It’s not often I’m going to be able to say that but I think I can now and with some justification. You see Carl Trueman has jumped, Jonny come lately like, on to a bandwagon I jumped on more than two years ago. Of course I’m happy he’s joined there’s room for more.

Back in March 2009 I got on my pedestal about all this talk about cities and I said things like,

“I’ve already admitted that strategically it’s hard to ignore the influence and impact of cities (however you define them) but that’s very different from creating a Biblical mandate which in effect prioritises cities over anywhere else, which is what I understand men like Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll to be advocating.”

And then along comes Trueman, albeit with a bit more wit and chutzpah, and says,

“One thing Paul and I did discuss was the current nonsense about cities being special which so dominates the popular evangelical imagination. Not that cities are not important: as areas where there are the highest concentrations of human beings, they are inevitably significant as mission fields. Rather, we were thinking of the `from a Garden to a City’ hermeneutic which jumps from scripture to giving modern urban sprawl some kind of special eschatological significance.   Was there ever a thinner hermeneutical foundation upon which so much has been built? OK, there probably has been, but this is still a whopper.”

Did you hear that thump? The sound of an eminent theologian landing on a bandwagon! The rest by the way is well worth reading and even though I’m about to head off to plant a church in a city, I still think he’s right.