Theology from the City

The welcome appearance of the Expository Times Special Issue on “The Church and the City” (October 2013) came simultaneously with the publication of my long awaited (at least by myself!) and much worked upon summary of my own work on the subject in Christ in the City.

As I point out there, “Urban Theology” is a term first used by myself in 1969. It did not have a good reception. The idea of a group of us to set up an Urban Theology Unit was vigorously opposed at a British Council of Churches Consultation in November 1969, when Canon Ted Wickham classically declared – “We do not have an Industrial Theology, and we do not want an Urban Theology”.

Despite this, UTU as a “Seminary of the Streets” got going in Sheffield and was featured in detail in a World Council of Churches publication Learning in Context, published in 1973.

We were totally committed to hearing and developing bottom-up, practical ways of Doing Theology, based on the experiences of practitioners in urban contexts. All our methods were based on Situation Analysis and Practice Analysis – that is, working with the Gospel to discern its situation and practice, and then working equally with our present-day contexts and ministries with a similar Situation Analysis and Practice Analysis. Christ in the City gives endless examples.

In Anthony Harvey’s piece, he recalls how in Faith in the City, in 1985, the theological chapter ended with the hope that theological reflections “should arise from the urban situation itself” (26).

When the plea was originally made for a genuinely urban theology, this was not primarily intended as the cue for sophisticated theologians to adopt the skills and technical language of related disciplines and offer new theological insights to those working on the ground. It was rather a challenge to those who were fully immersed in the urban scene to create their own ‘urban theology’ (29).

This has been precisely our work, and remains so.

Three consequences have emerged, which relate to the articles in the “Church and the City” issue, but which indicate rather different perspectives.

First, we have found ourselves part of the growing movement called Contextual Theology, and have made some distinctive contributions to it. It has meant reforming and developing our methods and discovering whether, and if so how, current academic presuppositions and methods helped or hindered.

In practice, this has meant working with Urban Theology PhD candidates who have had to gear their work, or at least their presentations of it, to the temporary reigning world views of particular decades and even particular institutions – Paul Tillich and Richard Niebuhr with New York Theological Seminary (1978-1990), Anthony Giddens, Habemas and Gadamer with Sheffield University (1991-2000), and Post-modernism and Post-structuralism with Birmingham University (2000-2011). We are still discovering what and who counts as “academic” with Manchester University (2012 to date).

Such ever-changing “sociological and linguistic concepts” in Anthony Harvey’s terms, certainly make us “question whether they represent indigenous, truly urban, insights arising from the situation, or are merely imported from other intellectual fields” (29). Chris Baker’s piece (3-12) looks like a case in point, though he also wants reflection on “current lived experience of ministering in the urban: journeying alongside, prophesying, locating and critiquing power” (11).

Second, we have wanted to work loyally beside urban practitioners actually doing the tasks of urban ministry, and then to listen to them as they attempt their own “theologising”. This was the heart of the Urban Theology Collective (it still meets in December) at St Deiniol’s Library, which led to the publication Faithfulness in the City (2003). The result is that we now talk of “Endogenous Theology”, theology coming from within, and “Urban Theologising”, the process of constant new Theological creation.

The September 2013 Urban Congress in Manchester followed a similar track, with its theme “Making Sense of the Fragments”. Despite Margaret Jones’s excellent comments (22-25), neither Secular nor Post-Secular appeared to be relevant concepts – they were certainly not mentioned.

Third, we have found ourselves working with New Testament Colleagues in developing methods of moving beyond “Reader Response” to “User Response”. Working with the Use and Influence Seminar of the British New Testament Conference and the Socio-Biblical Institute at UTU, we have developed a series of “Practice Response” studies. These are now published in the Practice Interpretation Series of Deo Publishing – the latest being Leviticus In Practice, edited by John Rogerson, and also in my “Outworkings” series of articles in Expository Times. Chris Shannahan’s piece (13-21) surely needed a group and situation and activity which actually used the Canaanite Woman story – or was felt to be used by it – or was an “Outworking” of it.

Which is all meant to welcome the ongoing discussion, keep the doors open, and slip in some contrary conclusions about Church and City.