father (John 8:26; 12:49; 14:10; 17:8), so also the body of Christ ought to seek participation in the end to which God is bringing the world. A congregation’s view of God’s particular end or “telos” informs every aspect of congregational life and work. How senseless it is to seek God’s kingdom “come on earth as it is in heaven” when the prevailing theology is that God’s last word for earth is the rapture of God’s chosen from the earth on the eve of its cataclysmic torture and destruction or that God’s primary concern is not for “new heavens and new earth,” but only for the saving of souls from eternal damnation.

Englewood has emerged from the dominance of a popularized dispensational premillennial eschatology to one which reads the whole of the Bible as a narrative; one focused on a redemptive end inclusive of the whole world and not just the souls of its human inhabitants. For instance, they notice the recurring theme in Isaiah where God urges Israel to live consistent with or in anticipation of the restoration he alone is bringing. They see Paul reminding the church in Rome that all of creation waits with a deep longing for God’s children to live consistent with God’s kingdom in order that the whole of creation might realize freedom from the futility of spiraling decay. Here is recognition that Paul’s language connotes not an expectation for some future other-world, but for the immediate physical reality of this world. This reflection on Rom 8 is the important context for understanding God’s faithfulness to his promises to Israel and his intentions for the renewed Israel, the church (Rom 9–11). And this real world historical context is the essential foundation for Paul’s admonitions for the church’s practices outlined in Rom 12–16.

The Old Testament prophets and the words and works of Jesus envisioned a new and restored world. This world began to take shape at various times in Israel’s history and in the new communities of the first-century church. The word of the prophets of ancient Israel, incarnate in Jesus and proclaimed by the apostles, began to emerge through congregational embodiment. These churches were continually reminded of God’s plan for “the restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21), “the summing up of all things” (Eph 1:10) and the “reconciliation of all things” (Col 1:20). The embracing of this vision can expand the missional imagination of a congregation, energize her membership, and help her to recognize the vital role each member must play in the collective witness of the church to the powers of this age. The fragmentation of members into independent families and life into neatly segregated departments has made the command that the church be of one mind virtually impossible. Only a renewed commitment to a practiced anticipation of life in the New Jerusalem will attract our cynical and jaded world of God’s grace-filled wisdom.

A Deep Commitment to a Place

If urban places are going to experience transformation, there must be deeply rooted social expressions of God’s presence. It is not altogether clear whether deserts create a nomadic lifestyle or nomadic lifestyles create deserts, but certainly many urban places have become cultural deserts as a result of suburban migrations. For example, urban schools are too often judged as failures as they try to compensate for the consequences of many of their students changing schools two or three times a year. Englewood has sought to reverse this trend by not only committing to remaining in the neighborhood institutionally, but many of the member families have moved into the neighborhood as well. Many Englewood families have expressed lifetime commitments to the church similar to various expressions of monastic vows of stability.

The congregation’s support for those who are involved in what has been called the New Monasticism has served to deepen an understanding of what it means to be submitted to Christ and a particular people in a particular place.10 Knowledge of a place takes time, and earning the trust of neighbors and neighborhood institutions takes longer. Lightning raids into urban places may be well-intentioned, but they usually cause more harm than good. God’s plan has not changed; just as Jesus was the embodiment of God, so also the church is the embodiment of Jesus. Incarnational theology requires stability.

Summary

The need of urban places is essentially no different than any other place; while more densely populated and having more complex systems of local government, cities and their urban neighborhoods need to see and experience God’s intent for every expression of society. God’s provision of churches as actual communities is an embodied witness to the wisdom of the crucified and risen Christ. God’s provision to churches are the various gifts given in members as manifestations of his Spirit. Nothing more than this is needed and nothing less than this will accomplish God’s mission. Englewood provides at least one example that older congregations can thrive in an inner-city setting, but the challenges of urban America in an increasingly urban world are issues for churches both young and old. The answers are not “out there” on the horizon in new techniques or new technologies; the solutions to all our mission and ministry challenges can be found in the ancient words of Scripture and have been made known to us in Jesus. Wherever Christians gather with a desire above all other desires to see God’s kingdom come on earth as it is already in heaven, wherever Christians value and love one another as gifts from God and more than adequate provision for participation in God’s mission, there will be dynamic transformation.

Tracy Taylor, Kyle Mobley, and Michael Bowling serve together at Englewood Christian Church. All three are graduates of schools identified with the Stone-Campbell Movement (Milligan College, Johnson University, and Emmanuel Christian Seminary).

Bibliography

Aldrich, James L., Michael J. Bowling, M. Joe Bowling, and C. Christopher Smith. “ ‘We Need to Talk!’: Restoring the Practice of Congregational Conversation.” Leaven 15, no. 1 (2007): http://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/leaven/vol15/iss1/10.

Ellul, Jacques. The Meaning of the City. Translated by Dennis Pardee. Jacques Ellul Legacy. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011.

Foster, Richard. Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth. 20th anniv. ed. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998.

Fowl, Stephen E., and L. Gregory Jones. Reading in Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998.

Hays, Richard. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation; A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Hunsberger, George R., and Craig Van Gelder, eds. The Church between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America. Gospel and Our Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.

Linthicum, Robert C. City of God, City of Satan: A Biblical Theology of the Urban Church. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991.

Lohfink, Gerhard. Does God Need the Church? Toward a Theology of the People of God. Translated by Linda M. Maloney. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999.

________. Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith. Translated by John P. Galvin. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

Smith, Christopher. The Virtue of Dialogue: Conversation as a Hopeful Practice of Church Communities. Englewood, CO: Patheos Press, 2012.

Stock, Jon R. “Stability.” In Inhabiting the Church: Biblical Wisdom for a New Monasticism, ed. Jon R. Stock, Tim Otto, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, 87–118. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2007.

Willard, Dallas. The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

Yoder, John Howard. Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community before the Watching World. Scottdale, PA: Howard Press, 2001.

________. “The Hermeneutics of Peoplehood: A Protestant Perspective.” In The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel, 15–45. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

Just at the start of the sixth century BC, the Judean exiles in Babylon received a letter from Jerusalem from the prophet Jeremiah. This must have generated tremendous excitement and anticipation within that desperate group, and we can imagine how eagerly they gathered to hear the messenger read aloud the letter that had traveled for some months over hundreds of miles to bring them the Word of the Lord. Here is some of what Jeremiah wrote:

Thus says the Lord of Hosts, God of Israel, to the whole exiled community that I exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and settle down, and plant gardens, and eat their fruit. Take wives and have sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there; do not decrease. And seek the well-being, the shalom of the city to which I have exiled you, and pray for it to the Lord, for with its shalom lies your own shalom. . . . For thus says the Lord: When seventy years have passed in Babylon, I will take note of you and fulfill for you my promise to bring you back to this place. For I myself know the thoughts that I am thinking concerning you—an utterance of the Lord—thoughts of shalom, well-being, and not of evil, to give you a future of hope. (Jer 29:4-7, 10-11; author’s translation)

Surely this is not the message the exiles were hoping for. Look again: “Settle down in Babylon; make yourselves content. You will live and die in that place. So seek the welfare of the Babylonians, pray for them, because your welfare is linked inextricably with theirs.” We can imagine what the exiles must have said after hearing that letter from home: “This is prophetic encouragement? What kind of phony hope is this? Jeremiah has sold out to the Babylonians.” “We always knew he was a Babylonian collaborator,” some would have said. “We exiles are the true Judeans. We may be stuck in Babylon, but we’ll make no peace with our captivity. We may be here a long time—God forbid—but if so, then we will live by our seething hatred for every living Babylonian.” “Happy are those who take their little ones and dash them against the rocks!” someone shouted, and it became a chant, a spiritual of sorts; we know that enraged song as Psalm 137.

Abiding hatred for Judah’s Babylonian captors is well represented in the Bible and even within the book of Jeremiah. True, Jeremiah speaks a reconciling word in his letter to the exiles; he envisions Babylonians and Judeans prospering together. But reconciliation is not the final word in the book of Jeremiah, which concludes with two long chapters (chapters 50 and 51) of rage against Babylon, prophetic poetry declaring that Babylon is doomed by God, utterly damned and marked for destruction. So in the book of Jeremiah as we have it, the commitment to abiding hatred of Judah’s worst enemy trumps the great vision of reconciliation in chapter 29. And just in case that book is not enough, the book of Revelation celebrates Babylon’s fall all over again, although this time “Babylon” is a stand-in for Judah’s new Great Enemy, Rome: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!” (Rev 18:2; nrsv).

What we see in the Bible is what we see in every religious community, in every place in the church, and also in our own hearts: a profound tension between a vision of reconciliation on the one hand and committed hatred on the other. This is the crucial thing for us to see: folks have good reasons for both reconciliation and hatred, even good religious reasons for both. That is why the tension is so deep and often seems impossible to resolve. The religious imperative for reconciliation is obvious enough to us, I suppose: “Love your neighbor.” But hatred of the neighbor near or far may be equally a matter of religious principle; the operative principle is Divine Justice. From a sixth-century Judean perspective, the strong denunciation of Babylon is an appeal for God’s just judgment on those who wreaked havoc on the holy city of Jerusalem, toppled the eternal throne of David, and exiled the king, along with thousands of skilled workers, teachers, musicians, poets, prophets, priests, and community organizers. Why would Judeans not believe that God hated the powerful and vicious enemy who had inflicted on them a forced march across the top of the burning Syrian desert to labor camps in Babylon? So we have two alternative messages about the Babylonians, both of which seemed to come from God: on the one hand, seek shalom for Babylon; on the other, wicked, godless Babylon will be destroyed. It seems that even the prophet Jeremiah was torn between those two messages.

The problem for people of faith has not changed in the 2,600 years since Jeremiah spoke and wrote. We are still torn, in our churches and in our hearts, between the impulse toward reconciliation with our enemies and the conviction that God’s justice must be upheld. American Christians are still torn between the two in the long wake of 9/11; Christians are torn between the two every time we fight a war. I dare say that many of us feel that tension also in intimate situations: how do we relate to someone who is profoundly destructive, in our family, in the church, in the neighborhood? Do we keep reaching out, keep trying to work with her, or at a certain point do we cut our losses and treat her as “a Gentile and a tax-collector” (Matt 18:17; nrsv)?

It should be clear by now that Scripture does not settle our dilemma once and for all. It does not suggest that we can in every case make community with the Babylonian oppressor so we may prosper together. But if the Bible does not deliver us from tension, nonetheless it does offer guidance for living in tension, a kind of guidance that was not available even to the prophet Jeremiah. In calling the exiles to seek God’s peace for Babylon, Jeremiah was writing something completely unprecedented. No one in recorded history had ever said, as Jeremiah did to the exiles: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:44; nrsv). Obviously many in his time thought that was absurd, and maybe the prophet himself wondered if he had gone off the deep end.

But six centuries later, the last and greatest of the prophets said that very same thing: “Love your enemies, and pray for them”—and when Jesus said it a second time, something changed forever. What changed is not that Christians are now disposed to love our enemies and pray for them assiduously, simply because Jesus said we should. With few exceptions, we feel just the same about our enemies as the Judeans felt about the Babylonians. What has changed is that we can no longer call it absurd to seek their shalom; we cannot dismiss the prophet of reconciliation as possessed of an overheated imagination or having sold out to the oppressor. Because now Jesus has spoken, and we know for sure that seeking shalom for our enemies is what God expects of us. That is what a “future of hope” (Jer 29:11) looks like in God’s own white-hot imagination: people praying without ceasing for their enemies, appealing to God for the godless, putting all their hope in God’s ability to craft shalom—well-being, peace, true prosperity—to make shalom in places where the only raw materials visible are human misery, the suffering of the planet, and profound spiritual poverty.

We dare not say that God cannot turn enmity and present misery to shalom, because often enough God has done it. There is hard historical evidence of this, including from the Judean community in Babylon. In time Babylonian Jews lived in relative peace alongside their former captors; the archaeological data suggests that Jews intermarried with Babylonians and did business with them. The Jewish community survived and even thrived in Babylon for more than 2,500 years, until the last century. A thousand years after Jeremiah, it produced the Talmud, to this day the greatest written expression of Jewish faith and culture apart from the Bible itself. The prophet’s vision for the exiles, “a future of hope,” was fulfilled, perhaps far beyond his own imagining.

As I understand it, our work is to attend seriously to God’s heated imagination. It takes courage to let that shape your life. What wild visions—extravagant, demanding, yet not absurd—occupy God this day concerning each of us and our communities? If any one of us is able to pose that question, and stand still long enough to hear an answer, that will be because we have managed to encourage each other to do something bold and otherwise unimaginable. It will be because we have sought to strengthen each other, as Jeremiah tried to strengthen the exiles, in order to stand and hear what God imagines. “For I myself know the thoughts that I am thinking concerning you—an utterance of the LORD—thoughts of shalom and not of evil, to give you a future of hope” (Jer 29:11).

Just this is the beginning of the church’s ministry of reconciliation, and thus our task for this day and this lifetime: to stand together in a listening place, an envisioning place, strengthening each other to share God’s thoughts of shalom and move together into a future of hope.

Ellen F. Davis is Amos Ragan Kearns Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke University Divinity School in North Carolina. The author of eight books and many articles, her research interests focus on how biblical interpretation bears on the life of faith communities and their response to urgent public issues, particularly the environmental crisis and interfaith relations. Ellen can be contacted at edavis@div.duke.edu.

The present wave of urbanization compels Christians to reflect scripturally on the place and purpose of the city in God’s mission. To that end, the following essay surveys various appearances of the city in the Old Testament. Some have charged the Old Testament with a largely pessimistic view of urban centers. Though the Hebrew Bible presents the city as a human construct fraught with peril, it also imagines the urban center as locus of God’s redemptive blessing.

INTRODUCTION

The present and unprecedented global wave of urbanization summons Christians to imagine what role the phenomenon of the city plays in the mission of God. Christian reflection upon the city, however, does not happen in a historical vacuum. Augustine’s City of God stands unrivaled in its impact on the Christian urban imagination throughout the last two millennia. Augustine identified two societies of humankind with two cities. Those who live according to God’s will inhabit the city of God, and those who live by human standards populate the city of men. Though Augustine was speaking largely allegorically, some have charged him with bequeathing to Western tradition a negative appraisal of the city qua city.1 Fast-forwarding more than a millennium, Raymond Williams has shown that a pessimistic portrayal of the city—together with a favorable view of the country—operates as a major motif in English literature from the sixteenth century forward.2 In a similar vein, Timothy Gorringe describes Cowper’s famous line “God made the country, and man made the town” as a succinct summary of a “conventional topos of Western thought”—namely, the demonization of the city and the “idyllisation” of the country.3 The American mythos, in particular, has embedded within it a certain amount of bias against the urban environment.4 Of course, Christians in the last two millennia have not wholly demonized the city.5 Nevertheless, critical reflection upon the city, from both Christian and secular perspectives in the Western tradition, attests that the city carries negative emotional baggage.

Does the biblical narrative lend any support to such pessimism about the city? The Bible certainly offers plenty of theological grist for Christian reflection on urban environments. The city appears early and often (Gen 4, 11, 18), and continues to make regular appearances throughout, both in the foreground and in the background, all the way up to the close of the Christian canon, which takes place in a city (Rev 21-22).6 However, some Old Testament scholarship leaves the impression that Scripture has little positive to say about the earthly city, outside of an ideological praise for Jerusalem.7 For example, a significant strand of interpretation reads into Israel’s canonical witness a none-too-subtle polemic against urban society. George Mendenhall and Norman Gottwald popularized a theory of Israel’s emergence in the land that cast proto-Israelites as a countermovement against Canaanite city culture.8 In their reckoning, Canaanite cities embodied the social stratification, exploitation, and human injustice that Israel’s pastoral, egalitarian community was formed to oppose. Furthermore, the Deuteronomistic History has been read as a historical retelling of the demise of the Israelite state due in large part to a failure of human institutions, centralized in and epitomized by cities.9 The prophets too have been construed as anti-urban, pointing to a restoration of Israel’s failed urban experiment in ways that hark back to an idealized pre-urban (egalitarian/desert) tradition, which is often associated with idyllic “back to nature” categories.10

There is surely truth in these observations. Though the Old Testament does not provide anything like a doctrine or theology of the city (nor is the city qua city a major topos of biblical literature), Scripture nonetheless frequently presents the city in a negative light. Much of its literature can even sound at times as if it is rejecting urban civilization. Our review of the biblical evidence will demonstrate that the Hebrew Bible imagines the city as an unavoidable human construct where power and people collide, and subsequently where lurks the potential for great harm. But it will also show that the Bible holds out hope that the city can be a context of human flourishing and divine blessing, and that Scripture does not endorse a predominately pessimistic view of the urban environment. The city is the major setting of much of what the Bible says about sin, judgment, and restoration, though not to the exclusion of the countryside. Indeed, we will see that in the imagination of the Hebrew Bible, city and countryside are tethered theologically. This essay will show that the overall biblical portrayal is more ambiguous than negative—the phenomenon of the city is shaded with gray far more than with either black or white.

DEFINING THE BIBLICAL CITY

The Bible is full of cities. They are a part of the “symbolic geography” of the biblical writers and more broadly the literature of the ancient Near East.11 Before going any further, it is necessary to give attention to what is meant when talking about “the city” in ancient Israel. Frank Frick describes the city as “the crowning achievement of the ancient world,” but just what constitutes an ancient city is a major point of discussion.12

The English connotation of the term “city” does not correspond to the ancient reality in multiple ways. First, ancient cities were far smaller in size and population than what the term suggests today, and cities in ancient Palestine were even smaller than most cities of their contemporary nations.13 Consider, for example, that Hezekiah’s Jerusalem covered at most 150 acres.14 Most recently, William Dever has postulated a multi-tiered hierarchy of Israelite sites in the eighth-century BCE. in which he heuristically defines an Israelite city as a site of ten acres or more with a population of 1,000 or more (using a coefficient of 100 people per acre).15 Based on these population estimates, Dever calculates that the land of Israel was home to around twenty cities, and very few of these exceeded a population of 3,000.16 Moreover, the vast majority of the population did not reside in cities. Dever estimates that only twenty-five percent of the population would have lived in communities of 300 or more people, and eighty percent of these communities were towns of only 300–1,000 people. Thus, approximately five percent of the total population dwelled in urban centers.17 These figures highlight the fact that when pondering what the Bible says about the city, one must keep in mind that the space to which it refers does not much resemble our modern cities in size or density.

Second, cities in the ancient world for the most part did not recognize the modern-day dichotomy between city and country. Most recent sociological study of ancient Israel has stressed that the city was dependent on and deeply vested in the countryside.18 Many of the “urban elite” would have been rural landowners not confined to the city (e.g., Boaz).19 Furthermore, the city gave to as well as took from the countryside, fueling the economic engine that profited all the population of its immediate environs. If a strict urban-rural divide did exist, it would most likely have involved only a small number of specialists (probably associated with the royal court) and only in the capital cities of Jerusalem and Samaria.20

Third, the main Hebrew term for “city” (⁽ îr) has a broader semantic range than its English translation suggests.21 Earlier biblical archaeologists commonly distinguished a city from a village by the presence of a wall, but the biblical authors use the term just as well for an unwalled village as for a fortified city (e.g., Deut 3:5).22 Nor does the term carry any implicit population marker, and Scripture makes no systematic distinction between city, town, and village, as there is in English usage.23 Furthermore, just as there was no uniform physical profile of the city, neither was there a uniform role for how the city related to its environs.24 The Hebrew Bible can designate any inhabited human settlement set “ideologically apart from its environs”25—whether for military, economic, religious, or social purposes—as a city, though most often cities were associated with physical features such as a wall or gate, or other monumental architecture (e.g., a temple).26

Despite this lack of definitional specificity, archaeology has contributed significantly to (and broadly supported) the biblical picture that Israel experienced a wave of urbanization with the rise of the monarchy.27 At this time, major cities in ancient Israel began to take on various and somewhat distinct kinds of functional characteristics, so that it becomes possible to categorize cities accordingly. Frick helpfully names four types of cities: (1) major (capital) cities with large populations and a symbolic presence among a host of cities; (2) administrative centers, which though not heavily populated, contained extensive water works, storage facilities, courtyards, temples, and palaces; (3) industrial cities, mainly characterized by industrial installations and craft workshops; and (4) forts that were located at strategic military points.28 Of course, many of these functions overlapped among cities, and some of the largest cities (e.g., Samaria, Jerusalem, Hazor) no doubt encompassed all of them. I might add one other significant category, the ceremonial city, to describe the urban centers that were main ritual destinations for the population (e.g., Jerusalem, Samaria, Dan, Beersheba, Bethel).29

The disciplines of anthropology and sociology shed additional light on some of the common functions of cities in ancient Israel.30 Among the most important, ancient cities were centers for trade and work-related specialties, tax collection and distribution, the administration of law and order, and the housing of nobility and/or wealthy gentry as well as specialists not associated with food production, such as bureaucrats, religious officials, and scribes.31 Moreover, by virtue of their defenses, cities offered protection from chaotic forces abroad. But the walls served an important sociological function as well, bonding people together in common cause. Most of the city’s working class denizens (peasants, artisans, traders, etc.) lived outside the gates, in close proximity to the city or in nearby villages, and in this way the city extended its dominant influence over the surrounding countryside.32

The various functions of cities comport with the biblical presentation that urban centers held powerful sway over the social, economic, and religious character of their dependents. Because of this kind of influence, the biblical witness often depicts a city, as Ellen Davis observes, “more like a person than an inert object. It has moral as well as physical character; its character grows and changes, for good or for ill. A city has a spirit, and a city with a future has a store of creative energy that enables it to respond to challenge.”33 Yet, in the biblical witness concerning cities, we will see that though cities embody the highest hopes of humankind, they also manifest the basest capacity for human sin. They can both protect and violate their inhabitants; both prosper corporate ingenuity and multiply creative evil. They magnify the effect of both the virtues and the vices of their people.34 This dialectical capacity for both blessing and destructiveness stands behind the ambivalence with which the biblical text evaluates the city as a human construct.

CITY IN THE HEBREW BIBLE

The biblical record includes an abundance of material related to the city and its happenings, to be sure, but outside of Jerusalem, the city is mentioned only as a byproduct of other issues.35 Nevertheless, in the biblical narrative the city appears at critical junctures in the history of redemption. In the following I will selectively trace reflections about the city in the biblical narrative in an attempt to come to some conclusions about what is an unsystematic presentation of the city in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Primeval History

The first observation to note is what is not said about the city in Israel’s story of beginnings. In stark contrast to some of the mythic literature of her contemporaries, Israel’s creation account makes clear that the earthly city has no divine prefigurement in the heavenly sphere nor is its appearance an act of creation.36 Instead of building a city for divine habitation (as, e.g., Marduk, the head god of the Babylonians, does after defeating Tiamat and creating earth), the God of the Bible plants a garden. Only on the outside of this garden, in the wider world, does the city come to be, and this at humanity’s initiative (Gen 4:17). The city, then, is a fully human establishment, leading the reader to suspect from the beginning that it will participate wholly in the weal and woe of humanity. Furthermore, given the city’s appearance so soon after the expulsion from the garden, the biblical author seems to consider it an inevitable human development. Nonetheless, the Bible is not clear whether the first urban building project is a positive or negative development.

On the one hand, Cain’s murderous actions set in motion a process leading to the construction of the first city.37 This inauspicious chain of events shrouds the city’s beginning in suspicion.38 Moreover, Cain’s acquired insecurity is a God-willed consequence of his violent act, yet such insecurity is the very thing a city is built to avoid. The connection of the city to violence perhaps reappears in the description of Nimrod, who is credited as the founder of great cities in Assyria and Babylon (Gen 10:10-12). Nimrod is portrayed as a mighty warrior and hunter (Gen 10:8-10). Does this briefest of descriptions imply that the city is necessarily tied to subjugation and violence, despite the fact that Nimrod’s conquests appear to be credited to the Lord (v. 9)? The Bible does not make the answer explicit.

On the other hand, Cain’s offense is not city building but fratricide, and the city could be understood as a development permitted by God in mercy to Cain and his sons. Furthermore, Cain’s descendants are credited with the cultivation of the arts and specialized technology, two developments associated with urban civilization. The first city, then, bequeaths gifts to humanity that the Genesis writer surely regarded as beneficial (Gen 4:21-22). Yet, these advances are tainted by the co-temporal violent aggression of Lamech (Gen 4:19-24), whose words might be taken, again, to tie together violence and advances related to city living.39 Urban society seems a mixed blessing.

The narrative about Babel may appear less ambiguous in regard to the city. Yet, the underlying polemic in this text is not against the urban project per se but directed at the sinful manifestation of human ambition that becomes exemplified in city building. In short, “the problem with the polis . . . is power,” not population growth.40 The community on the plain of Shinar wishes to construct a city in order to make a name for itself, signaling that the lust for power and control always lurks in the shadows of dreams for urban high-rises. In the ancient world, cities were more often than not built by slave labor, as Israel was all too aware, based on her slavery in Egypt (Exod 1:11). Perhaps, then, there is reason to hear in this story a polemic against the urban oppression of one group by another. Babel represents a centralization and use of authority that was engineered to thwart God’s purposes.41 The project’s success demonstrates that cities have an uncanny ability to catalyze human ingenuity, though the Bible illustrates how such a project can quickly devolve into a corrupt exercise in apotheosis. About Babel, Christopher Seitz observes:

The problem with city building is that no one can tell exactly when the appropriate need for protection and justice and organization slides over into name seeking, human endeavor in love with itself, and a false sense of independence and unity, achieved rather than granted. The story warns about this danger and lets the example of Babel stand as a signpost.42

Thus, the primeval history ends with a failed city that falters because of its aberrant ethos—though it does not necessarily pronounce the phenomenon of the city a doomed enterprise.

The Pentateuch

Cities continue to dot the landscape of the Pentateuch. Sodom, perhaps the most well-known city in the Bible other than Jerusalem, is the topic of an extended dialogue between Abraham and God in Gen 18. The people of Sodom sinned greatly against the Lord (Gen 13:13). The account of the sexual perversion and inhospitality of Sodom’s denizens notwithstanding, the text specifies only that God becomes interested in Sodom because of the “outcry” that goes up against it (18:20-21; 19:13). In other contexts, this specific language of “cry” is connected with the cry of injustice, of the oppressed against the oppressor.43 Again, the text appears to offer an episode about a city that facilitates relationships of injustice, likely pointing to Sodom’s relationship with the surrounding (and dependent) countryside.44 Nevertheless, God solicits Abraham to pray on behalf of the city. God’s exchanges with Abraham, no mere account of haggling over the city, are rather a demonstration of the lengths to which God is willing to go to save the city.45 Even though finally too few righteous exist in the city to merit its salvation, God’s actions underline God’s desire to bless the city because of the righteous therein. Furthermore, because the wider biblical witness uses Sodom as a paradigm for wicked cities (e.g., Deut 29:23; Isa 13:19-20; Ezek 16:48-50), one might also view Abraham’s intercession as one model for how God’s people ought to posture themselves toward the city.46

The Exodus narrative opens with oppressed Israel building supply cities in Egypt (Exod 1:11). The supply cities that were once their salvation (Gen 42:1-5) have become their curse. Though the motif of the city does not play a key role in the exodus, Ellen Davis astutely shows that the character of work entailed in such building projects is a main focus of the narrator.47 The account of the construction of the tabernacle (Exod 25-31, 35-40) is, among other things, a counternarrative to the oppressive work of Egypt, which Israel experienced in Egypt’s building program. The problem with Egypt is not the desire to build but the desire to build without reference to worship of the one true God—a perversion of God’s creational gift of good work. The construction of the tabernacle shows Israel the character of good work, or, said differently, how to build rightly: by observing the rhythms of the Sabbath (31:17; 35:2), by everyone offering their God-given talents and materials (35-36:7), and by keeping covenant with God through it all (32-34). Israel will need to recall these exodus-defined “building codes” when she settles into the land.

On the plains of Moab, poised between past experience (Egypt) and future anticipation of urban dwelling (Canaan), Israel receives in Deuteronomy a vision of city living.48 Up to this point in the canonical-literary context of Scripture, most reflection on the city has been negatively formulated. In Deuteronomy, however, the city is presented explicitly as a gift from God that Israel will acquire (Deut 6:10; 17:2).49 Israel must now learn how to behave faithfully as urban dwellers.50 John Goldingay nicely summarizes six concerns of Deuteronomy’s vision that are particularly pertinent to Israel’s urban imagination:51

1. Honesty and truth in social and economic relations, as opposed to fraud and violence (17:8-13; 19; 25:13-16);
2. A system of care for the needy as opposed to exploitation (chs. 14-15; 26);
3. Social cohesiveness, as opposed to anonymity and/or individualism (note the language of brotherhood throughout Deuteronomy);
4. Womanhood (ch. 15; Deuteronomy frequently adds concern for women alongside that of men);
5. Family order and sexual relations (ch. 22);
6. Regular celebration and joy, in the form of urban festivals (ch. 16).

In a block of text at the heart of the book (16:18-17:20), Moses instructs the Israelites on the challenge of the administration of justice in cities (16:18). That this is a main concern should not surprise the reader given the character of cities previously encountered in the Pentateuch.52 Here, though, the cities are gifts, and city administration performed justly contributes something integral to the broader vision of Israel’s existence.53 Finally, it should be noted that the blessings proclaimed in Deuteronomy imagine cities fully unified and at peace with the countryside (Deut 28:3-7).54 Deuteronomy’s urban vision integrates the concern for the practice of religion, politics, economics, and even ecology (cf. Deut 20:20) in its overall concern for city existence. Thus, Deuteronomy’s vision provides another contribution to what it means to practice faithful urban habitation.55

Jerusalem

David’s capture and subsequent selection of Jerusalem as the capital of his kingdom opened up new vistas in Israel’s imagination about the city (2 Sam 5:7-9). Jerusalem looms large in Israel’s historical, poetic, and prophetic literature.56 Regularly, Jerusalem is cast throughout Israel’s canon as a personified female figure; she is the most frequently referenced female agent in the Hebrew Bible, and perhaps the most complex of any human character.57

Theologically, Jerusalem was beset by a fundamental tension.58 On the one hand, David’s transfer of the ark of the covenant and Solomon’s construction of the temple cemented the centrality of Jerusalem as the holy city and dwelling place of YHWH—signified by the name “Zion” (1 Kings 8; 11:36; Pss 46; 48; 132). Over time a “Zion” tradition developed that celebrated Jerusalem as the special meeting point of heaven and earth (Pss 9:11; 50:2), creating a mythic aura of invincibility because of an assumed divine protection (Pss 46:5; 48; 125:1). As the location of the temple, Jerusalem was the epicenter of God’s blessing, from which every nation would receive blessing (43:3). Jerusalem and its temple were a routine focal point of Israel’s prayers (Ps 122:6-9). As long as Jerusalem stood, its people presumed a measure of security, because it was the place from which YHWH ruled the earth (Ps 99:1-2). On the other hand, many of the prophets inveighed against the city’s inhabitants for the jingoism supported by these presumptions, particularly in light of their callous covenantal unfaithfulness (e.g., Isa 1-5; 24; Ezek 16; Jer 7). Because of the people’s idolization of Jerusalem the prophets pronounced God’s judgment. Ezekiel, for example, shows that God is not monopolized by the city but can depart from God’s dwelling leaving the city to be destroyed (Ezek 10). Nevertheless, the prophets envision for the city an eventual salvation.

Jerusalem, for all its flaws, becomes in the imagination of Scripture something of a model for God’s agenda for urban life. Jerusalem as a metaphor stands for a reality and truth larger than itself, namely, the possibility and problems of God’s dwelling among any human city. Historically it is experienced as a place where evil is magnified; but many prayers and prophecies testify that the city can also survive by the creative power of God. For this reason, Ellen Davis compares Jerusalem in Scripture’s imagination to “an icon: a holy, healing image whose function is to invite worshipers into a different experience of the world and their own humanity.”59 As an icon, Jerusalem embodies a theology of urban dwelling where justice and righteousness find a home (Isa 1:21), to which people stream for its life-giving capacities (Ps 87; Mic 4:1-2), and where divine blessing finds an outlet to the far reaches of the earth (Isa 2:3; Pss 72; 134). Because of its enduring connection to God’s love, Zion could be said to be the “mother” of all good city dwelling (Ps 87:5).60 Thus, Jerusalem teaches readers both what to pray for and what to offer praise for in regard to the city.61

Prophets

In no other part of the canon is the city as dominant a theme as in the prophetic literature. The prophets give expression to the ambiguity of the city just as we have seen in other parts of the canon, but the prophets provide the largest and most conspicuous picture of the city in its peril and promise.62 In a brief essay it is impossible to plot the polyphony of responses to the city in the prophetic corpus.63 Below I paint in broad brushstrokes a few of the most important truths that the prophetic literature offers to a theological assessment of the city.

To recall earlier comments, the prophets are often understood as railing against a corrupt, wealthy urban system from the perspective of the exploited, poor rural community. Indeed, the prophets inveighed against sins associated with the city (e.g., Isa 1:21-23; 3:16-17.; 5:8-13; Amos 3:9-10; 4:1; Mic 6:9-16.; Hab 2:12; Nah 3-19; Zeph 3:1-7) and the wealth garnered from exploitation of agricultural communities (e.g., Isa 5:8-10; Amos 5:11; 8:4-6; Mic 3:9-12). But to read a generalized anti-urban attitude64 overlooks the fact that the prophetic critique often concerns the totality of the population, with city names frequently standing as metonyms for a much larger population.65 Furthermore, many of the prophets themselves probably hailed from privileged backgrounds or were at least associated with cities and the wealthy power holders therein (consider, e.g., Samuel, Jeremiah, Huldah, Isaiah).66 Far from an urban polemic, those texts that castigate the city should be read instead as a sharp reminder of the degree of interconnectedness of city and country.67

The prophets were religious spokespeople who were covenantal truth tellers, warning and interpreting for urban audiences the impending judgments of YHWH.68 In the prophets, God’s judgment on the city frequently targets the city for its arrogant, persistent belief in its own security (Isa 17:9-10; Jer 7; Ezek 13:1-16; Hos 8:14; 13:10; Amos 6:8).69 The prophets regularly chide cities and their officials for not delivering on the promise of the city to be a place that fosters the practice of justice and righteousness: “How the faithful city has become a whore! She that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her—but now murderers!” (Isa 1:21).70 All through the prophetic literature, it seems that cities “impress” prophets for their persistent ability to harbor evil. The defeat of the wicked “city of chaos” as a phenomenon takes a typological, apocalyptic response (Isa 24-25). The city that is the mirror of the human lust for control and power must finally die to its pride and injustice.

But if in the prophets the city frequently fell under the judgment of God, the city also was the setting for the restoration of God (Isa 2:2-4; Mic 4:1-4). In dialogue with two texts (Isa 24-27 and Jer 7), Robert Carroll develops the argument that the dialectic of judgment and restoration, of despair and hope, points to a symbolic understanding of the topos of the city in the prophets: every city may at one point be the life-giving Jerusalem-Zion or may be the death-dealing “city of chaos.” Carroll surmises:

All the cities in the Bible represent different phases of the one city—the city of humankind. . . . There is no city of god unless it be Jerusalem, an all too human city. . . . In the Hebrew Bible, unlike in the New Testament, there is no city outside the human sphere which may descend in due course from heaven nor is there a Jerusalem which is from above (Gal. 4.26) or at the end of history (contrast Rev. 21.1-4), there is only the human-all-too-human city of humankind where justice and peace may reside, along with murderers and the lovers of bribes who also live there, oppressors and oppressed together.71

Carroll has likely not given enough due to the prophetic vision of Jerusalem’s restoration in redemptive history, or to the evil that is symbolized by Babylon;72 nevertheless, his point stands that the prophetic literature as a whole testifies that no city is beyond the pale of God’s redemptive activity. For the Jews of exile a strict bifurcation between Jerusalem and the wicked city (e.g., Babylon) does not makes sense of either Jeremiah’s command to pray for the peace of the city (Babylon! Jer 29:7) or the literature of Jewish heroes and heroines within the city (e.g., Joseph, Daniel, Esther). Rather, in one sense every city was to one degree or another tinged with Babylon but also invested with the potential to be a renewed, Zion-like habitation of peace.73 Indeed, one need only recall the message of Jonah. God announces the wickedness of Nineveh (1:2), and Jonah’s message to Nineveh is devoid of hope (3:4). Yet the city exemplifies a remarkable capacity for repentance, and God, in turn, a remarkable capacity for mercy, showing that “no great city is past praying for.”74

CONCLUSION

This survey of the city in the Hebrew Bible has been selective, and I have noted that care must be taken in transferring what the Bible says about the city to the context of the modern urbanized world. Our investigation has revealed that though the Bible often exhibits ambivalence about the city, the God depicted in various parts of the canon cares about the fate of the human city. The city is not divinely underwritten, and the times when humans are susceptible to such a belief, the biblical text makes clear that God is not monopolized by any city, even Jerusalem. Still, the city is the setting for the cultivation and sustenance of civilization (Ps 107:4-9). Moreover, Zion as an epitome of the human city shows that the city has the stunning potential to manifest the presence of God.75

The city, then, is quite an important development, but one that the biblical witness recognizes is fraught with danger. This is so not because of an ideological bias against all things urban; the city and countryside share a similar destiny. Rather, people are sinful, and because cities consist of a concentration of people, they can manifest and magnify the evil inclinations of their constituents. But the concentration cuts both ways, and the prophets teach us that God does not finally abandon the city, which “bears the hope for redemption.”76 As a potential image of Zion, every city can thrive if it fosters the same environment imagined for the holy city of God.77

The human city cannot sustain itself without the saving mercy of God. In this way it is no different from any other human construct:

The city is one of a series of human devices such as sacrifice, monarchy, and temple, which are taken up by God, even though they did not arise from God’s initiative, and are worked into God’s purpose so graciously that we would not be able to conceive of worship or of Jesus or of the fulfillment of God’s final purpose without them.78

The city may represent an ambiguous moral sphere, but this does not stop the biblical tradents from treating it as the subject of prayer, praise, prophecy, lament, and hope. Surely all this attention is a show of love. Thus, if the narrative of the city is a narrative of repeated failure, it is also a narrative of faith in the power of God to create something lovely in the midst of human foundering. “Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth” (Ps 50:2).

Nathan Bills is a ThD student at Duke Divinity School. His focus is in Old Testament, and he is particularly interested in the intersection of Old Testament theology, ecclesiology, and urban communities of poverty. In the Spring of 2013, Nathan will join the Bible faculty of Lipscomb University, where he anticipates teaching and living in this intersection. You can contact Nathan at nbills80@gmail.com.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Bill T., and H. G. M. Williamson. Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005.

Blenkinsopp, Joseph. “Cityscape to Landscape: The ‘Back to Nature’ Theme in Isaiah 1-35.” In “Every City Shall Be Forsaken”: Urbanism and Prophecy in Ancient Israel and the Near East, edited by Lester L. Grabbe and Robert D. Haak, 35-44. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001.

Boyce, Richard N. The Cry to God in the Old Testament. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988.

Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon: With an Appendix Containing the Biblical Aramaic. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996.

Brown, William P., and John T. Carroll. “The Garden and the Plaza: Biblical Images of the City.” Interpretation 54, no. 1 (January 2000): 3-11.

Brueggemann, Walter. “The City in Biblical Perspective: Failed and Possible.” Word and World 19, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 236-50.

Carroll, Robert P. “City of Chaos, City of Stone, City of Flesh: Urbanscapes in Prophetic Discourses.” In “Every City Shall Be Forsaken”: Urbanism and Prophecy in Ancient Israel and the Near East, edited by Lester L. Grabbe and Robert D. Haak, 45-61. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001.

Davis, Ellen F. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

_______. “Slaves or Sabbath-Keepers? A Biblical Perspective on Human Work.” Anglican Theological Review 83, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 25-40.

Dever, William G. The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel: When Archaeology and the Bible Intersect. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012.

Ellul, Jacques. The Meaning of the City. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970.

Fox, Richard. Urban Anthropology: Cities in Their Cultural Setting. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977.

Freedman, David Noel, ed. The Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Frick, Frank S. The City in Ancient Israel. Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 36. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977.

Fritz, Volkmar. The City in Ancient Israel. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995.

Goldingay, John. Key Questions About Christian Faith: Old Testament Answers. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010.

Gorringe, T. J. A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Gottwald, Norman K. The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B. C. E. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979.

Grabbe, Lester L., and Robert D. Haak. “Every City Shall Be Forsaken”: Urbanism and Prophecy in Ancient Israel and the Near East. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 330. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001.

________. “Sup-Urbs or Only Hyp-Urbs? Prophets and Populations in Ancient Israel and Socio-historical Method.” In “Every City Shall Be Forsaken”: Urbanism and Prophecy in Ancient Israel and the Near East, edited by Lester L. Grabbe and Robert D. Haak, 95-123. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: Supplement Series. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001.

Hoppe, Leslie J. The Holy City: Jerusalem in the Theology of the Old Testament. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000.

Houston, Walter. “Exit the Oppressed Peasant? Rethinking the Background of Social Criticism in the Prophets.” In Prophecy and the Prophets in Ancient Israel: Proceeding of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar, edited by John Day, 101-16. London: T&T Clark, 2010.

Jenni, Ernst, and Claus Westermann, eds., Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament. Translated by Mark E. Biddle. 3 vols. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997.

Köhler, Ludwig, Walter Baumgartner, and Johann Jakob Stamm. Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. Translated and edited by Mervyn Edwin John Richardson. 5 vols. Boston: Brill, 2000.

MacDonald, Nathan. “Listening to Abraham—Listening to YHWH: Divine Justice and Mercy in Genesis 18:16-33.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 66, no. 1 (January 2004): 25-43.

Mendenhall, George. “The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine.” In The Biblical Archaeologist Reader 3, edited by Edward Campbell Jr. and David N. Freedman, 100-120. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1970.

Middleton, J. Richard. The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005.

Miller, Patrick D. Israelite Religion and Biblical Theology: Collected Essays. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.

Mills, Mary. “Urban Morality and the Great City in the Book of Jonah.” Political Theology 11, no. 3 (July 2010): 453-65.

Mulder, Mark, and James K. A. Smith. “Subdivided By Faith? An Historical Account of Evangelicals and the City.” Christian Scholar’s Review 38, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 415-433.

O’Brien, Mark. “Deuteronomy 16.18-18.22: Meeting the Challenge of Towns and Nations.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 33, no. 2 (December 2008): 155-72.

O’Connor, Michael Patrick. “The Biblical Notion of the City.” In Constructions of Space II: The Biblical City and Other Imagined Spaces, edited by Jon L. Berquist and Claudia V. Camp, 18-39. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 490. New York: T&T Clark, 2008.

Park, Sejin (Sam). “Cain’s Legacy: The City and Justice in the Book of Genesis.” In vol. 1 of A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam, edited by Eric F. Mason, et al., 49-63. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 153. Leiden: Brill, 2012.

Roddy, Nicolae. “Landscape of Shadows: The Image of City in the Hebrew Bible.” In Cities through the Looking Glass: Essays on the History and Archaeology of Biblical Urbanism, edited by Rami Arav, 11-21. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008.

Rogerson, J. W., and John Vincent. The City in Biblical Perspective. Biblical Challenges in the Contemporary World. Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2009.

Sakenfeld, Katharine Doob, ed. New Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible. 5 vols. Nashville: Abingdon, 2006-2009.

Seitz, Christopher R. “The Two Cities in Christian Scripture.” In The Two Cities of God: The Church’s Responsibility for the Earthly City, edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, 11-27. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Sheldrake, Philip. “A Spiritual City: Urban Vision and the Christian Tradition.” In Theology in Built Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture, and Design, edited by Sigurd Bergmann, 151-70. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009.

Towner, W. Sibley. “A Crisis of the Imagination: The Real Jerusalem Confronts the Ideal Jerusalem.” Interpretation 54, no. 1 (January 2000): 13-22.

VanGemeren, Willem A., ed. New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis. 5 vols. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997.

Van Wieringen, Archibald L. H. M., and Annemarieke van der Woude, eds. “Enlarge the Site of Your Tent”: The City as Unifying Theme in Isaiah. Old Testament Studies 58. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Willis, Timothy M. The Elders of the City: A Study of the Elders-Laws in Deuteronomy. Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series 55. Atlanta: SBL, 2001.

Wright, Christopher J. H. The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006.

An accurate understanding the city’s relationship to the early church reveals how Christians lived out and embraced the kingdom of God as a way of life in their particular cultural settings. The aim of such an analysis is not to find a strategic “silver bullet” that will allow the church to return to the growth pattern of its early years. Rather, a more profitable way of reading Scripture as it relates to the early expansion of the church recognizes that missions is not so much about strategies of evangelism as it is about meeting God where he is already at work and living purposefully in the ways of Jesus, the Christ.

The discussion of where to initiate new mission efforts has for many years involved the consideration of the appropriate size of a city for such a work. Cities have almost always been the target of new efforts of evangelization for many reasons—the most obvious of which is the potential of larger numbers of conversions where larger groupings of people live and work. Roland Allen’s classic work Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?, first published in 1912, raised the question of Paul’s use of the city in his missionary strategies. To be more specific, Allen focused on Paul’s strategy to permeate the Roman provinces with the gospel. However, Allen explicitly mentions Paul’s use of major cities as points of proclamation within a province—a city where there would be much coming in and going out.1 Allen was convinced Paul intentionally planted evangelistic churches at such strategic locations so that such churches would be “sources of rivers, mints from which the new coin of the Gospel was spread in every direction. . . . [Paul’s] method of work was so designed that centres of intellectual and commercial activity became centres of Christian activity.”2

In Wayne A. Meeks’s preface to the second edition of his work The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, he writes:

The urbanization that Alexander, his successors, and then the Romans brought to the region may have affected the movement at an even earlier stage that we once thought. Be that as it may, it was as an urban cult that Christianity spread through the empire, and the earliest substantial evidence we have of its formation as an urban cult comes from the documents associated with Paul.3

Meeks then reminds his readers that ancient cities were much different from cities as we know them today, especially in the West. Those living in developing nations have a clearer view of what cities in Paul’s era were like—crowded streets, raw sewage, poor construction, little urban planning—in other words, generally unpleasant places to live. The purpose of his book (and its revision) is to attempt to reconstruct the social dynamics of the cities in which the early church so rapidly spread.

It is interesting to point out that both Meeks and Allen wrote out of a concern for appropriately applying the methods and teachings of Paul. Allen’s concern was methodological—attempting to set the record straight, for “almost every intolerable abuse that has ever been known in the mission field has claimed some sentence or act of St. Paul as its original.”4 Meeks, on the other hand, was concerned with a hermeneutical issue. He believed the social context and functions of doctrine in ancient cities had been all but universally neglected when interpreting the letters attributed to Paul, leading to serious distortions when attempting to apply his teachings to the reader’s context.5

Rodney Stark renewed an interest in the dynamics of the city in relationship to the early church in his book Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. Stark set out to debunk many of the many assumptions about the early church that have no supporting quantitative data.6 Stark calls for historians to count—literally! He states early in the book, “A major purpose of this book is to demonstrate that quantitative methods can help to resolve many debates about early church history.”7

Stark’s work has been well received by some and rejected by others. Those who reject the validity of his work tend to have personal stakes in their dissenting views. He argues (I think convincingly) that the growth of the early church was neither explosive nor miraculous as the usual interpretation concludes.8 He studies the thirty most populated cities of the Roman empire during the apostolic era and establishes several statistically supported hypotheses, such as the impact of a city’s distance from Jerusalem upon its size (the closer to Jerusalem, the larger the community), the influence of Hellenism, and the nature of travel (inland versus port cities; port cities having larger numbers of Christians). Basically he attempts to demonstrate that the expansion of the early church can be explained based on criteria present in the ancient world. This is not to discount in any way the work of the Holy Spirit in the early church, but to convince the reader that the power of conversion was the everyday life of the “normal” believer. It was the living out of loving one’s neighbor as oneself, doing to others what one would have them do to oneself, and helping the poor as if they were Jesus that made the difference.9

The most exhaustive work to date concerning the development of the early church is James D. G. Dunn’s Beginning From Jerusalem, volume two of his Christianity in the Making series.10 This volume is limited to the church as recorded in the New Testament writings (30 to 70 CE). Volume three, to be entitled A Contested Identity (hopefully to be published in 2013), will deal with the continual development of the church from 70 to 120 CE. Even if one disagrees with some of Dunn’s conclusions, the exhaustive references (the bibliography in volume two alone is 62 pages long!) make his works indispensable in the library of anyone interested in the early church as revealed in the biblical text. Dunn’s primary concern is properly reading the New Testament text, but there are many nuggets provided for consideration of the relationship between the early church and the city.

Dunn’s research strongly supports several significant considerations of the first years of the Christian movement. First, Paul’s (and other NT writers’) understanding of the mission of Jesus was not different from that which Jesus embodied and taught (as many scholars have suggested).11 The central idea of the establishment of “the kingdom of God” continued to be the core purpose of the nascent Christian churches.12 Secondly, the delay of the Parousia was not the problem many have suggested it was. The death of Christian leaders and other great difficulties of life from the beginning (Acts 3) disallowed any triumphalist expectation of Jesus’ immediate return.13 If true, this impacts any study of early evangelism because it explains the impulse of the missionary expansion of the early church was not one of eschatological necessity (urgency due to the imminent return of Jesus) but rather because the good news of the kingdom of God truly added great value to everyday life.14 For Dunn, the cities did indeed have an influence on the early church’s growth simply because that is where the synagogues were located, and it was from there the “good news” emanated in its earliest developments. He contends that “most small churches in effect probably continued to shelter under the legal status of the synagogues.”15

One last point from Dunn (which directly challenges the Stone-Campbell tradition’s often reductionistic patternist hermeneutic) is the complexity and differences of the Christian movement by 70 CE. He concludes, “The somewhat uncomfortable fact is that first-generation Christianity was never the pure ideal church which subsequent generations imagined as ‘the apostolic age’ or for whose return radical reformers longed.”16 There was no single pattern of “doing church,” as most students and scholars know. Ecclesiology was not the primary focus, according to Dunn. It was christology. The implications of this in an appropriate understanding of the early church cannot be overstated.17

It is here that I arrive at my purpose for writing this article. As a church historian, I am painfully and acutely aware of the continual misuse of biblical history to validate contemporary ideas and initiatives. This is particularly true with the early church and what it might teach us concerning the expansion of the kingdom of God. Many misguided efforts toward church growth and missions have been based on some aspect or idea generated from perceived practices of the early church. My hope is to help move us toward a more profitable way of reading Scripture (in particular as it relates to the early expansion of the church)—to the glory of God and for the sake of today’s church in today’s world.

Therefore I will identify my thesis here and spend the rest of this study attempting to demonstrate its validity. The actions and teachings of the early church reveal how Christians lived out and embraced “the kingdom of God” as a way of life in their particular cultural settings. The whole idea of “strategy” is a post-Enlightenment idea—especially as it pertains to an endeavor generated by the Holy Spirit to the glory of God through the work of Jesus Christ. That is not to say that careful planning, preparation, and study do not have a place in the work of today’s church—they most certainly do. But searching for a “silver bullet” that will allow the church to return to the miraculous growth pattern of its early years risks, ironically, defeating or at least greatly impeding the very work of the Holy Spirit we seek to understand and ultimately put into action.

I recently reviewed an extensive research project (which I will not identify for obvious reasons) based on finding the key to the expansive growth of the early church. I was asked to evaluate the work as an “early church historian.” The entire study was based on the assumption that the early church exploded from Jerusalem as the expression of a well thought out strategy of the Holy Spirit enacted by Peter, Paul, and other followers of Jesus (beginning with Acts 2 and continuing to explore the exponential growth reflected in Acts). The study was based on the proposal that there were miraculous conversions of large groups of people that led to the phenomenal expansion of the early church.18 It concluded with a riveting and complex strategy based on an intricate system of networking (confirmed by recent sociological studies) established through carefully negotiated relationships between leading churches in various major cities. The author is convinced this was the key to evangelistic success and thus is attempting to establish similar dynamics through cooperating churches in major cities in today’s world. His study is not without merit of consideration. My reply to that author will be reflected in the remainder of this article.

Are We Missing the Obvious?

It is of particular importance that those of us participating in the Restoration Movement model a proper understanding of the appropriate use of the study of the early church. There is currently a growing desire, especially among evangelical churches, to reconsider their governance in light of what the Scriptures teach. Those of us who have advocated a return to the principles of Scripture for guidance in such matters concerning the purposes, teachings, and functions of the church have a wonderful opportunity to lead the way in this pursuit.

What might we gain from an accurate understanding of “the city” and its relationship to the early Christian church as reflected in Scripture and other documents of the early church? To this day, whether discussing strategy, theology, missiology, or hermeneutics, much of what we debate appropriately originates from Paul’s actions recorded in Acts or writings attributed to him. We immediately note that Paul’s teaching methodology differs considerably from that of Jesus. Paul rarely quotes Jesus and in fact uses remarkably different language and style. Yet, as Dunn and others have convincingly shown, Paul teaches the same gospel. If Paul, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, is contextualizing the message of the good news of the kingdom of God for the cities of his day, it would be helpful for us to understand the similar dynamics of life in our cities. This is where studies like those of Meeks and Stark are extremely helpful to our understanding of appropriately contextualizing the gospel.

Meeks attempts to use social description or social history to better understand Paul’s writings. Might more information concerning the ancient cities inform us of Paul’s concerns so that that we might better apply them to our cities? If the gospel originates in the teaching of Jesus and not Paul, how does Paul convey Jesus’ message to his hearers? If we understand Paul as the urban interpreter of the gospel of Jesus in the context of the Hellenistic, Romanized cities of his day, might this help us be better interpreters of the gospel of Jesus in the Modern (Postmodern?), Western cities of our day? Or, if you are working in a non-Western, developing nation—does the nature of your context modify the way you read and understand Paul?

Stark raises other interesting possibilities. As he attempts to reconstruct the cities to which the Christian message spread, he looks for elements in those cultures that might be of particular propensity to embrace the good news of Jesus. Missiologists often use the phrase “redemptive analogy” in the context of cultural studies. Too often this has more to do with particular practices rather than basic understandings of reality. Stark is convinced the monotheism of the Christian faith made it particularly attractive to the cities where Paul preached because of currents in those cultures. Might there be similar elements in our cities that will lead non-believers to faith? One of the issues Stark discusses is the confusion that polytheism had created. People were ready for a better way to understand their lives in the context of a divine power. Paul’s teachings were very attractive—one God, one reason to live (to serve others), and a view of worship and praise that no longer required a “portfolio” of competing gods.19

In March of 2012, I took a group of Lipscomb University students with me to Dundee, Scotland to work with the church there. One of the ministers, Patrick Sullivan, has established great relationships with a local secular high school, where he serves as chaplain. Patrick arranged for our group to speak to the seventh graders during their religious education classes. A large majority of the students were non-believers. Most viewed Christianity with obvious negative bias. One of the reasons we were asked to speak to the young people was to convince them of the importance of continuing their education. We spoke to almost two hundred students in groups of thirty, for ninety minutes each. Using various activities, including breaking the students into groups with our students, we told the story of Jesus as the hero of our lives—giving us a reason to learn. Working on the idea that life for these young people was without hope and meaning, we explained how Jesus gives each of us the opportunity to be rescuers and redeemers (returning value to damaged lives). I was amazed at how well we were received. The students enjoyed it so much that we are taking a larger group next year so we can cover all grade levels. Borrowing from Donald Miller, we offered them “a better story.”20

This is where texts like Amy Oden’s And You Welcomed Me and Bruce Winter’s Seek the Welfare of the City set a more helpful trajectory for considering the relationship of the city and the early church.21 Along with Stark and Meeks, Oden and Winter point out the power of the early Christian’s faithful witness to the love and concerns of Jesus. While this is true in all populations, rural and urban, cities were important because that is where large gatherings of people lived—in very dense, compact quarters. As pagans fled the cities when calamities such as plagues and fires devastated cities, the Christians flowed in to help the sick and displaced.22 They carried with them a message of healing, spiritually and physically.

Here we encounter a widely espoused idea of the missional church movement: missions is not so much about strategies of evangelism as it is about meeting God where he is already at work. An excellent presentation of this is Alan Roxburgh’s Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood.23 As simple as this sounds, this may be the key to kingdom growth—living intentionally and purposefully in the ways of Jesus, the Christ. This is certainly not a negation of the importance of biblical teaching and proclamation. It is a plea to recognize that proclamation in the absence of visible life transformation, leading all believers to lives of love and concern for others, lacks purpose and power. In the words of Paul that we all know by heart:

So, my dear family, this is my appeal to you by the mercies of God: offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. Worship like this brings your mind into line with God’s. What’s more, don’t let yourselves be squeezed into the shape dictated by the present age. Instead, be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you can work out what God’s will is—what is good, acceptable, and complete (Rom 12:1,2).24

Conclusion and Challenge

I recently had a great discussion with a friend whom I deeply admire concerning this approach to missions in the city (joining God where he is already at work). While he agreed with me in principle, he also pointed out the difficulty of this kind of methodology in leading to concrete results. He mentioned a mission work with which he is familiar where the workers have spent several years “just living and doing good,” yet have no tangible, measurable results. This is a challenge. We have worked for so long trying to produce results, rather than live faithfully and let the Holy Spirit work, that “faithful witness” seems to lack content, direction, and purpose. This is where the early church can help. Apparently, this lack of direction was not a problem for them. The life they lived was of such stark contrast to the complex paganism of their day that people, one by one, experienced conversion because the Christ-way offered a better story for their lives. When authentic discipleship is on display, church happens. The good news of kingdom living is too wonderful not to share. One lives a life of authentic discipleship, which provides an opportunity for a defense of that hopeful, purposeful living (1 Pet 3:15). The experience of authentic Christian living is too dynamic to remain unorganized. Disciples gather because they need to share, experience vibrant community, and learn more about Jesus. Discipleship, or apprenticeship to Jesus in the school of life, as the focus of proclamation is a different approach than attempting to plant churches. It focuses on christology rather than ecclesiology. I realize there is much yet to be developed in such statements—another article for another time perhaps.

Yet, the challenge I offer is for us to return to the impulse of kingdom life manifest in the early church. The teachings of Paul were for the most part focused on Christian living rather than overt evangelism. Actually, it might be that intentional, authentic Christian living is overt evangelism. I would argue that most of Paul’s “theology” would be better understood as the true story upon which Christian living is based. My experience as a professor over the last few years, in bringing non-believing students to faith, has convinced me this is true. My experience in helping churches, whether mission churches or established, traditional churches, understand their missional calling in the context of the individual lives of each member bearing witness to the kingdom of God, has also given me great hope for new growth in the church.

Cities are where broken people live. That does not exclude rural settings as also being ripe for the gospel. But cities are a great starting place. The key to effective proclamation in the early church was the result of their taking seriously the words of Jesus: “As you go, make disciples.” Cities happened to be where early believers “went.” The power of teaching the ways of Jesus has not diminished. The Holy Spirit continues to lead the way in the cities and throughout the world. Will we follow the Spirit’s leading? We will proclaim through our lives that there is a better story?

Earl Lavender is executive director of the Institute for Christian Spirituality and director of missional studies at Lipscomb University. Born to missionary parents in Italy, he returned there with his wife Rebecca for six years, planting a church in northeastern Italy. They have also been involved in domestic church planting. Earl has worked in mission efforts throughout Europe, as well as Australia, India, Russia, Brazil, Ghana, and China. Earl completed his undergradu- ate and masters work at David Lipscomb College and received a PhD in Historical Theology from Saint Louis University in 1991. He has written multiple books and published articles as well as contributing encyclopedia entries in several published volumes concerning patristics or ancient history. He can be contacted at earl.lavender@lipscomb.edu.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Roland. Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? 6th ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983.

Bousset, Wilhelm. Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus. Translated by John E. Steely. Nashville: Abingdon, 1970.

Crossan, John Dominic, and Jonathan L. Reed. In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.

Dunn, James D. G. Beginning from Jerusalem. Vol. 2 of Christianity in the Making. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009.

Meeks, Wayne A. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Miller, Donald. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009.

Oden, Amy. And You Welcomed Me: A Sourcebook on Hospitality in Early Christianity. Nashville: Abington, 2001.

Roxburgh, Alan. Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011.

Stark, Rodney. Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. New York: HarperOne, 2006.

Winter, Bruce. Seek the Welfare of the City: Christians as Benefactors and Citizens. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.

Wright, N. T. The Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

David Lipscomb feared that wealth had perverted the mission and work of the church in late nineteenth-century America. A ruralist ethos reigned among his contemporaries, resulting in prejudice against the urban poor. Yet, Lipscomb believed the gospel was fundamentally good news to the poor—including the urban poor. He called prophetically for churches to preach the gospel as Jesus did, by identifying with the poor and communicating the message to them in understandable ways.

In 1967 David Edwin Harrell, Jr., published a significant, though relatively unknown, article entitled “The Agrarian Myth and the Disciples of Christ in the Nineteenth Century.”1 The article demonstrated that the Stone-Campbell Movement, a thoroughly western religious body, was birthed in the midst of agrarian mythology (that is, a particular way of looking at the world). Specifically, this myth envisioned the newly founded United States with its seemingly boundless western expansion as the “garden of the world.” It was rooted in “the conviction that rural life was superior to urban life” and that the “foremost hero of the garden myth was the yeoman farmer.”2 This figure was the typical small, industrious, and independent farm of the Midwest, which became the dominant model in the South after the demise of “plantation mythology” due to the abolition of slavery.

The Stone-Campbell Movement, ultimately including the distinctive Churches of Christ, was nurtured in this agrarian mythology. As a consequence, urbanity was viewed with pity and sometimes suspicion. Alexander Campbell, for example, wrote, “American cities, like all other cities” were “neither so intelligent in the scriptures, nor so pious as the people of the country.”3 Most everyone assumed that people in the cities, as the future President of David Lipscomb College put it, “would be better off physically, financially, and spirituality in the country.”4 In fact, it was generally believed that the cities were the “great corrupters of the morals of mankind, like lewd women to whom they are compared by the sacred writers of both Testaments.”5 “The cities are moral and spiritual deserts,” wrote the Ohio preacher B. A. Hinsdale. “They contain the dangerous classes.”6

“Dangerous classes” reflects not only the prejudices of the times but also the threat that the cities posed to another “myth” that gave birth to the Stone-Campbell Movement. As Harrell demonstrates, Alexander Campbell, Walter Scott, and others believed that “America was the land prepared for the introduction of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant millennium.” Immigration threatened this as Roman Catholics and non-Anglo-Saxons populated the cities, where there seemed to be simultaneous rise of immorality and poverty. The cities were the power base of the Catholic Church and the epicenter of immorality within the nation.

Many feared that the cities fomented the development of an impoverished working class whose lives were characterized by immorality and irreligiosity. A St. Louis editor warned that “the laboring classes of the great cities are largely irreligious” and “have loose ideas of the rights of property, openly preach the right to take whatever is wanted, and to burn, blow up and destroy.”7 Consequently, many members of the Stone-Campbell Movement, especially conservative ones, believed, according to Harrell, that the “church should ignore these centers of sin and concentrate on farmers.”8 The illiterate, non-Anglo-Saxon, impoverished immigrant was a threat to law, order, and religion.

In this milieu David Lipscomb (1831-1917), the longtime editor of the Gospel Advocate and co-founder of what is now Lipscomb University, appeared as a dissenting voice.9 Though deeply enmeshed within the Agrarian Myth—Lipscomb’s stated preference was that the “best community in the world is that every man own his own land, small farms with industrious owners”10—he nevertheless advocated for the urban poor and working classes (including Labor Unions).11

The Gospel for the Urban Poor

The year 1873 was a significant economic year within United States history. This period was known as the “Great Depression” until the new “Great Depression” arrived in the 1930s. Reconstruction in the South tended to place power and money in the hands of an elite few. The rise of the “robber barons” such as the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts gave a few excessive wealth. As Lipscomb put it in 1892, “money is more and more becoming concentrated in the hands of the wealthy” and is becoming a “controlling element in all the affairs of society.”12 The chasm between the rich and poor grew in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This, linked with the explosive growth of cities, nurtured deep suspicions that were part of the Agrarian Myth.

This was evidenced in an 1873 editorial in the Apostolic Times (1869-1885), a conservative paper based in Lexington, Kentucky. In the April 24, 1873 Gospel Advocate, Lipscomb reprinted the editorial. Lipscomb was appalled by what he read. The article, in part, said:

The only poor in this broad land that have not equal access with the rich to the blessings of the gospel, are the poor in the great cities. It is also true, that they are about the only class of poor people among whom the gospel does but little good when it does reach them. The great mass of them are besotted by vices of all the baser kinds, that they turn a deaf ear to all the messages of truth and virtue. It was not to this class of the poor that Jesus referred in his celebrated reply to John; it was the poor peasantry of Galilee and Judea, who, though ignorant and often reduced to extreme want, were an industrious, sober, and comparatively poor people. Let us not confound things that greatly differ, and draw unfavorable comparisons between ancient and modern Christianity without sufficient cause.13

Lipscomb’s response was brief but illuminating.14 Lipscomb found the editorial alarming at two levels. The first was the writer’s disdain for the “pre-emptive rights” of the poor, and the second the writer’s apparent tendency to cater to the rich. I will address Lipscomb’s first concern in this section and address the second in the next.

At the heart of Lipscomb’s response was his belief that “the poor possess pre-emptive rights in the kingdom of God.”15 Indeed, the poor, “as a class, constitute [God’s] elect. They are the chosen objects of his tender regard and true and faithful love.”16 Contrary to the “general disposition among [many] to despise a state of poverty, or even moderate competence, and regard it as a disgrace,” God has “honored the poor as a class in all ages.”17

What drives this theological assessment? Fundamentally, it is Lipscomb’s christology. Lipscomb tended, in his various articles, to emphasize three points above all others. First, the incarnation testified to a divine kenosis (emptying) whereby the Son of God, who is rich, becomes poor for our sakes. “The Savior himself declared his sympathy with the poor when he came as the poorest of the poor.”18

His Son was born of a humble handmaid of the Lord, who was espoused to a carpenter. The reputed Father of our Lord, Joseph, was a carpenter. The laboring, toiling classes were the associates chosen of God for his Son during his childhood and youth.19

Jesus was born of a poor woman who married a working class “day laborer.” They were so impoverished that they offered “two turtle doves,” the offering “provided for the poor.” Jesus lived as a “homeless wanderer” who “mingled with the poor in their homes, ate of their coarse barley loaves, and shared their frugal face.”20 In other words, the incarnation serves as a missional model for how to minister among the poor. Jesus ministered among the poor as one of the poor.

Second, in his own ministry—and in the ministry of the Apostles as well—Jesus modeled how the poor have priority. This was modeled in two ways. On the one hand, it was modeled by whom God chose as leaders in this new community. “The more prominent of his Apostles were from the laboring classes,” including fishermen.21

On the other hand, the priority of the poor is modeled in how Jesus himself conducted his ministry. The preaching of the gospel was truly evidenced, according to Lipscomb, when the gospel was preached to the poor. Indeed, this was the “crowning characteristic of the Christian religion.”22 Moreover, it was the “perfect evidence of [Jesus’] Messiahship” that “the poor have the gospel preached” to them.23 According to Lipscomb, both “Christ and his apostles preached to the poor of the cities,” including “servants, slaves, poorer classes” in Rome and “widows” in Jerusalem.24 These, for the most part, composed the churches of the New Testament era. “The chief success of the Christian religion was in the cities, and among the poor of those cities.”25

Third, Jesus is himself “personified” in the poor. Jesus is present in the poor. Rooting his theology in the judgment scene of Matthew 25, Lipscomb wrote:

Jesus Christ personified himself in his poor brethren. He stands to-day personified in the gaunt and hollow face, sunken eye, and half-clad emaciated form of widowed mothers and hungry, starving children in the South. If Christians fail to relieve their wants, no matter whether we or they believe in societies or not, and no matter whether their sympathies were Northern or Southern, the stern truth will one day meet them, “Inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into everlasting life.”26

This ethical imagery was near to the heart of Lipscomb as he used it on several occasions. To minister to the poor is to minister to Jesus.

What incensed Lipscomb about the Apostolic Times article was that “to teach that certain classes are so degraded that the Gospel of God’s love cannot reach the poor, is certainly to despise them, and is nigh akin to oppressing them.”27 Lipscomb thought that neglecting, shaming, or snubbing the poor was equivalent to oppressing them. To oppress the poor was to mistreat Jesus himself, dishonor God’s elect, and assume a prideful arrogance that puts the rich in the privileged place of the poor.

The problem, according to Lipscomb, was not that the urban poor are disinterested in the gospel or that they—as a class—are unreachable. In fact, “the extreme poor of the cities in the days of Christ and the apostles were not the class difficult to reach.”28 It was the despised, weak, and ignoble that responded to the gospel in Rome, Corinth, and the ministry of Jesus. The problem, according to Lipscomb, was that the gospel is not really preached to the poor. They may be told the truth of the gospel but they are told in such a way that it is injurious to the gospel itself. The poor, Lipscomb believed, “are not approached in the true Spirit of Christ.”29 This was a second theme that Lipscomb applied to the topic, to which I now turn.

The Cities, Wealth, and the Poor

Lipscomb opposed the expenditure of large sums of money on “fine houses” in the cities. His rationale, though influenced by the Agrarian Myth, is deeply theological. Like his advocacy for small farms, Lipscomb’s consistent counsel throughout the years was small, modest buildings rather than “fine houses.” Smaller and more modest is better than large and lavish. This is how he thought about congregations as well—relatively small, modest, every member involved, marked by mutual edification and shared leadership. Wealth, power, and “fine houses” were corrupting influences that diverted the church from its mission to the poor and the lost. The large church with a “fine house” fostered, according to Lipscomb, a faith in success, wealth, and power; while the small church tended to foster community, service, and relationships with the poor.

The urban poor did not participate in urban church life because the urban churches catered to the wealthy and rich. They built “fine houses” whose surroundings were unsuited to the working class, employed articulate and educated ministers whom the poor did not understand, and sought monied classes because money was the life-blood of their grand buildings and educated ministers. While the poor would receive Jesus gladly, they did not flock to urban churches whose edifices were geared toward the cultured, educated, and wealthy. The reason was obvious to Lipscomb: they did not reject the “religion of Christ,” but they rejected the power, wealth, and pride of Christianity’s teachers. Even when these churches set up parachurch organizations that reached out to the poor, the distance between rich and poor was maintained, as church folk were not in the homes of the poor sharing their meals and trials.

Theologically, Lipscomb argued, “the church is the especial legacy of God to the poor of the earth.” Consequently, “the poor then should, above all others, feel at home in the church”—with “special privileges there above all others.”30 God “never intended” that Christianity would be “costly to the poor” or “make the poor feel that they are pensioners upon the bounty of the rich.” Rather than money, it was self-denying service that was the hallmark of the Christian faith. But Lipscomb feared that wealth had perverted the mission and work of the church and particularly the “demands for the expenditure of money” had tended to “oppress [the poor] or make them feel that they are pensioners upon the bounty of others.”31 In other words, the poor have no church. Rather, they are at the mercy of the rich who rule the church and dictate the “fashionable” standards that represent the status of the church in the community.

Lipscomb was concerned that churches (and preachers) sought out the rich rather than the poor because they valued their status in the community (“world”), thereby forsaking their mission to embody the gospel among the poor. Anyone who “seeks the rich and the learned and the fashionable . . . instead of the poor and simple-hearted and unpretending, by that course nullifies the power of the great truth” of the gospel.32 They perverted the very nature of the church that “God ordained . . . for the common people.”33

The church that fails to exhibit that its first, most important work is to preach the gospel to the poor, has utterly failed to appreciate the true spirit of its mission, and the character of work it was established to perform. The congregation of true worshippers of Jesus Christ always exhibits the greatest anxiety to have the poor preached to. In all of its provisions for worship, the comfort and accommodation of the poor must be its first object.34

It is no surprise that when the poor are approached in a “patronizing, self-righteous style, by those so delicate and refined that they cannot eat a morsel of hard bread with them, or sympathize with their trials, they reject the approach. Had the Son of God approached them in such a style, he would have failed too.”35 But this was exactly what was happening in the cities, according to Lipscomb. “We believe,” he wrote, “the tendency of the age is to adapt religion to the rich and drive off the poor.”36

How do the rich drive off the poor in urban settings? Lipscomb has several examples, but his most significant and most constant was his critique of the church’s cultural adaptation to the “worldly” expectations in the design of their buildings. One of the most celebrated examples of this is the building of the Central Christian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Completed in 1872, the French Gothic edifice could seat 2,000 people. The nave itself was 103 feet high and 125 feet long with what was reputed to be the largest stained glass window in the nation. The building cost $140,000. This was more than the total sum Lipscomb was able to raise among Stone-Campbell members in the post-war years for the poor in the South.37

Lipscomb, among others, was not amused by this development. Indeed, he was outraged. But by 1892, only twenty years later, the Central Church was putting out feelers to sell the building because not only was it “too expensive to keep up,” but “many of the wealthy members [had] moved out to the suburbs” and united with other congregations. While Lipscomb did not rejoice in the lack of growth in the church, he did rejoice over the prospect that the building would be sold. He had believed at the time that it was “a sin against God and his people to put such large sums of money in a building, when so many thousands and millions of our fellow creatures are suffering want and going down to hell for lack of the truth.” Such an “expenditure” was more about ministering to “human pride” than it was honoring God.38

The episode reminded Lipscomb of 1850s Nashville. When the $30,000 “fine house” that seated twelve hundred people mysteriously burned in 1857, Lipscomb “publicly” expressed his joy. Even in 1892 he regarded the fire as a “blessing from God.” His rationale is that such extravagant houses “hinder instead of forward the cause of true religion.” What Nashville should have done—and later did do—was build a “half dozen modest” buildings for small churches rather than one edifice for a large congregation.39 This had been effective for Nashville since the fire. While in 1865 Nashville only had two congregations with a total of 500 members, by 1889 it had over 2,500 members with several additional congregations. Cincinnati, Lipscomb reported, only claimed 1,000 members.40 Lipscomb suggested that Atlanta follow the example of Nashville. Instead of building a $30,000 edifice, it should build “a few modest houses, as needed.”41

Now that the Central Christian Church was open to selling its property, he hoped that they would “build a dozen simple, modest houses for worship, that correspond to the principles and aims of the Christian religion.”42 Like small farms that suit the common people, so small churches are well suited to the poor. The urban poor, Lipscomb argued, would only hear the gospel when they heard it in an incarnational way.

Lipscomb’s rationale was more than pragmatic. It reflected what he believed to be the heart of the gospel. Christ is our example. “Christ came to the poor and adapted himself to the surroundings and wants of the poor.” Consequently, “all the surroundings of his religion were simple, plain and unostentatious.”43 The “fine houses” of the wealthy in which the poor are invited to worship is the exact opposite of Christ’s incarnational model. Instead of approaching the poor with sympathy and dignity, they repelled the poor with their ostentatious wealth and rhetoric.

The whole effort to gratify the culture of the world in artistic speaking, music and surroundings that indicate wealth and luxury, attract the idle and curious, those anxious to be entertained, for a time, but as these efforts clog, as they sooner or later will, they drive these very persons from whom heart melody, heart service, heart worship were sacrificed away from the church. It substitutes a barren, empty formality for loving, hearty, worshipful service to God. The efforts to accommodate the religion of Christ to these luxurious and artistic surroundings destroy spiritual power and spiritual earnestness.44

When Christianity assumes power and sides with the wealthy, the poor are oppressed. They are driven away by the wealthy. Jesus, according to Lipscomb, walked with the poor, became poor for their sake, and ministered to the poor. Churches ought, following the model of Jesus, to situate themselves so that the poor feel at home in their communities. “As Jesus, in his own life and teaching, presented his religion to the world, it commended itself to the common people, the working people, rather than to the high, the rich, the rulers, and the learned.” Though some from the wealthier classes accepted the gospel, “the pride of learning and of riches and ambition for place and power unfitted the hearts that cherished them for the reception of that religion.” Lipscomb, then, drew the conclusion that “riches, ambition, love of power, and pride of intellect do not create an atmosphere suited for the growth of the religion of Jesus Christ.”45

Conclusion

Lipscomb believed that the “masses in the cities” today would hear the gospel with joyful hearts if the church approached them in the “spirit of Christ.” When they are approached, however, with the trappings of the “tastes of the rich and cultured,” they infer that “none save the rich and cultured are desired in the church.” Even the preaching, with its educated rhetoric and cultured erudition, “suits the wealthy” and is “illy adapted to the understanding of the poor.”46 When churches require a vast amount of money, “the spirit of the gospel is lost in these churches in the anxiety to attract the rich and cultured.” The poor are neglected and the rich are courted.47 The poor do not thereby reject the religion of Jesus but the religion of the wealthy.

God ordained the church for the working people; the gospel is for the poor. It is through them that God will inaugurate his kingdom and transform the world. “God chose the common people as effective agents through whom he would root out the wickedness and rectify wrongs and re-establish right and justice among men.”48 Lipscomb hoped that one day he would see many efforts in the cities “to establish and operate a church among the common people in fidelity to the principles” of the gospel.49

Our church buildings, our dress, and our attitudes should be shaped by an incarnational posture that welcomes the poor. Do we create spaces, relationships, and opportunities where the poor feel welcome? Given our upper middle class buildings, fashionable dress, and expensive toys, it is little wonder that the poor are generally uncomfortable. Lipscomb’s statement reminds us that while our American churches—for the most part—are oriented toward the middle class and rich, this is not the fundamental orientation of the kingdom of God within the narrative of Scripture.

To conclude this article, I offer this brief note by Lipscomb that epitomizes his perspective. This theological orientation functioned at the heart of his understanding of the gospel for over fifty years—from the beginning of his editorship of the Gospel Advocate in 1866 until his death in 1917. We would do well to hear these words in our own context.

The crowning characteristic of the Christian religion in the esteem of its founder, is that the “poor have the gospel preached to them.” The church that fails to exhibit that its first, most important work is to preach the gospel to the poor, has utterly failed to appreciate the true spirit of its mission, and the character of work it was established to perform. The congregation of true worshippers of Jesus Christ always exhibits the greatest anxiety to have the poor preached to. In all of its provisions for worship, the comfort and accommodation of the poor must be its first object. The congregation that erects the costly and elegant edifice, that furnishes the floor, the seats, the altar, the communion table, in such a manner, that makes the poor feel that they are not for them, cannot be the Church of Christ. The congregation whose members dress in the “fine linen and purple” of wealth, whose equipages and bearing are of a character to prevent a home-feeling in the plainly dressed, humble poor, in their midst, is not a congregation in which the spirit of the Redeemer dwells. The individual, man or woman, who attends meeting in such style of dress, that the poor, plainly clad laborer is made to feel the unpleasant contrast in their equipages, is an enemy of the religion of Jesus Christ. The poor of the land are driven from the religious services of the so-called Church of Christ, because the whole surroundings at those services, plainly say by their costly and gilded equipments that they are for the rich, not for the poor. The profession of Christianity has well nigh run into the sheerest mockery of the religion of primitive times upon this very point. Where is the house for worship in the city or the country, that is now builded with a view of its adaptation to the wants and customs of the poor, and not rather to exhibit the tastes and minster to the pride of the rich? The poor fail to attend religious worship, especially in the cities, not because they are less disposed to be religious than the rich, but because the pomp, dress, parade, equipages and style of these services declare plainly to them, they are not for you. The spirit of the church must be changed—radically changed in this respect, before it can be truly the Church of Christ. The thousands of the poor in the cities and in the country, must be sought out —preached to—must have congregations whose dress, style, manners and associations will draw them to them, rather than repel them from them, and these congregations so conforming themselves to the true spirit of the Gospel, and adapting their habits to the necessities of the poor, will alone constitute THE CHURCH OF CHRIST.50

John Mark Hicks is Professor of Theology at Lipscomb University in Nashville, TN. He has published numerous articles, both popular and scholarly, contributed to thirteen books, and authored or co-authored an additional nine, including Kingdom Come: Embracing the Spiritual Legacy of David Lipscomb and James Harding (Abilene: Leafwood Publishers, 2006). He can be contacted at hicksjm@yahoo.com.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Campbell, Alexander. “Notes of an Excursion to the Eastern Cities, No. II.” Millennial Harbinger, n.s., 7 (February 1843): 58-65.

Dunnavant, Anthony L. “David Lipscomb and the ‘Preferential Option for the Poor’ among Postbellum Churches of Christ.” In The Stone-Campbell Movement: An International Religious Tradition, edited by Michael W. Casey and Douglas A. Foster, 435-454. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002.

Elam, E. A. “Going to Town.” Gospel Advocate 37 (25 April 1895): 262.

“Great Cities.” Christian Pioneer 7 (1 August 1867): 42. As quoted in Harrell, David Edwin, Jr. “The Agrarian Myth and the Disciples of Christ in the Nineteenth Century.” Agricultural History 41, no. 2 (April 1967): 185.

Harrell, David Edwin, Jr. “The Agrarian Myth and the Disciples of Christ in the Nineteenth Century.” Agricultural History 41 (April 1967): 181-92.

Hicks, John Mark, and Bobby Valentine. Kingdom Come: Embracing the Spiritual Legacy of David Lipscomb and James A. Harding. Abilene: Leafwood Press, 2006.

Hinsdale, B. A. “The Poor and the Gospel.” Christian Standard 1 (10 November 1866): 254.

Hooper, Robert E. Crying in the Wilderness: A Biography of David Lipscomb. Nashville: David Lipscomb College, 1979.

Lipscomb, David. “Christ and the Working People.” Gospel Advocate 38 (4 June 1896): 356-57.

________. “Christ the Savior of the World.” Gospel Advocate 8 (20 February 1866): 124.

________. “Church Pews.” Gospel Advocate 20 (5 December 1878): 762.

________. “Destitution, Its Cause.” Gospel Advocate 17 (25 March 1875): 300-1.

________. “Dispensing Christian Fellowship.” Gospel Advocate 8 (24 July 1866): 478-79.

________. “Fine Houses for Worship.” Gospel Advocate 34 (28 January 1892): 52-53.

________. “Mob Law.” Gospel Advocate 34 (2 June 1892): 340.

________. “[Notice].” Gospel Advocate 8 (27 February 1866): 107-108.

________. “Preaching to the Poor.” Gospel Advocate 15 (24 April 1873): 390-91.

________. “Preaching to the Poor.” Gospel Advocate 15 (19 May 1873): 508-11.

________. “The Church as God Ordained It—The Church for the Working People.” Gospel Advocate 38 (9 July 1896): 436-37.

________. “The Spirit of the Church.” Gospel Advocate 8 (13 February 1866): 107-108.

________. “Thirty Years Work.” Gospel Advocate 38 (2 January 1896): 4.

________. “Who are to Blame?” Gospel Advocate 11 (6 May 1869): 422-25.

“Why Does Crime Increase?” Christian Evangelist 22 (28 May 1885): 339. As quoted in Harrell, David Edwin, Jr. “The Agrarian Myth and the Disciples of Christ in the Nineteenth Century.” Agricultural History 41, no. 2 (April 1967): 190.

In recent years, the phrase “incarnational ministry” has entered the Christian vernacular as a method of engaging in urban ministry. Christian communities seeking to serve the city draw upon the example of Jesus. Jesus abandoned the heavenly places and relocated to earth and made his dwelling among us. Jesus’ incarnation becomes the theological motif for Christians who relocate to the city to minister in the city. The motif of incarnational ministry can provide a powerful theological motivation but can also be misappropriated. This essay explores the potential misapplication of the theology of the incarnation in the context of urban ministry and offers interpretations of the incarnation that seeks to strengthen the practices of the urban church.

How Do We View the City?

One of the difficulties in engaging the topic of incarnational urban ministry is defining the terms urban and city. If we were to draw upon the range of options found in Western thought for the definition of the city, we would be hard-pressed to determine one specific definition that is commonly and consistently used. One approach to the city in Western thought is the depiction of the city in abstract terms. The ability to define the city in abstract terms allows those who engage the city potentially to redefine the city on their own terms.

While cities certainly existed prior to the Greeks, it is in the Greek word for the city, polis, where the city begins to mean more than simply the collection of citizens in a defined physical location: “The Greek word for city, polis, meant far more to an Athenian . . . than a place on the map; it meant the place where people achieve unity.”1 Aristotle, in particular, begins to expand the definition of the city beyond the physical and the material. For Aristotle, the polis is not so much a location bound by geography but a destination, the end goal of human endeavor. Human partnerships and cooperation should move towards the authoritative good of all. “As we see that every city is a society and every society is established for some good purpose.”2

The end goal of the polis is not simply life lived in the context of a particular location. The polis is both the concrete concept of a political entity but also the abstract concept for collective human life and a socio-political entity. Aristotle states:

It is evident that this is the principle upon which they are every one founded, and this is more especially true of that which has for its object the best possible, and is itself the most excellent, and comprehends all the rest. Now this is called a city, and the society thereof a political society.3

Because of the heavily symbolic nature of the city, the city comes to represent more than its actual physical reality. It comes to represent the collective human endeavor.

The ongoing influence of Aristotle in urban thought is the abstraction of the city, not simply as a gathering of people within a geographic boundary but as the locus of human activity. The Greeks see the positive potential and direction of the city as a gathering of humanity moving towards a virtuous telos. As the culmination of human activity, the city has the great potential to embody the best of human life but also the worst. Western thought embodies both expressions.

Augustine follows suit in using the term city as an abstraction. For Augustine, the human city is the secular realm, existing in stark contrast to the city of God. The two cities stand in opposition to one another. The realm of the city of God is the realm of God’s dominion and authority. The human city is the work of human hands. Human cities, therefore, are viewed with a degree of suspicion. Since the true city of God is not being built in the earthly realm but in the heavenly realm, the earthly expression of a city would not yield the city of God. As Augustine writes:

The earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord. The former looks for glory from men, the latter finds its highest glory in God.4

As Luke Bretherton summarizes, “For Augustine, the only true society and true peace exist in the city of God.”5

The cities of the earth stand in for the kingdom of earth, resulting in a rejection of the city as a potential site of redemption or as a location worth redeeming. In Augustine, there is the rejection of loyalty towards the earthly city and an embracing of loyalty to the heavenly city. Augustine’s development of a contrasting framework between God’s city and the human city furthers the abstract understanding of the city. The city is more than a location. It is a summary of human life or the transcendent work of God outside of the realm of the flesh. In Augustine’s framework, the virtuous city of God is not found in the earthly realm.

The advent of the industrial age meant that the city arrived as both an elevated and abstract philosophical and sociological concept and a heightened reality in everyday life. There would be an increasing awareness of both the positive potential of the city and the potential danger of the city. Industrialization meant that populations would increasingly move in greater numbers from an agrarian and rural setting to an industrial and urban setting.

In the twentieth century, the Augustinian perception of this division between the ungodly, secular culture and a contrasting godly culture widens. Exasperating the assumptions of this demarcation is the rapid proliferation of cities, the explosion of the global urban population, and the rapid shifting of populations towards the city. These drastic changes contribute to the sense of distinction and separation between the city and non-city regions. The sense of contrast and conflict deepens between the two worlds. This dichotomy has a problematic application in many Christian circles. The city can be viewed as the center of all that is wrong with the world, while the suburbs can be seen as what is right with the world.

For theologians Harvey Cox and Jacques Ellul, the city is often equivalent to culture, or, at minimum, the sum total of human endeavor. In a sense, both Cox and Ellul reflect the Aristotelian perspective that the city is the sum total of human life. The two theologians, however, hold vastly differing opinions regarding the value and worth of the city. As Cox writes, “In our day the secular metropolis stands as both the pattern of our life together and the symbol of our view of the world.”6 Cox’s perspective, best exemplified in The Secular City, holds the more optimistic position that the city is the culmination of all that is good about humanity. It is the height of humanism. Cox finds redemptive elements of the aggregate life of human community. The concentration of humanity in community life multiplies human goodness. “If secularization designates the content of man’s coming of age, urbanization describes the context in which it is occurring. . . . The urban center is the place of human control, of rational planning, of bureaucratic organization.”7 The secular city is to be celebrated as the good end of earthly human life.

Ellul, on the other hand, tends to hold a more pessimistic view of the city. The city is the culmination of human sinfulness. Cox’s perspective upholds the goodness of humanity (the image of God found in humanity) and the capacity to create good arising out of a good humanity. Ellul’s perspective asserts the fallenness of humanity (the reality of sin found in humanity) and the capacity to multiply sinfulness arising out of a fallen humanity. In The Presence of the Kingdom, Ellul states that “a major fact of our present civilization is that more and more sin becomes collective, and the individual is forced to participate in collective sin.”8 For Ellul, the concentration of humanity in the city is not the multiplication of human goodness but the multiplication of human sinfulness. While Cox and Ellul greatly differ on the general characteristic of the goodness or sinfulness of the city, both seem to reflect the Aristotelian approach that the city represents more than its mere physical reality but that the city gestures towards a larger and more abstract meaning. This trend continues in the writings of Graham Ward, James Dougherty, and others, who continue to use the term city to represent civilization, culture, and society.9

There is an array of opinion regarding whether a collection of humanity in the city yields a positive, virtuous end or a negative, destructive end. Despite this difference, the common method is to abstract the city to represent more than its physical and material reality. The abstraction and reification of the term city can result in an inability to engage the city in concrete and material terms. An abstract concept can be portrayed in extremes, potentially resulting in an all good or all bad perception of the city.

The city should not merely be an abstract concept that references politics or culture. Instead, we should view the city not only for what it represents (although there is a theological import of what the city represents) but for what the city actually is. The city is a gathering of people in one location that expresses the vast range of human life and activity in a particular location. The city is the city. It is the neighborhood where people are gathered together. This particular gathering of human life raises the same sense of need of any human gathering. In this way, it reflects the power of community life. It is not, however, only an abstract reality to be seen reductively through its theoretical representation.

If the city is merely an abstraction, then the response to that abstraction is another abstraction. The only legitimate change is, in this construal, further philosophical and theological abstraction and the triumph of ideas and values over any real on-the-ground changes. Urban theology then becomes an abstraction battling an abstraction; the battle of ideas. But if the city is an actual location, neighborhood, and community, urban ministry should draw from a theology that has a concrete expression. The church in the city is not merely engaging in a metaphorical battle, but it is working to bring real change in a material reality. The movement away from the city as an abstraction results in the possibility that the presence of the church shaped by Christian theology could have an impact on the city of humanity. The actual, physical realm of the city provides a place for concrete action by the church.

Limitations of Understanding the Incarnation of the Body of Christ

Applying the incarnation narrative to the urban church requires the recognition of key limitations. One of the most significant potential misapplications of the concept of incarnational ministry is that the church could mirror in every way the power and mystery of Christ’s incarnation. A key to the incarnational life of the church in the city is the awareness that the church is not the complete and perfect reflection of Jesus’ incarnation. While the church is established by Jesus as a holy institution, it is still comprised of human beings with human limitations. The church’s imitation of Christ should not be seen as a strict one-to-one correspondence between the incarnation of Jesus and the embodiment of Christ in the city through the church.

The first key limitation on the application of the incarnation is that one individual cannot fully and completely embody Christ, but rather, the individual is a part of the community that collectively embodies Christ. Western culture tends to centralize the role of the individual in society. The dominant theme of individualism in Western culture leads to the elevation of the individual as the primary force of transformation—usually in the form of the heroic individual. The image of the rugged individual called to conquer the wild frontier is a common expression of the Western individualist narrative.

The heroic and triumphant individual is not only found in Western culture but also in the context of the American church. The tendency in the church to elevate the heroic individual leads to the dysfunctional narrative of the Christian as the incarnate savior for the inner city—usually in the person of the heroic white pastor who arrives to save the urban black poor.10 The application of the incarnation, however, should never be the justification for the actions of the individual with a messiah complex. The individual does not have the capacity to single-handedly embody the Messiah, but rather it is the community that corporately embodies Christ. Western culture’s excessive individualism leads to the failure to understand that the power of the church is not in a heroic Christian individual superstar but in the community that is the body of Christ. The body of Christ must be seen in its corporate expression rather than being expressed through the individual.

A second key difference between the person of Jesus and the application of the incarnation to the body of Christ is the limitation of the authority of the church. Jesus’ authority as the Messiah finds its full expression in the kingdom of God. Jesus’ fulfillment as the king is the full eschatological realization of God’s kingdom and Christ’s kingship in that kingdom. Jesus expresses his authority in the Great Commission: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matt 28:18–20).11 Jesus proclaims his authority, and the charge to the disciples arises out of that authority. Yet, the Great Commission does not automatically transmit that full authority to the church. It is passed on to the church to make disciples. The temptation is to see the church with the fullness of God’s authority as the body of Christ. However, in the same way that the incarnation of Jesus gestures towards the eschatological fulfillment of Christ’s return, the body of Christ in the in-between space reflects the authority of Jesus, but that authority prioritizes the making of disciples of Jesus.

For example, John Howard Yoder outlines the three-fold office of Jesus in Preface to Theology: prophet, priest, and king.12 A misinterpretation of the doctrine of the incarnation would be to see the church as the incarnation of Jesus’ role as the king. The main expression of the church as the body of Christ should be seen in the servant role that shapes all three expressions of Jesus’ messiahship. In The Politics of Jesus, Yoder writes:

There is thus but one realm in which the concept of imitation holds—but there it holds in every strand of the New Testament literature and all the more strikingly by virtue of the absence of parallels in other realms. This is at the point of the concrete social meaning of the cross in its relation to enmity and power. Servanthood replaces dominion, forgiveness absorbs hostility. Thus—and only thus—are we bound by New Testament thought to “be like Jesus.”13

The goal of the incarnate body of Christ in the city is not to grab for earthly power but to be a servant for the city. This prevailing notion of the body of Christ as a servant does not preclude the possibility of prophetic witness and challenge to the powers that be in the city. The church has the responsibility to stand in prophetic opposition to evil in the city. However, the servant nature of the body of Christ precludes the possibility that the church would replace the earthly kingdom and become an earthly power. The pursuit of earthly power, therefore, leads to the name of Jesus being inappropriately appropriated, with the doctrine of the incarnation manipulated by fallen humans for the sake of earthly power.

The key limitation in applying the incarnation of Jesus to the work of the church in the city is, therefore, to understand that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between Jesus, the physical body of Christ, and the church, the spiritual body of Christ. A popular misapplication of the doctrine of the incarnation is the positioning of the affluent suburbanite in the place of Christ. The affluent suburbanite is called to live out the incarnation by moving into the city to live among the poor. This misapplication puts the affluent (usually white) American in the place of divinity, bringing salvation to the poor (usually people of color) in the city. Incarnation is co-opted to further the privileged position of white suburbanites.

Jesus embodies divinity in his individual personhood, but no individual person in the church embodies Jesus in the city. Furthermore, the body of Christ has an authority that comes from Jesus’ total authority. The church’s identity and authority is a derivative identity and authority. The level of authority that Jesus has over the world is not the level of authority that the church has in the world. Limitations in correlation and application of the incarnation of the body of Jesus to the body of Christ in the city must be recognized.

The Urban Church as the Body of Christ

Being aware of these limitations, it is still possible to formulate positive correlations between our theological understanding of the incarnation and the role of the church in the city. The Scriptures attest to the defining of the church as the body of Christ. First Corinthians 12 claims that the church is one body composed of many parts, as it is with Christ (12:12–14). The passage concludes with the proclamation in verse 27 that “now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” In Eph 4:12 and 5:23, there is a direct correlation between the church and the body of Christ. Finally, in Colossians, there is the assertion that Jesus is the head of his body, which is the church (1:18, 24) and that the whole body depends on connection with the head of the church (2:19). In each of these passages, we see the biblical understanding that the church is to be the ongoing embodiment of Christ. There is also the suggestion that the church is an organic being, a body that reflects the characteristics of the human body. Furthermore, the body that is the church relies upon the head of the church, which is Jesus. The image of an organic body that draws her identity from the body of Jesus is made explicit in these New Testament passages.

Given this connection in the Scriptures, this essay will explore three areas of application, with the understanding that additional applications are possible. First, the act of incarnation required humility that is characterized by a downward mobility. Second, the incarnation of Jesus reflects the heart of God to make his dwelling among us and to relate to us as his companions. Third, the movement of the incarnation required the embracing of suffering by Jesus. All three characteristics of the incarnation yield a model of how the body of Christ, the church, can relate to the city.

Furthermore, while the body of Christ is often understood metaphorically, true embodiment would require concrete and actual practices and actions. Our understanding of urban ecclesiology begins with the biblical motif of the body of Christ and the implication of this motif for urban ministry, not only as an abstracted theology but as authentic practices. It is through the practices of the church that the embodiment of Christ occurs in the city. As Sam Wells writes in Improvisation, the church needs to develop right practices and habits, “trusting itself to embody its traditions in new and often challenging circumstances.”14 The practices of the church in the city are urgently necessary given the number of potential crises in the urban context. Each of the three categories reflects the practices that arise from a theology of the incarnation. The emphasis will be on the important connection between Jesus’ body and the body of Christ, the church in the city.

The challenge of the Scripture is to see the church as the body of Christ, united and incarnate in the world. The promise of the Scripture is that Christ’s embodiment in the church could place the church on a trajectory of healthy engagement with the city. What Christians are not able to accomplish individually, the church as a body could accomplish corporately. The narrative of the incarnate body of Christ becomes the positive model for the practices of the urban church.

The incarnation as downward mobility

One of the central characteristics of the incarnation is God’s movement from the heavenly places to the earthly realm. This reflects God’s downward mobility and the associative laying down of power. This surrender of power provides a vivid example for the church to follow. In the same way that Jesus reflected humility in the emptying of his privilege and power, the church is also called to empty herself of privilege and power. The incarnational body of Christ should embody the ongoing laying down of power and privilege, rather than a seeking of greater power and privilege. If the focus of the church becomes the increase of the church’s power in this world, then the church no longer reflects the incarnation of Jesus. If, however, the church uses power for the benefit of the lame, the blind, and the sick, then the life of Jesus is embodied in the body of Christ.

The embodiment of Christ in the city must reflect the humble example of Jesus’ authority, which is best embodied as an act of servanthood on behalf of others. As Yoder explains:

Servanthood is not a position of nonpower or weakness. It is an alternative mode of power. It is also a way to make things happen, also a way to be present. When we turn from coercion to persuasion, from self-righteousness to service, this is not a retreat but an end run. It brings to bear powers which, on balance, are stronger than the sword alone.15

Jesus’ incarnation required his emptying himself of the privileges of heavenly power and majesty. The act of yielding privilege was not a false humility but an act of true servanthood. This self-emptying, even to the point of death on a cross, is the full expression of God’s love. The incarnation was not a short-term, half-hearted response to the reality of human existence. The practices of the church, therefore, should reflect the genuine humility required by the incarnation. Are Christian communities able and willing to yield privilege in the same manner that Jesus laid down his privilege? In the current context of the American church, power tends to speak more loudly than humility. Prominence in American Evangelicalism tends to focus on success oftentimes based on Western, capitalist concepts.

By measuring success by mostly American values, heroes are created of those who succeed by Western culture’s standards rather than biblical standards that arise out of the example of Jesus’ incarnation. Upward mobility in American society is the norm more than the downward mobility exemplified by the incarnation of Jesus. Pastors and churches that measure up to the American definitions of success become the examples and models for the Evangelical community. Success in an upper-middle-class, white, suburban community in the United States usually entitles American pastors to apply their systems, ideas, and values to a poor, starving, war-torn nation with the same expectation of material success.16 The true value of the incarnation, the process of yielding power and privilege, gets lost in the process of grabbing for material success.

American churches tend to reinforce a system of privilege. The power of the body of Christ is the capacity to go against the existing power structures and to present a counter-cultural model of engagement. The incarnation of Christ offers the model of downward mobility, which becomes the model of engagement for the urban body of Christ. How can urban churches engage in downward mobility? Our attitude and mindset should be the same as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human being, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross. (Phil 2:5–8)

The church, therefore, should maintain an attitude of humility that would prioritize the needs of the community and neighborhood over its own needs—the same attitude that led Jesus to go to extreme lengths in order to be a part of the lives of the other—even to the point of total self-sacrifice. The church in the city should engage in the practice of downward mobility through the proactive and thoughtful sharing of their resources with the community. Given the example of Jesus, the church could do no less than engage in the corresponding act of self-sacrifice.

The Incarnation as Being-With

The drastic and humble act of downward mobility reveals the depth of love required by God towards his children. At the heart of the incarnation is God’s deliberate movement towards us. God is expressing his desire to be in our midst, because he enjoys being in our midst. It is the undeserved work of grace that operates as the fullness of God’s love. To use the language of Sam Wells and Marcia Owen, it is the sense of God wanting to be with us. “The incarnation marks the moment when God’s mode of presence moves definitively from being for to being with.”17 If the act of incarnation is seen as part of God’s supreme sacrifice, then the motivation of incarnation is God’s desire to be with his children. Jesus’ life, therefore, is not only seen in light of his actions, but also in light of the desire that underlies his actions.

Jesus’ example reveals the ongoing act of self-sacrifice for the sake of his relationship with us. As Wells and Owen describe:

He spent thirty years in Nazareth being with us, setting aside plans and strategies, and experiencing in his own body not just the exile and oppression of the children of Israel living under the Romans but also the joy and sorrow of family and community life. We don’t know the details of this period, but that silence all the more suggests it was not a time of major working with or working for, with whose narration the Gospel writers are largely concerned.18

One of the key expressions of the body of Christ in the city is the living with and the working with the people of the city. The Christian understanding of the incarnation of Jesus often glosses over a significant part of the story. A potential misinterpretation of the Scriptures is to argue from silence. One of the key ways that the argument from silence is employed is the silence afforded the thirty years of Jesus’ life prior to his public ministry. Scripture’s silence about Jesus’ pre-ministry years has meant that Christians may see those years as irrelevant. A common assumption would be that there would be more of a public record if Jesus’ life prior to his last three years were significant years. The argument from silence would project that the Scripture’s silence means that the mundane and everyday portion of Jesus’ life has little to no importance. Incarnation, however, requires that we walk alongside the other in the everyday aspects of life. God is found not only in the signs, wonders, and miracles of Jesus’ ministry years, but also in the mundane life of being a carpenter in a small town in Palestine. The body of Jesus is found in the midst of the mundane.

The tendency in urban ministry is to gravitate towards the fantastic success stories. Urban ministry conferences consistently highlight the story of the drug addict who got clean, the welfare mom who is now earning big bucks, and the urban pastor who orchestrated the whole thing. Dostoevsky’s story of the Grand Inquisitor reveals the desire of the masses to hear the fantastic stories.19 Henri Nouwen writes about one of the key temptations of Jesus being the temptation to grab attention with a pyrotechnic display of power.20 But understanding the incarnation is about moving deeper into the life of Jesus to see the work of God in its mundane aspects. The incarnation, therefore, requires the living with to be not only in the places of success but also in the mundane, everyday aspects of life, even the painful and suffering aspects.

The motivation of the incarnation, therefore, challenges the church in its practice of ministry in the urban context. Because the body of Jesus incarnate in the world reflects a desire to be with us, the body of Christ’s incarnation in the city should reflect a desire to be with the people of the city. The motivation to serve the city arises not out of a messianic expectation of triumphant victory over the city but the real benefit of being a companion to the poor and a friend to the citizens of the city. “Being with disadvantaged people means experiencing in your own life something of what it is to be disempowered and oppressed. It means setting aside your plans and strategies for change, and simply feeling with disadvantaged people the pain of their situation.”21 Wells and Owen describe the incarnation of the body of Christ among the poor as the full embodiment of God’s people in the city. Incarnation is not only for the benefit of the city, but also for the benefit of the body of Christ.

Underlying the church’s desire to become a companion to the poor in the city is the recognition that God is already present and at work in the urban community. Incarnation, therefore, must be understood in the context of the missio Dei. The term missio Dei arises from the understanding of God’s preexisting and ongoing mission in the world. “Mission is, primarily and ultimately, the work of the Triune God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, for the sake of the world, a ministry in which the church is privileged to participate.”22 From the very beginning, it has been God at work reaching out to lost humanity. God’s voice ringing out, “Where are you?” in the Garden of Eden is a reminder that God pursues and looks for us. “Mission is the result of God’s initiative, rooted in God’s purposes to restore and heal creation.”23 When we consider the role of the church in the city, we must acknowledge that God’s plan of redemption has been at work before the church even existed.

Acts 10 provides an example of God’s preexisting work in the life of Cornelius before the “missionary” makes his appearance. The Apostle Peter is hesitant to minister to Cornelius, a Roman centurion. Peter is dealing with an underlying sense of superiority because of his Jewish identity. But God had already been at work in Cornelius’s life. Not only had Cornelius been seeking God through his generosity, but God himself had already appeared to Cornelius. God, therefore, communicates to Peter: “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean” (Acts 10:15). When Peter does come to minister to Cornelius, he recognizes that God had already been at work and recognizes that these Gentile believers will receive the same baptism as the Jewish believers. “Then Peter began to speak: ‘I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts those from every nation who fear him and do what is right’ ” (Acts 10:34–35). God’s mission was being fulfilled among the Gentiles and Peter was allowed to participate in the mission of God. If mission is God’s work, then God’s plan is manifest not only in those being sent out into the city, but God is already at work within those in the city.24

The incarnation of the body of Christ in the city, therefore, means that the church recognizes the preexisting work of God in the city. The introduction of a new church body into the body of the city requires the permission of the host community. The preexisting work of the body of Christ must be acknowledged and honored. The incarnation of the church in the city is not an invasion based upon assumptions of cultural superiority but a seeking of how God is already at work in the community. As Wells states:

In learning how to proclaim the faith to a local culture, the Church discovers the signs and signals of its neighbourhood, and can rediscover the significance of the universality of the gospel while appreciating the particularity of the incarnation. . . . There is also an analogy between one’s understanding of the role of the church in a neighbourhood, the leader in a church, and the perception of God’s activity in the world.25

The incarnation acknowledges the preexisting work of God that prepares the city to receive the ongoing work of God.

Incarnation as Suffering

Our first two categories seem to reflect a chronological, even a linear understanding of the incarnation. We see God’s motivation for the act of incarnation and see the corresponding act of downward mobility to fulfill that motivation. However, understanding the incarnation requires comprehension of its full range of actions and motivations. The motivation to make his dwelling among us is a critical one, but the incarnation must also be seen in light of the cross, as well as the resurrection, ascension, and triumphant return. Incarnation without an eye towards the cross is naïve. The incarnation of Jesus points towards the fullness of his work in the world.

The outworking of the entirety of God’s plan required the incarnation. Not only because he wanted to draw close to us, make his dwelling among us, and to call us his friends but because the incarnation created the possibility of the full work of Christ. God wanting to “be with us” is not unrelated to God wanting to “work for us.” God’s work for us required not only the downward mobility of the incarnation, but also the suffering of the cross. The purpose of the incarnation, therefore, must be seen in its full widescreen reality. The incarnation is the declarative statement that God’s plan of redemption has begun. The movement of God is the movement from heaven to earth, but it is also the movement from the manger to the cross and to the empty tomb.

Because the understanding of Christ’s incarnation must encompass the suffering of Jesus at the cross, the body of Christ in the city must be willing to engage and even experience suffering. Shusaku Endo reflects on a non-Western approach to the incarnation which does not focus on triumphalism. The incarnation moves towards suffering and the model and example of suffering that is expected of the church. Endo states,

The religious mentality of the Japanese is—just as it was at the time when the people accepted Buddhism—responsive to one who “suffers with us” and who “allows for our weakness,” but their mentality has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them. In brief, the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father . . . , the kind-hearted maternal aspect of God revealed to us in the personality of Jesus.26

Endo’s description of Jesus focuses on not only an incarnation that is a being with but also a suffering with. The work of the incarnation is both the work of suffering for us and suffering with us. “On every page of the Gospels we see an image of Jesus trying to share in all the sorrows of misfortunate men and women.”27 The incarnate body of Christ is the suffering body of Christ in the city.

Conclusion

Western history and philosophy’s abstraction of the city results in the perception of the city apart from its material importance. The church relates to the metaphorical city in abstractions rather than concrete practices. Theological motifs such as the incarnation are applied haphazardly with a range of options for the Christian engaged in urban ministry. If the city is viewed in its material worth with a direct connection to actual human bodies as Sennett suggests, the response of the church is rooted in the concrete reality of the incarnation. The concrete reality of the incarnation should result in actual practices for the ongoing incarnation of Christ, which is the church. Recognizing that the incarnation requires downward mobility calls the church in the city to seek opportunities for self-emptying, humility, power-yielding, and servanthood. Acknowledging that the motivation for the incarnation is the desire to be in community and relationship with the other should lead the church to practice depth in human relationships and to see God already at work in the life of the city. And finally, since the incarnation moves towards the cross, the church is called to embrace rather than shun suffering. While there is still significant latitude in how the theology of the incarnation can be applied to the body of Christ, we can begin to see the foundational principles and practices that help to define the church in the city as the ongoing incarnation of the body of Christ.

Soong-Chan Rah is the Milton B. Engebretson Associate Professor of Church Growth and Evangelism at North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL.

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________. The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972.

________. Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2002.

In examining the city, we examine ourselves and our capacity for cultivating communities of belonging in urban contexts. Through seeing the city as a cultural and theological text, critical engagement with urban literacy focuses on reading for themes of density, diversity, and disparity. In dialogue with Seattle’s Rainier Valley, the process of theological reflection on the nature of place, neighbor, and community moves the church in the city into participation with the missio Dei.

What is the city?

How can the city become a place of shalom, where its disparate inhabitants understand that their peace and prosperity are bound to one another?1 And how can the church be an agent of this divine wholeness and mutuality in the city? In various ways, these questions have preoccupied my research and involvement in the city for years. Unfortunately, defining the term city is deceptively complex. Part of this complexity comes from the fact that “scholarship devoted to the city has yet to find a commonly accepted definition of either a city or the city. The diversity of cities makes such a question extremely difficult.”2 What, then, are we to make of the urban environment that frames so much of our lives?

We may know that a city is comprised of people and places, along with institutions and infrastructure, but as Aristotle noted in his philosophical treatise Politics, “a city . . . is more than the sum of its parts.”3 Beyond the physical geography of settlement space, cities—and their growth, politics, economics, and social influence—are arguably one of the most significant, pervasive cultural realities shaping our world today. As the majority world continues to march inexorably toward an urban future,4 in North America we face issues of urbanization that are both similar to, and distinct from, our global neighbors.

The similarities of cities are rooted in common urban issues: congestion, pollution, segregation, resource allocation, and so forth. But one of the things that makes North American urbanism distinct from its counterparts in the majority world is its virtual invisibility. Whereas the relatively recent and dynamic urban growth in developing contexts has drawn the attention of the world, many North Americans remain largely oblivious to the structures and systems of the city.5 Particular facets of the urban environment become like wallpaper, just a function of the background as we go about our daily routine.

Thus, the location of this grocery store, the length of that freeway, the height of this apartment complex, and the size of that ethnic enclave become little more than incidental geographic realities. Sadly, this lack of critical engagement with the urban environment has been tragic for the church in the city. Particularly as more Christians (especially Evangelicals, a broad tradition of which I am a part) jump on the “missional bandwagon,”6 the hypocrisy of global advocacy without local engagement is glaring.7 As John Perkins, the legendary civil rights advocate and grandfather of Christian Community Development, says, “it’s easy to give out of abundance and help the poor Africans ‘over there.’ But white Christians hesitate to cross the tracks in their own hometown and meet their brothers and sisters on the other side.”8 This hesitation to “cross the tracks,” whether literally or metaphorically, can be traced in some ways to a fear and ignorance about life in the city.

But is the city—in all of its complexity and brokenness—only something to fear? Or worse, a problem to solve or people to “rescue”?

It is assumed by many people that the terms “urban” and “problem” are synonymous, like “urban” and “decay.” There are many things wrong in cities. But the easy juxtaposition of urban with problems and the automatic connection between cities and social ills have become so pervasive that they have clouded our judgment, polluted our language, and infected our analysis. Cities . . . are a mirror of our societies, a part of our economy, an element of our environments. But above all else they are a measure of our ability to live with each other. When we examine our cities, we examine ourselves.9

Ultimately, the city is not only about “us” and “them,” or the many serious problems created by cyclical poverty, class consciousness, and structural racialization, important as those issues may be. Rather, the city is fundamentally about our generative capacity for life together as we imagine and embody places that cultivate communities of belonging instead of exclusion. This cultivating work is central to the vocation of the church. However, before we can realize this vision of the city as a place for human flourishing, the ability to live with each other requires a particular kind of literacy of urban contexts.

Reading the City

Stated succinctly, the city is a cultural text. To see the city as a text simply means that its many facets and features need to be read and interpreted in order to understand its meaning. The art and science of interpreting cultural texts is a whole field of interdisciplinary discourse that cannot be summarized concisely,10 but for the sake of brevity, reading the city as a text essentially means paying close attention to both the whole and the parts of the urban environment as we observe and make sense of its significance. In the same way that a critically engaged reader of Scripture must utilize the tools of biblical exegesis to parse paragraphs, examine contextual details, and reflect on layered metanarratives, so must an astute reader of the city bring thoughtful, critical inquiry to the task of “urban exegesis.”11

Theologian Kevin Vanhoozer, in emphasizing the importance of cultural literacy, says that “Christians must learn to read the signs of the time. . . . Most of us learn to read and write. . . . What we do not learn, however, is cultural literacy: how to ‘read’ and ‘write’ culture. . . . The focus is on reading culture and involves critical engagement, not merely passive consumption.”12 Urban literacy begins with seeing the city as a complex cultural text loaded and layered with meaning. Rather than allowing ourselves to remain passive consumers of the city, dialogical engagement with the urban context calls all city-dwellers to recognize that “the city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it.”13

As we encounter and become conversant with the city as a cultural text, urban literacy helps us to know what we are looking for as we read and engage urban contexts. In my ongoing reading of the city, I consistently examine three interrelated descriptors of the urban environment: density, diversity, and disparity.14 Density describes the physical context of the built environment in the city, from both a structural and human perspective.15 Diversity describes the varied social context of the city, with an emphasis on race, ethnicity, class, and religion as elements of both social cohesion and division. Disparity describes the economic and political context of the city as density and diversity often work together to accentuate the stark contrasts of wealth and power with the poverty and marginalization that characterize the urban environment.

By overlaying these thematic descriptors on the city, certain spaces and places that rise to the surface accentuate the distinctly urban contours of the city. In other words, reading the city for these themes highlights the cultural texts that exemplify the convergence of density, diversity, and disparity. These cultural texts could be a particular neighborhood, a certain historical event, or a dynamic social movement. However, what matters most in reading these urban texts well is not only being able to interpret them in their particular urban contexts but also being able to “exegete” their meaning in a theological context. How do urban cultural texts help us to reflect on the nature of God, the identity of the church, and the mission of Christian community? The meaning that arises from this reflection is simultaneously social, ethical, and missiological in nature, and, like any complex text, is always multivalent in relationship with the hermeneutics of the reader.

The Columbia City Neighborhood

One such urban cultural text that has shaped a reading of my immediate community is the Columbia City Landmark District, a small but dense commercial area that serves as the social and economic hub of the neighborhood. Contained in a relatively short four-block stretch of Rainier Avenue South, right in the heart of Seattle’s Rainier Valley, the Columbia City Landmark District is on the National Register of Historic Places. Today, quaint storefronts and turn-of-the-century architecture frame each urban block in a seemingly innocuous restoration of this once dilapidated business district. Yet behind the trendy boutiques and new restaurants is a very particular history—one that connotes community pride and successful revitalization for some but class tensions and deep resentment for others. Whenever a neighborhood changes, there are always people on both sides of the change. Developers, investors, business owners, families, and residents interact in a complex, dynamic process that can shift the socioeconomic trajectory of a community, and sometimes evidence of these changes is inscribed in the physical geography of the built environment.

Angie’s Cocktails, a fixture of the “original” Columbia City, was a symbolic tavern of the old neighborhood. Described by some as a classic “dive bar,” Angie’s was a favorite watering hole of local clientele for decades, particularly among the African-American community. With as many surveillance cameras as there were barstools,16 regulars came to shoot pool and enjoy cheap drinks, but for many newcomers in the neighborhood, a few too many incidents of alleged criminal activity damaged the bar’s reputation beyond repair.17 Polarizing perspectives on the controversial bar had long fragmented the community.

In 2000, directly across the street from Angie’s, the opening of the Columbia City Ale House signaled the changing demographics of the community. Offering “fine ales and splendid food” according to their elaborate, full-service menu, the new Ale House catered to a growing population of hipsters and professionals with very different tastes than those of the regulars at Angie’s. Noticeably more upscale and attentive to aesthetics, the Ale House predictably attracts a customer base that is mostly white. And as one might naturally expect, the Angie’s and Ale House crowds do not mix.

To the casual observer, these two bars, one on the west side of Rainier Avenue and the other on the east, are divided by what would appear to be little more than fifty feet of asphalt and sidewalks. But locals know all too well that the cultural, socioeconomic, and historical distance is much greater. In this particular context, Rainier Avenue signifies an invisible boundary that segregates the gentrifiers and upwardly mobile professionals of the future from the humble, working class roots of the past. Both groups are working through these social tensions in the present, but they are doing so independently of one another and on either side of Rainier Avenue.

Despite cohabitating in this dense urban environment, the various barriers between the Angie’s and Ale House groups nearly invalidate their proximity. And as a microcosm of the larger Rainier Valley community, one of the most ethnically and socioeconomically diverse urban areas in the US,18 the apparently peaceful coexistence of people from different backgrounds does not necessarily lead to a truly multicultural community. Instead, in some cases, the density and diversity of Columbia City serves to exacerbate the socioeconomic disparity between various stratifications of the social order. While Southeast Asian immigrants and recently resettled East African refugees lament the closure of a small corner store that sells a seemingly odd combination of halal meats and garden-grown Asian herbs, white gentrifiers cheer the opening of a pricey, all-organic grocer offering artisan foods.

Given the multifaceted complexity of this kind of urban cultural text, what is the meaning—social, theological, or otherwise—of the city in this context? How does reading the city closely help us to make sense of the urban environment for the constructive purposes of cultivating communities of belonging and human flourishing?

Urban Theological Reflection

Noted Christian “urbanologist” Ray Bakke has often said that before we attempt to devise a missiology for the city, we need a theology of the city.19 Too often, eager pastors and practitioners equipped with the best of intentions have rushed to strategize about urban ministry programs without any robust ontology of the city. But how can we design and implement effective urban ministries without a theological understanding of what exactly the city is? Unfortunately, these strategic efforts often fall short due to any number of oversights and misunderstandings, ranging from unintentional cultural paternalism to an underestimation of the entrenched nature of structural challenges in urban systems.

In conjunction with Bakke’s merited admonition, it is also true that good missiology has a deep theological foundation in the identity of a sending God and the ecclesial community of a sent people. With its proper orientation around the missio Dei, urban missiology that takes the city seriously must first begin to unpack the theological—and therefore missiological—meaning of density, diversity, and disparity in the urban context.

This abbreviated urban contextual theology20 will simply trace the contours of density, diversity, and disparity by reflecting on the nature of place, neighbor, and community in the city. Each of these reflections is dialogical in nature in the sense that urban contexts do not dictate theological discourse in a systematic fashion. Instead, like all cultural texts, the city conveys a plurality of meanings, and the role of theological reflection is to enter into the discourse of the city with both contextual considerations of complex anthropological realities and a strong sense of the deep wells of the Christian tradition.

Density and Place

The particularities of the Columbia City neighborhood—its people, history, character, geography—reinforce the unique nature of place in the city. As people humanize urban space, it becomes a particular place in the same way that a family’s memories make the space of a house into a place called home. The full dimensionality of “place” is much more than the physical mechanics of geography or sensory perception of one’s surroundings.21 “ ‘Place’ is one of the trickiest words in the English language, a suitcase so overfilled one can never shut the lid. It carries the resonance of homestead, location, and open space in the city as well as a position in a social hierarchy.”22 Thus we can speak of physically “going to this or that place,” socially “knowing your place” in a relational context, and existentially “understanding our place in the world” all in the same sentence. A theology of place in the urban context must see this multifaceted nature of place as more than just theologically neutral territory.

Unfortunately, the concept of place in the frenetic urban environment of Western society is largely a pragmatic, consumer-driven idea often motivated by little more than comfort or convenience. The places where we live, work, worship, shop, and play reflect projected images of a class-conscious “lifestyle” with little to no awareness of the ethics of place, the patterns of structural inequality, or the politics of fear in the city. Urban density, it seems, is just so inconvenient and unappealing. Is it any surprise that our churches have largely departed from the city for greener pastures?

For the past two decades . . . we have been abandoning our strategic locations within city cores and traditional neighborhoods, and we have tried to create for ourselves a new kind of society in the form of suburban megachurches. And as individual Christians, we have marched right along with the rest of our culture and moved our homes outside of the urban core into the sanitized world of the suburbs. Even when we have not participated directly in this radical shift, we have come to view the particularities of functioning in the midst of the city (restricted parking, unsympathetic neighbors, and pushy transients) as inconveniences rather than as opportunities for ministry. . . . Unfortunately, if we were to take a hard look at how Christians in this country have come to view their cities, we would have to conclude that our views have not necessarily been shaped by the Bible, prayer, or meaningful discussions among fellow Christians. It might be more accurate to say that the fear of cities, or the fear of one another, or possibly the love of convenience has been the actual basis of much of our current perceptions about the city.23

Jacobsen’s conviction that the church has succumbed to fear and comfort over compassion and service is a timely critique for a self-focused, therapeutic Christianity. Generally viewed as a place of congestion, inconvenience, crime, and immorality, the urban context has too often become a place to avoid, not a place—as the prophet Jeremiah admonished exiled Israel— to “seek the peace (shalom) of the city” (Jer 29:7; author’s translation).

However, urban density is not only a problem to be solved, or an inconvenience to overcome. Density in the city confronts North American individualism and privacy and helps people to see that public places in the city, when truly shared and stewarded by a neighborhood, can help to cultivate communities of trust and mutual care. Density may force us to encounter “the Other” and to begin to see the imago Dei in all people in surprising and refreshing ways. Though segregation and fear persist in my neighborhood, there are also signs of hope. Columbia Park, built over an old dumping ground, is just two blocks from where Angie’s was recently closed. On a good day, it’s a place where people are moving from co-residents to becoming neighbors as children play together, families enjoy the farmers’ market, and friends gather to share a meal under the shade of an evergreen.

Diversity and Neighbor(ing)

“The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14; msg). Eugene Peterson’s well known paraphrase of this memorable introduction in the first chapter of John’s Gospel is more than just a clever rewording of this incarnational doctrine. That God chooses to dwell among us and become our neighbor is a powerful biblical metaphor that must inform our praxis as we strive to love our neighbors as ourselves. Though “neighbor” is traditionally a more static category of people, this theological concept of “neighboring” in the city is a dynamic verb of action and engagement.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, the passage opens with an abrupt interaction between Jesus and an expert in the law about what must be done to inherit eternal life. It is important to recognize that the qualification of faithfulness to the Shema (Deut 6:4-9) that is outlined by the lawyer and affirmed by Jesus is portrayed in an intentionally active light. The discussion is not merely theological and propositional; it is by definition connected to the concrete reality of neighboring in the world. “That the practice of God’s word is the central issue in this narrative unit is obvious from the repetition and placement of the verb ‘to do.’ . . . In this way the first segment of this unit (vv 25-28) is bound together with references to praxis.”24

The defensive question “And who is my neighbor?” that the lawyer poses to Jesus is one of justification and avoidance. But Jesus replies with a radical narrative of countercultural neighboring, one in which traditional cultural categories were shattered in favor of a different definition of neighbor. After the priest and the Levite had failed to intervene on behalf of the beaten man, “the audience may well have expected the third character in the story to be an Israelite layman, thereby giving an anti-clerical point to the
story. . . . Jesus, however, deliberately speaks of a member of a community hated by the Jews.”25

Jesus’ unexpected inclusion of a Samaritan in the story is a turn that surely would have shocked his listeners. Nonetheless:

What distinguishes this traveler from the other two is not fundamentally that they are Jews and he is a Samaritan, nor is it that they had high status as religious functionaries and he does not. What individualizes him is his compassion, leading to action, in the face of their inaction. . . . The parable of the compassionate Samaritan thus undermines the determination of status in the community of God’s people on the basis of ascription, substituting in its place a concern with performance, the granting of status on the basis of one’s actions.26

Over against all the other social and cultural identifiers at work in this context, compassionate action is what differentiates the Samaritan and defines him as a good neighbor.

That a nameless Samaritan—perceived as less than fully human by many first-century Jews—embodies a Christlike ethic of love and service to neighbor should call into question the ways in which racialization and class consciousness have accentuated the segregation of neighbors in the urban context. Diversity in the city is an opportunity for Christians to see the unique particularities of their neighbors as a vital, indispensable contribution to the wholeness of the community.

Angie’s and the Ale House represent disparate communities that are in fact bound to one another. Though race remains as a deeply problematic barrier in this context, the city can become a place where communities move “from exclusion to embrace.”27 Angie’s closure is in fact an opportunity for people in the neighborhood, especially those committed to the work of reconciliation, to create a new and hospitable place for neighboring together in friendship.

Disparity and Community

The ubiquity of socioeconomic disparity in the city has conditioned people to accept the stark contrasts between the rich and the poor (and the powerful and powerless) as inevitable, or perhaps even necessary. In Columbia City, residents in million-dollar homes look across the street at government-subsidized public housing, while wealthy, single professionals wait in line for groceries behind a family surviving on food stamps. Is this kind of disparity “just the way it has to be”?

If the church is to become a community of belonging both for and with its diverse neighbors in the urban context, then it must consider ethics of redistribution that effectively model care and concern for the poor. Unless the church is able to truly see the poor as neighbors to whom it is accountable, people will not understand the heart of the Prophets and the importance of economic justice for the marginalized in the eyes of God. Until the church is willing to see “poverty as a scandalous condition,”28 the community of faith will not fully grasp the deep compassion of YHWH revealed in the righteous anger of Amos, the indignant admonitions of Isaiah, and the somber laments of Jeremiah.

To be a Christian community that practices redistribution is not to adhere blindly to human models of economics that preclude private ownership or wield an authoritarian rule. Rather, to be a generous and hospitable Christian community is to seek the heart of God in the fair and equitable treatment of the poor so that the whole people of God, and not just those with economic means or political resources, will be able to live under the gracious care of a generous, reconciling God. The church must model this kind of community, especially in the urban context, where the exploitative market forces of gentrification and unrestrained capitalism too often run rampant, deepening socioeconomic disparities and trampling on the poor in the process.

A steadfast devotion to communal economic justice is perhaps the most prophetic and countercultural commitment the church can make in an age of unbounded hyper-consumerism. Becoming a community of redistribution flies in the face of a society where cutthroat social Darwinism, left to its own devices, would have us all chasing after “the wealth of nations”29 at any cost. Moreover, Christian redistribution is not simply about taking resources from the “hardworking haves” and giving them to the “nonworking have-nots”; quite to the contrary, it is about sharing that with which we have been entrusted as stewards and giving back “to God what is God’s” (Mark 12:13-17; niv).

As Columbia City continues to undergo significant economic changes with an influx of new wealth, questions about displacement of the poor are ongoing. In a neighborhood that has known socioeconomic disparity for much of its history, the role of the church as an inclusive, bridge-building community is increasingly important. Making room at the table and extending hospitality to those on the margins is the church’s Eucharistic offering to the city.

Conclusion

Density, diversity, and disparity in the city make for interesting urban reading. As critically engaged interpreters of cultural texts, the church must see the city in all of its complexity, brokenness, and beauty. It is important to remember that the ministry of place-making, reconciliation, and communal justice is always participatory and collaborative. We participate with the missio Dei as image bearers of the divine community, and we collaborate with our neighbors as co-learners. And along the way, the church in the city lives into its vocation as a called and sent people.

It is a healthy reminder:

Christianity entered history as a new social order, or rather a new social dimension. From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a “doctrine,” but exactly a “community.” There was not only a “Message” to be proclaimed and delivered, and “Good News” to be declared. There was precisely a New Community, distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited. Indeed, “fellowship” (koinonia) was the basic category of Christian existence.30

May the bold witness and compassionate care of the church continue to grow this fellowship into the city and beyond.

David Leong, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Missiology at Seattle Pacific University where he directs the Global and Urban Ministry Program in the School of Theology. He can be contacted at leongd@spu.edu.

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