Believing Urbanization can be of God Aristotle is quoted as saying: “Men came together in cities to live, but remained there to live the good life” . I believe that it is important in our preaching today that we proclaim a belief that urbanization can be of God. The good life which God desires for all men and women can be experienced in the city. We need positive preaching about cities that expounds how they are part of God’s plan for men and women and for the world. There is, however, a strong tradition in Christian preaching of denouncing the city in the tradition of the prophets: “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city and cry out against it! For their wickedness has come up before me” (Jonah 1.2). “Alas for you who build a town by bloodshed and found a city on iniquity” (Habakkuk 2.12). John Chrysostom, in the 4th Century, described as one who “remains to this day a model for preachers in large cities” , describes how when “we look over the city, we wept over it, as if it were on the eve of its destruction” . Bishop Hugh Latimer, in the 16th Century, identifi ed by Paul Welsby as the premier city preacher of the Reformation, began his famous Sermon on the Plough: “Is there not reigning in London as much pride, as much covetousness, as much cruelty, as much oppression, and as much superstition, as was in Nebo? Yes, I think, and much more too. Therefore, I say, repent, O London; repent, repent” . Yet Chrysostom and Latimer also preached positively about cities. Chrysostom in a sermon in Antioch proclaimed: “There was nothing happier than our city” and Latimer commented positively about the care of the poor in his city: “I heard very good report of London” .
Preachers such as Chrysostom and Latimer believed in cities and their sermons condemning their sins was because of this belief and their desire for citizens to repent of those sins that spoilt the good life of their cities. In this it seems to me they were being true in their preaching to the revelation of God’s plan for humanity revealed in the Scriptures: “When the Scriptures become more precise, it is always to describe the future under the aspect of a city. So it is with Ezekiel and all the prophets, without exception and so with Revelation” . It was because of this belief that urbanisation can be of God that the Church of England’s Report Faith in the City began with this statement, “We begin by affi rming our belief that our cities are still fl ourishing centres of social, economic and political life...nothing we say in this report should be interpreted as evidence against our fi rm belief in an urban future of which all citizens can be proud” . It was in the same spirit that the 1998 Lambeth Conference Report commented: “We recognise that throughout human history it is in cities that human societies and culture have expressed their highest aspirations and celebrated their greatest cultural achievements” . I believe it is important that in our preaching today, we are much more positive about the city. Helen Hayes has powerfully commented: Christians in the city should affi rm an urban renaissance that engages local communities, creates meeting-places for individuals, allows space for cultural expression, designs highquality environments that lift our spirits and distributes the benefi ts to the poor. Where it is effective in these ways, it will enable us to glimpse, in the urban, the divine” .
Desiring to Encourage Faith On Millennium Eve, I visited a night shelter for the homeless in East London. One of the homeless men told me his story. He had been a skilled worker in the past and had worked in both Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral. Six years ago his wife left him, he turned to drink and he lost his job. For five years, he had been sleeping rough on the streets of London. Then with tears rolling down his cheeks he looked across at the Christian helpers in the night shelter and said, “These people have shared in my suffering and have treated me like a human being – they have made it possible for me to believe in Jesus.”
In the parable of the sower, Jesus spelt out clearly that “the cares of the world” (Matthew 13.22) disable hearers of the preached word from responding to the call of the Kingdom. If, therefore, we desire to encourage faith in God in our cities, we must address the cares of those oppressed in the cities before they are able to hear the preached word.
In an issue of Expository Times, Frank Wright comments on preaching in the New Millennium: “Neither the Church nor the world today lacks noise or words. We need primarily to see and then words will have meaning” . The homeless man in East London saw the love of God through the helpers in the Night Shelter and the words of the preacher about God’s love then had meaning. It was signifi cant that the section on evangelism in the Lambeth Conference report was called Living and Proclaiming the Good News – in that order! Bishop Graham Cray has commented: “We’ve got to be the Good News before we can tell the Good News” . Preaching the Gospel of Faith For the Apostle Paul, preaching is at the heart of communicating the gospel of faith in the city: But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news” (Romans 10:14-15)
Commenting on these verses as a preacher, Olin Moyd says: “In this age of secularism and relativism, of urbanisation and ghettoization, in an ironic way, the future of God is in the hands of the preachers.” Drawing on the tradition of African-American preaching he answers the question, “How shall we preach?” in this way: The preaching was bibliocentric. It included elements of reproach, judgement, exhortation and promise. While the reproach in African- American preaching pointed to the sins and shortcomings of persons, it also addressed the corporate sins of an unjust and oppressive system .
In my experience, preaching the gospel of faith to many in our cities today will mean proclaiming God’s victory in Christ over all that oppresses them, whether it is economic injustice or institutional racism. For Paul, in Romans, the faith he preached had huge implications for the nature of society as we see in Romans 13. Unmasking the Powers that Destroy Faith James Harris comments:
Liberation preaching is preaching that challenges the established and prevailing social order, which is often the source of poverty, oppression, and injustice .
Walter Wink links this type of preaching with the evangelistic zeal of the early Christians: The passion that drove the early Christians to evangelistic zeal was not fueled just by the desire to increase church membership or to usher people safely into a compensatory heaven after death. Their passion was fi red above all by relief at being liberated from the delusions being spun over them by the Powers . George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury has said, quoting David Bosch: It belongs to our missionary mandate to ask questions about the use of power in our societies, to unmask those that destroy life, to show concern for the victims of society while at the same time calling to repentance those who have turned them into victims, and to articulate God’s active wrath against all that distorts and diminishes human beings and all that exploits, squanders and disfi gures the world . He called this sort of preaching “Prophetic Evangelism”. I have seen at fi rst hand, in my Episcopal ministry, the evil forces of racism, economic exploitation and oppressive bureaucracies. Naming these evil forces and powers in preaching has led to freedom in worship and a deeper commitment to follow Jesus. I was helped through involvement in an East London Procession of Witness with a young man portraying Jesus, riding on an ass, to see Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem as a street demonstration (Luke 19: 29-40), followed by the unmasking of powers that destroy peace (Luke 19: 42) and exploit the poor (Luke 19: 46).
Celebrating the New Life of Faith in Urban Communities Andrew Young, the former Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia in the USA, believes that “cities should be places where we learn to celebrate the joy of humanity” . I recently celebrated the joy of humanity in the city when I joined a pilgrimage in the UK organized by the Church Action on Poverty. One of our national newspapers commented: “One of the most impressive aspects of the pilgrimage was the way it has linked prayer and protest with a call to celebrate the achievements of people in poverty” .
The Lambeth Conference Report commented: “At a local level, the task of mission and evangelism is to create communities of memory, meaning, CELEBRATION and hope…”, and then goes on to say: “…There is growing evidence that this model is enabling the urban church to ‘Live and Proclaim the Good News’ in ways that are welcomed by the disadvantaged” .
Jeanne Hinton and Peter Price in Changing Communities seek to encourage celebration in our cities even in times of suffering and oppression: “Sometimes when there is nothing to celebrate the one thing to do is celebrate. Celebration can be as simple as passing round a bar of chocolate albeit with style” . Frank Thomas, in his book They Like to Never Quit Praisin’ God, sees preaching has a very important role in creating communities of celebration:
The Church can be understood as the CELEBRATIVE community because celebration and thanksgiving are the natural response to the inner acceptance and appropriation of the Good News. After this response to the acceptance of the Good News, often one desires to become part of the community of people who have had the same experience of celebrations .
In preaching missions that I have been leading in London Boroughs, we have always had as a climax of the mission a Celebration Rally which has both celebrated the life of the local community and the grace of God revealed in Jesus Christ. We have seen people as a result want to join these communities of celebration and experience for themselves a living, transforming faith. Before Transforming Individual Faith can Flourish Three key texts for preaching faith in an urban world are: words of Walter Wink:
Personal redemption cannot take place apart from the redemption of social structures .
words of Christopher Rowlands, in his commentary on Revelation:
John’s vision is of a city. It is, therefore, communal rather than individual, a reminder that biblical practice and hope is centred from fi rst to last on relationships between humanity and God and with one another. Christianity has in its history focussed so often on hope for the individual that it has lost sight of the central place community plays in past, present and future expressions of human destiny .
and a comment by Simon Barrow in Street Credo – Churches in the Community:
...the purposes of God are not restricted to individuals, but extend to the fl ourishing of a corporate life that guarantees, and affords meaning to human persons. This is why the fi nal biblical vision is the coming of a “New Jerusalem” – a metropolis of healing, justice and peace in which alone, God is rightly discovered .
If “the Christian preacher is a direct heir of the Hebrew prophet” then what I am suggesting is not new. The prophets addressed the structural sins in society before calling individuals to repent (Amos 5:21-24, Isaiah 1:2-17). They presented a new vision of society as it should be before calling for individual faith (Isaiah 65- 66). Jesus inherited this tradition when he proclaimed: “Seek fi rst the Kingdom of God and his Justice” (Matthew 6-34), as did the author of the Book of Revelation with his picture of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21- 22).
With Walter Burghardt, I believe that it is vital that we recover the “social focus of the scripture” in our preaching today. Without the primary emphasis on social transformation through prophetic preaching, we will not see strong communities of faith in our urban areas. Individual faith will only fl ourish in the context of transformed communities.
At the 1998 Lambeth Conference, we asked “our Member Churches to give urgent attention to ‘Living and Proclaiming the Good News’ in our cities so that all that destroys our full humanity is being challenged, the socially excluded are being welcomed and the poor are hearing the Good News (Matthew 11:5).” This resolution has led to the development of a Faith in an Urbanizing World programme for the Anglican Communion which asks, “What is Good News in the Global City of the 21st Century?” Increasingly, I have come to see that the “Good News” must include as a priority the desire for social transformation at both a local and global level.
This will involve a radical prophetic shift in the way we preach. It is vital, I believe that we do this lead for the survival of the faith is at stake.