Friday, December 16, 2005

Urban Seminary – Part 3

This discussion surrounding my previous two posts on “Imagining an Urban Seminary” (Part 1 & Part 2) has been extremely exciting and challenging. The comments and dialogue that you contributed have been incredibly helpful to us as we seek to make this dream and reality here in our city. Though it has been some time, I knew that a few more posts on the topic were going to be necessary.

While the emphasis of the previous posts have primarily focused on the context of the seminary, I want to examine the importance of the urban centre and urbanization on the emerging church (and the Church at large). Urbanization is seriously under estimated in the examination and development of theology, ministry and ecclesiology, too often dismissed as “ministry niche” or merely one in many contexts. It is also often too narrowly defined as “inner city ministry”, when in fact it does (and should) embrace the entire city.

A recent study reported a statistic that has been in the making since the creation of humanity- for the first time in history, more than half of the worlds population now lives in the urban context. Further, with a large percentage of the worlds Christian population living in non-urban context, with cultural, theological and missional models defined by a rural worldview, the disparity between “where” the Church is and the larger world context is growing. We need to recognize the centrality of the urban reality in the emerging church movement.

While this post will be more about putting the question to you, let me outline a two factor that I think are central to this issue:


Proximity: In his paper, “Church in the Missional Mode” Michael Frost stated “Missional thinking assumes that proximity to a host community is essential”. As the world is becoming increasingly urbanized, the locality of the Church, including its missional communities, educational institutions, etc. must intentionally respond by alligning themselves with this new reality, both in emphasis and physical locality. However, we must understand that this is more than proximity of buildings and ministries, but by necessity is a calling for the radical relocation of our lives to urban contexts.

Theology: In is essential that we understand, especially in North America, that our worldview, and thus our theology, is deeply informed by our rural heritage. Therefore, we must examine and reorient our theology, going beyond application to think implicationally (to borrow from a very helpful concept from Doug Pagitt). Just as our theology is lacking in its exclusively patriarchal focus, so to it is lacking in out exclusion of an urban contextualization.

Thankfully more people are beginning discuss this reality. As North Americans, we have a lot to learn from the UK in this regards, as Europe is far further along in urbanization of worldview and theology as we are (see “Emerging Churches” by Eddie Gibbs & Ryan K. Bolger). The Asian church is also further along, though Europe (especially the UK) is more culturally helpful to the North American context.

How important do you think the urban context is to the emerging church?

What other dynamics do you see as important?


Posted by Jamie Arpin-Ricci in 16:54:09 | Permalink | Comments (23)