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 PrintableVersion Letter from AmericaWhole city - not just inner cityEvery Saturday millions of Americans watch their little tykes play soccer, little league baseball, or the equivalent. The suburban parks are full of mini-vans, the parents shout and cheer each tiny kick or hit, holding expensive name brand lattˇs in their hands. Is this wicked? What does the gospel have to say to such folk? Pack up and go to the inner city? Or is there something redeemable about living ‘in the world but not of the world’ in the suburb land of the city (and not just the inner city). Theologies of the cityWhole theologies are being built these days on the concept of the city. What is seldom acknowledged is that this concept of the city is rather small scale, for the city is bigger than either its elite skyscraper inhabitants, or its druggie homeless. By contrast, the publication of books like Death by Suburb seem to suggest that people who dare to live in the suburbs need to defend themselves against implicit accusations of cultural marginalisation, ethical compromise, if not downright naffness (if that’s a word). Suburban ChristiansBut what are we Christians to say about people who live in the suburbs? Are their lives only fully valuable if they move to the inner rather than the suburban city? And are, in fact, our new theologies of the (inner) city aping the contemporary cultural love affair with elite upwardly mobile intellectuals and young executives, itself driven in all likelihood by lower than previous marriage rates, birth rates, as well as lifestyles that decentralise the family? You don’t find much in the Bible about the suburb, while you do incontrovertibly about the city proper. It has even been said that the story of the Bible is a story from a garden to a city. But then the modern form of the city is rather different from the ancient, and the suburb is — after all — suburb, a part of the urban environment in some respects, if at its periphery rather than its inner centre. But anyway, who cares? Do we really draw our theologies of different geographical regions from their preponderance in the Bible? There are no skyscrapers (other than the tower of Babel…) — what does that mean? Or do we form a theology of living in farming communities from the fact that Jesus used a lot of farming analogies? Is the city something we should avoid because it was in Jerusalem that he got crucified, while in the less urban north he found greater welcome? Should we emphasise the Jerusalem that is above (from Galatians 4.17-20) rather than the physical Jerusalem, and does this change our view of geographical preponderance — when really that passage is about what is the true church, the spiritual, rather than the physical city which the Judaisers were claiming as the centre ground. Need for sacrificeThe last generation of evangelical Christians certainly seemed to build their mega-churches in the suburbs, rather than the inner city. But then Edwards’s very, very large church was in Northampton, which at the time was practically a frontier town. Spurgeon’s massive 5,000-seater was in inner city London, as was Lloyd-Jones’s emporium, and other examples abound. Was Baxter’s ministry less significant because it took place in Kidderminster rather than London? How about the tinker of Bedford, Bunyan? We certainly need people called to sacrifice their lives and give them to building great churches in the inner city. But we certainly also need people to sacrifice their lives and build up tiny churches in the countryside, among the non-cultural elite (which if history has anything to teach us may also have a pretty profound cultural impact). We also need people to live ‘in the world not of the world’, in suburb, ‘urb’, country, and any geographical region we can think of in between. We need people in universities and we need people in towns. Paul’s missionary strategy was, as has long been recognised, apparently a prioritisation of the great cultural centres of his age. But then Jesus’s was rather different. Elijah’s time with a widow in the middle of nowhere seems to have been fairly strategic too. So, yeah to the soccer mums, yeah to the farmers, yeah to the university professors, yeah to the businessmen, yeah to the lawyers and bankers, yeah to the young, and to the old, the children, and the parents — all ‘in the world but not of the world’ that by all means we might win some. Josh Moody,
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