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Andrew Wilson jumps on my bandwagon

April 18, 2012

Church

First it was Carl Trueman and now Andrew Wilson is following my lead about the not-quite-so-important-importance-of-cities. Andrew lists 13 reasons put forward for the strategic importance of planting churches in major cities and then proceeds debunk almost all of them. Here they are and places where I’ve said the same thing (albeit not quite as sharply or wittily!)

 

  1. The people live there.
  2. They are under-represented by Christianity. (I wrote here “…maintains that cities are underserved by the church and I’m not sure there’s evidence to back that claim up in the UK. While they may not be ‘served’ enough they are unquestionably better served than towns, suburbs and villages in the UK where in many places the church has all but disappeared. Take my suburb for example 20,000 people and 200-250 believers.”)
  3. Culture flows downstream, from cities to surrounding areas. Andrew challenges the notions of all areas in a city beng equal when it comes to creating culture. In this post, Creating Culture, I question the priority of that as a biblical goal.
  4. Cities are vitally important in the biblical story. Not as important as you might think and the record is a bit mixed, as I wrote here, “God does seem to spend a lot of his time judging cities such as Babel (Gen 11:8), Jerusalem (Is 1:21 e.g.).”
  5. Paul targeted strategic cities in his mission. Here I quote Morna Hooker who says, “Look at a map, and you will see the immense distances travelled by Paul – and though he walked along the roads built by the Romans, which made travel much easier that it had once been, he could not travel from Philippi to Corinth, in a day. He would have found it necessary to stop in smaller towns and villages along the way – and I cannot imagine Paul staying the night anywhere without sharing the good news with everyone he met.”
  6. Jesus focused on the city of Jerusalem. I put this question (not very articulately I must add) to Tim Keller when he spoke to Newfrontiers leaders about cities, I asked, ‘how does what you say fit given the fact that Jesus ignored the city except to go and die in one?’ Slightly more politely I wrote, “Jesus’ mission and strategy virtually ignored cities for the whole of his three years of public ministry.”
  7. Influencers live there. Well, they also live in other places too.
  8. If you want to influence a nation, you need to be in a city. Well, that’s not the only way to go…”to culturally win a region you first needed to win the city. Militarily of course the opposite is also true. Capture the countryside and the cities will starve. Biblically, cities are important but then so are places like Nazareth.”
  9. Cities make it easier to build big churches, and building big churches is important. OK, I haven’t said anything about this but I did lampoon it a bit here.
  10. Jeremiah called upon Judah not to live in the suburbs but move into the city. Nope, didn’t spot this one either.
  11. Cities are the most multicultural parts of the UK. Or this one.
  12. The greatest deprivation exists there. Or indeed this one.
  13. Cities are cool, and you know it. Yeah, that’s true. I used to live in Shrewsbury and I’m about to live in Stockholm. When it comes to cool the city wins by a country (should that be city!) mile.
So in future I need to do less posts and more bullet points but it’s always comforting to know that people sharper (with pen and thought) have said similar things.

The irony in all this is that when I attacked all this harping on about cities I was living in a suburb of a medium sized town. Now I’m about to move to a city and a capital one at that. I will probably use all those points at some point or other because when it comes to church planting, leaders are often sales people because we want to persuade people to come to our city and impressing them with the importance of the city is a tried and tested way of doing that.

I’m going to be in Stockholm because that’s where God has called me, but I hope that through the generosity of this church, churches will be planted in the towns and villages all over Sweden and Scandinavia.

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  • Andrew Wilson

    Laughing at my desk in provincial Eastbourne, where we all wear wooden shoes, particularly at the line “I haven’t said anything about this but I did lampoon it a bit here”. Thanks for the link – and for the important, if uncomfortable, insight that “when it comes to church planting, leaders are often sales people because we want to persuade people to come to our city, and impressing them with the importance of the city is a tried and tested way of doing that.” I know that’s not the only issue in play, but it’s helpful to hear nonetheless.

  • Andi

    Hi Phil –

    I admit that i haven’t looked at statistics in the UK, and you may be right. But I’ve never seen any other country in the world in which number of churches-per-1,000 population was not higher in the countryside and towns than it is in the city. 

    • http://thesimplepastor.co.uk Phil Whittall

      Hi Dr Keller, thanks for leaving me a comment. I guess the key statistic is % of Christians per 1000 of the population so number of churches may or may not be helpful. If you’ve got any links to stats on this, I’d be grateful if you could post them.

  • http://www.absolutestory.org/ Andy in Germany

    With regard to point 3: “Culture flows downstream” I’d argue that it shouldn’t, even of it does, which I’m not convinced about. Our culture is made up pf shared stories and customs, and it’s very important that the people “diwnstream” have a way of telling stories and worshipping  that is their own, not second hand from the ‘centre’: our problems, lifestyles and way of viewing life is different, our challenges are different nd our stories will also look different: the logical end of the “Downwards” argument is that everyone will untimately end up following one dominant culture, which at the moment would mean ‘Saturday night live’ and eating Mcdonalds: no creativity, no variety: no thanks.

  • Tim Keller

    Hi Phil –

    This is a very general rule-but in general, in the U.S., if there is 1 church per 1,000 people the percentage of the population that goes to church is 10-20%. If it is 1 church per 10,000 people it’s more like 1% of the population goes to church.  If there is 1 church per 500 then over 40% of people go to church.   The two percentages/ratios  are linked–though loosely. 

    Tim Keller

    • http://thesimplepastor.co.uk Phil Whittall

      Hi Dr Keller, thanks again for the clarifying comment. I think here is where we in the UK need to some thinking for ourselves because our context is quite different. Different in terms of church attendance but also what we mean by city and the suburbs and how the two relate to each other.

      In the UK where the average national weekly church attendance is 6.3% and is often much lower in rural areas at around 2.5% and higher in cities (see http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2010/church-attendance-in-england/ ). 

      However I remember your definition of city this way,  ”Secondly of course it depends how you define a ‘city’. Tim Keller defined a city in two ways – one is a regional hub, where the roads lead to and gave the example of Inverness (pop 40,949) as the city of the Highlands of Scotland. It’s not a big place like London or New York but it is the place where arts, commerce, law, markets etc… meet. Keller’s second definition was that a city is a multi function place where people live, work, eat, engage in arts etc…he made the point that the village has more in common with the city than the suburbs in that respect.” (http://www.thesimplepastor.co.uk/why-the-fuss-about-cities/)

      I think that definition is much more helpful in the UK context. Although I’m now in Sweden so I have to start again! Thanks again for taking time to leave me a comment.