Church planting groups like Redeemer City to City have for some time now been stressing the need for churches to be planted in major cities, and for this reason have targeted some of the biggest and most important cities in the world in their work. Tim Keller, in a recent post on Redeemer CTC's blog, wrote that the church's focus on cities is so critical "because of the sheer masses of people who live there and because of how influential cities are on their respective societies and cultures."
It would be hard to deny the importance of the cities and their powerful influence on culture. There is a reason so many people around the world leave rural towns and villages in droves and flock to the cities, even if it means they need to live in conditions of squalor in the slums and shanty-towns bordering those cities. There is an anticipation, a hope of something better, an expectation that the city will provide something they do not have. The city, in some sense, becomes synonymous with life.
Why has the city come be what it is? Graham Ward, professor of contextual theology and ethics at the University of Manchester, offers some rather intriguing insights into this question in his book, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens, one of the books in The Church and Postmodern Culture series that Jamie Smith is editing. Ward writes,
Cities are the greatest and most complex of human arts forms. They are aesthetic installations of juggernaut proportions, and they are shot through with transcendental aspirations. Lewis Mumford raises an important questions. What, he asks, drew people from the comfortable security of villages into the towers, walls and precincts of early cities? Cities were not created simply out of large numbers of people coming together; something attracted them into an orbit that fed not their bodies but their desires and imaginations. Mumford pinpoints the catalyst: the figure of the local chieftain merged with the priest and created the king. With the institution of sacral kingship, a new symbolic world order emerged—the city. Only for the gods would human beings exert themselves in the building of citadels and the construction of walls too thick simply to keep out other human and animal invaders. The king become a symbol, a metonymic figure of dazzling ambiguity, incarnating the corporate personality of the community. It is not that the sacred was invented with kingship, for the shrine had always been a focal point for congregating and, before city dwelling for the living, there were always necropoli, cities of the dead. But with the institution of sacral kingship came an urban explosion, for around him grew the scribes, the lawyers, the military, who fostered an intellectual and cultural life. The city thus came to represent 'the cosmos, a means of bringing heaven down to earth, the city [as] a symbol of the possible. Utopia was an integral part of its original constitution, and precisely because it took form as an ideal projection, it brought into existence realities that might have remained latent for an indefinite time in more soberly governed small communities.' The city, then, has always been shot through with references to the transcendent, while simultaneously being the site for the massive extension of what it is to be human, for in cities human capabilities are extended by the aggregate of human beings dwelling there; there is an accumulation of wealth, power, and intellectual ingenuity. Besides being the sites for the sacred, they are the sites for Promethean aspirations, sites for self-assertion. Here lie the origins over the struggle for the soul of the city (207-208).
And it is precisely because of this ongoing struggle for the soul of the city that we need the church in the city.
