The Church, the Urban, and the Global: Mission in an Age of Global Cities

Abstract

October 2009 W are living in a period of enormous global transformation—that is no secret. One of the results is that cities across the globe—all cities, the city in general—are rapidly changing. A majority of the earth’s population now live in cities or megacities.1 Over the past several decades, these cities throughout the world have undergone a transformation that is closely connected to the transformation in economy, politics, and culture associated with globalization.2 The city is no longer located spatially at the center. It is becoming decentered and transcentered and—given the accelerating forces of virtual reality and virtual living—virtually immanent and transcendent at the same time.3 Cities by their very nature seek to make connections with other cities, seek to form networks, seek to facilitate contacts beyond the immediate terrain. Megacities and global cities realize these ends as never before. Globalization has transformed many of the most basic conditions or understandings of human existence upon which notions of church and mission have historically been constructed in the modern era. The idea of national and even geographic boundaries of identity, for instance, that gave us the “here” and “there” of missionary thinking that was famously criticized by Keith Bridston as offering a “salt-water” definition of mission—that is, that someone becomes a missionary only when she or he crosses salt water—is even more anachronistic in this day of global cities than it was when his book was first published in 1965.4 Rather, cities around the globe are becoming places of diaspora, places of passage more than places of settlement, more like thoroughfares than they are residences. City and world are converging formations. The implications for mission and ministry are enormous. Christianity has had a long and complex relationship with the city. During its first centuries Christianity was primarily an urban phenomenon. It spread from Palestine along urban commercial trade routes to other regions of the world, going east into Asia and south into Africa, as well as north and west into what later The Church, the Urban, and the Global: Mission in an Age of Global Cities