Nearly 7,000 years ago human beings began to gather together to live in what eventually came to be known as cities. This “urban revolution” (as V. Gordon Childe termed it) remade more than just the social order and the material economy for vast numbers of human beings.  It remade human consciousness itself.

Cities and the way of life they fostered became synonymous with civilization, something that is still part of our everyday vocabulary in a variety of ways.  The words “civil,” “polite,” and “urbane” are all derived from words pertaining to city life.  Even the term “paradise” has urban roots.  Its etymology reaches back to an ancient Iranian word for a walled garden set inside the boundaries of a city – the original Central Park if you will.  The Christian scriptures reflect this notion of the city as a place of salvation as well.  It is no accident that the Christian Bible opens with an earthly garden and closes with a heavenly city.

Historians over the years have offered a number of theories as to the origins of urban life in the distant past.  One school of thought has held that cities emerged from ancient military centers or fortress sites.  The German word burg, for instance, originally meant a hilltop fortress but came to mean a city.  A second school of thought has argued that cities were originally commercial centers or marketplaces out of which more variegated forms of social life then grew.  Advanced material production and the accompanying social differentiation are the distinctive marks of urban life according to this particular theory.

A third school of thought, one with which I tend to resonate, has argued that cities were originally ceremonial or religious centers.  Cities are religious to the very core, according to this particular school of thought.  Almost all ancient cities had at their center a temple, a shrine, or some other religious institution. It was their religious function that gave cities their initial attraction and power.  The military and commercial dimensions of their life followed the religious purposes out of which they grew.

One can still see the remnants of such ancient urban religiosity in even the most sophisticated secular cities of today.  The rituals of day to day urbanism, from the various dealings on street comers to the parades down the major boulevards, the grand performances in the opera houses, and the civic ceremonies at city hall are all examples of the ritualization that makes cities what they are.

Cities were places that concentrated power and wealth.  Thus they were places that eventually attracted people from afar.  They became places where strangers came to reside in close proximity, bound not by blood or race but by a common vision and a set of common commitments and laws.  The phenomenon of strangers living next to one another, seeking to do so peacefully while working together toward a common good, remains a powerful motivating vision for urban life still today.

It is interesting to me that this is also an ancient Christian vision. The early Christian movement was in fact a decidedly urban phenomenon.  The Jesus movement might have been born in Galilee, in a hill country that was only marginally urbanized in its day.  But it spread as Christianity from the urban center of Jerusalem to other ancient urban places such as Antioch, Edessa, Alexandria, Corinth, and Rome.  Where it later spread to locations that were mostly rural (the Latin word paganus originally meant the rural countryside), such as among the Germanic tribes in northern Europe, Christianity soon fostered the development of cities.  {quotes}One might even say that there is something inherently urban about Christian life and something inherently Christian about urban life.{/quotes}

The industrial revolution transformed the ancient city in ways that we are still seeking to understand. Industrialization did not just fall out of the sky of course, but was the culmination of centuries of social developments worldwide.  Western cities took the lead in the industrial revolution, but the process was soon to spread around the globe. New methods of production (the factory), transportation (the railroad and the automobile), communication (telegraph, telephone, radio and TV) and construction (the steel-framed skyscraper) came to characterize the modern city. Eventually new methods of ministry emerged as well, as astute Christian practitioners sought to address the needs for evangelism and pastoral practice in the new urban situation.  John Wesley in 18th century England, and Jane Hull Addams and Walter Rauschenbusch in the early 20th are but examples of the many pastoral practitioners who responded to the changing context of the modern urban situation.

{quotes align=right}Standing at the beginning now of the 21st century we are facing what has been called the “post-industrial” or the “post-modem city,” and more recently the “global city.”{/quotes}  A major shift has taken place in urban economic life, from being production-based to being service-and-information based.  Many cities have become centers for financial services and information, turning their factories into upscale living places or expensive restaurants.  The new working class that has emerged (much of it in the U.S.A. and Canada now supplied by foreign immigration) is equally service-based, working either from an office cubicle or in some area of the secondary service industry (daycare centers, office cleaning services, and so on). The disparity between the rich and the poor has grown enormously over the past several decades as well. The wage differential between the top corporate executives and the people who run the schools or deliver the office lunches is astronomical.

Cities used to be places where individuals from different social and class locations interacted on a regular, even day to day, basis. Today the city has become a place where individuals are increasingly likely to interact physically in a meaningful way with people who are only like themselves.  Numerous books are being written about how the post-industrial, post-modem, or global city has become a place of social isolation and fragmentation.  What is lost is something that is absolutely fundamental to the nature of Christian life: the opportunity and the capacity to live together in community with strangers.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing any urban minister and any urban church today is the same one that has faced them in every century since the movement began: the challenge to create community among people who regard one another as strangers. When wealthy churches open their doors to offer shelter to the homeless and facilitate interaction among their members and the homeless population, a bit of the experience of Christian life as being a community among strangers begins to re-emerge. When an African-American congregation and an Asian-American congregation visit each others’ churches, join each other for special celebrations, and work together for community improvement, something fundamental to the very nature of the Gospel begins to be recovered.  Urban outreach ministries to AIDS victims, at-risk youth, or the isolated elderly are more than acts of civic well-being (although they certainly are that).  They are a fundamental sign, a sacramental indicator one might say, of God’s ultimate urban redevelopment plan as it is revealed in Revelation 21: 1-22:7.

Such ministries gain their meaning by virtue of the fact that they participate in what God intends for all creation.  The welfare of the city into which God has sent us (Jer 29:7) entails building up a new community from among strangers. Indeed, this is what makes us “citizens” (politeuma in the Greek), that is, members of the polis or “city” of God.