Has the Christian Church Forgotten Its Urban Roots?
Emily Badger, The Atlantic Cities, May 02, 2013
The early history of the Christian church is primarily an urban history, and this makes sense: Want to spread the word of a new religion? Your best chances likely lie in those places where would-be believers already densely congregate together. The Apostle Paul made this strategic decision in the First Century A.D., as he traveled through the Roman Empire planting churches.
"Paul is going to Athens, he's going to Rome, he's going to Philippi, to Thessaloniki," says Justin Buzzard, the founder of a year-and-a-half old nondenominational church in Silicon Valley. Much of the New Testament is made up of the letters Paul wrote to congregations in some of these cities. "This was a movement," Buzzard says, "that swept the great cities of the ancient world."
Stephen Um, a Presbyterian pastor in Boston and co-author with Buzzard of a new book about cities and God, pushes the argument even further, referencing the work of sociologist Rodney Stark. As plagues regularly swept through these cities in the First and Second Centuries, Christians were often the ones who stayed behind to care for the ill while others fled to the countryside.
"The term 'Christian,'" Um says, "was synonymous with an urbanist at that particular time."
There are also, of course, the contents of the Bible itself: Jesus ministered to people in cities. The story of his crucifixion and resurrection takes place in one, Jerusalem. Psalm 48, from the Old Testament, is an ode to God's citadels. Defining moments from Christianity's later development are inseparable from cities as well. Theologians have called the Protestant Reformation a "uniquely urban event," one dependent on the invention of the printing press and the subsequent spread of the gospels through densely clustered neighbors.
Today, this narrative of Christianity as a religion with urban roots is notable for an abrupt turn in the story over the last half-century, particularly in America: Now, cities are commonly described as the epicenter of secularism, with Christians and their mega-churches retreating outside the citadel.
Um frames it this way: "We believe there is an anti-urban bias within the Christian community."
He and Buzzard have written their book--Why Cities Matter: To God, the Culture, and the Church--as a counter-argument, calling on Christians to re-approach the city (and the religion's urban story), lest Christianity become irrelevant in the age of global urbanization.
"Oftentimes, it's been Christians who've been the slowest to see new cultural trends in what's going on," Buzzard says. And if more Christians don't heed this call? "The consequences would be great. You'd have an increasingly marginalized Christian community in America, really not incredibly relevant to where the bulk of our population is living."
Buzzard and Um aren't calling for sympathy and soup kitchens for the urban poor. Rather, they argue for the need for more Christians to understand cities, to become invested in them, to work to help them flourish.
Oftentimes, it's been Christians who've been the slowest to see new cultural trends in what's going on.
Um says, "We're not saying, as Christians, that cities are our ultimate hope. We're saying the God of our cities is our ultimate hope."
By making a credible, relevant impact on cities around them, Buzzard and Um hope that people will take this message more seriously.
"My hope would be that if my church shut down tomorrow, my city would notice," Buzzard says. "There would be people in our city going, 'Woah, our city is worse off because this church is gone.'"
