Editorial

In this special issue of Expository Times we have, as guest editors, asked our contributors to map the contemporary landscape of urban theology. The reader might wish to inquire into the motivation for taking the pulse of urban theology. It is an oft-repeated line that the biblical story of redemption begins in a garden and ends with a vision of a city, the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21). This urban vision of redemption should be a constant irritant at the heart of the Christian response to society and how it imagines life together: what difference does it make to the communities of which we are part to believe in the promise of the New Jerusalem and the Kingdom of God? The urgency of urban theology is not purely pragmatic – that, because more than half the population now live in urban contexts we better start asking what theology might have to say about urban existence – but also eschatological. Life together now is not unconnected from life together understood in terms of the promises of the past and future. Christians have theological motivations for caring for cities and the lives of city dwellers. The inspiration for gathering together these essays is therefore rooted in a constant form of attention: that if cities are concrete embodiments of what we as a society believe about what it is to be human, and what it is to relate to one another, then this is a constructive task to which the Christian faith will wish to contribute.

Urban theology, at least in the UK, looks to the Church of England’s 1985 report Faith in the City as a highpoint. Yet, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, and as Anthony Harvey points out in his retrospective comments, certain features in the urban landscape look somewhat different now. Urban theology, as a contextual form of theology, will want to relate to three particular features of our time. First, the intensity and diversity of urban life is such that we are best talking of belonging and identity through the language of hybridity and the imaginative lenses of ‘third space’ thinking which upsets any and all binary categories. (This liveliness of religious behaviour in such urban contexts is highlighted in the Book of the Month.) Being ‘church’ in a constantly shifting urban landscape calls for deep forms of attention and responsiveness, as well as a willingness to not always be in control. Second, the role of faith in the public square has only become more complex since the mid-1980s. Faith based organisations (FBOs) are now very public participants in the making of the ‘good city’, from homeless shelters to ‘Street Pastors’ schemes. The church’s urban ministry is often carried out in some form of partnership with government bodies in a manner which aggravates simplistic divisions between faith and the public square. In this new space of rapprochement (a common theme in the articles of this issue) lurks a set of challenges for both governmental bodies and for churches. Third, enduring political questions surrounding economic justice and the distribution of wealth (questions as old as the biblical texts) now operate in a very different context from that of the mid-1980s. The autumn 2011 action of the Occupy Movement in surrounding St Paul’s Cathedral symbolised the challenge posed by broad-based urban politics to the church. St Paul’s Cathedral, located in the discredited engine house of the UK’s globally connected economy, likes to see itself as a space capable of generating the questions that the City of London is slow to ask. Yet the protestors of the Occupy Movement, gathering outside the walls of the church and a good number of them evoking Jesus’ example, caught the Cathedral unaware and allowed the following question to be inescapable for many months: how will the church relate to the new urban based politics that is lobbying for global justice?

In their own ways each of the essays in this volume relate to some of these features of our urban context. The effect of Chris Baker’s essay, which relates the themes and challenges of contemporary urban theology, is to evoke a church ceaselessly responsive to a fluid and shifting urban landscape. This surely takes us into new ways of imagining what it is to be ‘church’, a task responded to by forms of Emergent Christianity. Chris Shannahan’s essay reads the Gospel story of Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15.21-28 in a self-consciously contextual manner, asking how this story might prompt us to encounter the Other in the cities which we dwell. How can we read the biblical text and also respond to contemporary problems such as Islamophobia in urban contexts? Shannahan’s essay is a reminder of one of the challenges posed by Baker: urban theology must be willing to grapple with the hermeneutical challenge of tracing some form of correspondence between the biblical text and today’s urban contexts. Margaret Jones, a practitioner and researcher, lends some concrete detail to talk of postsecular rapprochement by focusing on one vivid example of its practice in Manchester. Jones reminds us that postsecular practices will take the church into blurred spaces of encounter and so are potentially unsettling. Finally, Anthony Harvey, a leading contributor to Faith in the City, identifies some of the change of tone in urban theology from the 1980s to the present day. Harvey too is concerned with rapprochement, and reflects on how the church might respond theologically to urban realities through encounter with Scripture and self-examination, recognising the urgency of these issues for a Christian vision of society.

These essays represent in abbreviated form some of the key points of intersection between talk of God and talk of the city in our time. It is our hope that they will invite the reader to contribute to the evolving task of urban theology.