Lausanne World Pulse – Urban Articles – God’s Global Urban Mission in an Era of the Autonomous Self and Globalization

By Glenn Smith
December 2009

In 1983, I left a ministry to university students to give direction to the ministry with which I am presently involved in Montréal. It is interesting to reflect back on how a relevant theology and missiology of the city evolved through that change. One day, as I was looking out the window from the sixth floor of our office, I asked myself a question that initiated a reflection that continues to this very day. “I wonder what is being done in my city to reach people who work in the downtown core from Monday at 8 am until Friday at 5 pm.”

Much to my chagrin, I learned that very little was happening. I began to read about ministry with people in the marketplace and saw the relationship to the needs of urban ministry. At that same time, I was reading in Jeremiah. Having been raised in the context of a family that placed a high priority on the Bible and the church, I am not sure how many times I had read that particular book or skimmed this particular chapter.

But in that cold winter of 1983, the words of chapter 29:4-7 took on a new meaning. As the LORD God Almighty had called those ten thousand exiles to seek the shalom of a foreign city, I began to see that the social and spiritual needs of downtown Montréal could not go by me easily. So began the reflection and the action that have informed life over this period. The context was shaping how I listen to the Bible. I had to join with others to pursue a contextualized action and reflection.

Yet along the way, I learned that this one text would never inform all that is the mission of God in the city. Harvey Conn taught me well. I remember him saying,

Picking one biblical text to sum up my view of urban ministry is an assignment too awesome and dangerous for me. Too awesome because wherever I turn in my Bible it shouts “urban” to me. Too dangerous because the text I select could leave out a piece of the picture too crucial in another text and distort the whole. We need a hermeneutic serious enough to link Genesis to Revelation in the unending story of Jesus as an urban lover and the church as God’s copycat.

I realized that I needed to keep studying all the texts in the context of God’s global mission. Many urban church leaders do cultural studies and wrestle with (the sociology of) place. On a different track, others try to get their heads around the worldviews that make up the personality of our cities (sometimes referred to as a horizon or a space). We need to help urban ministry practitioners put these two approaches together so that in examining the city as a place, we are also learning to look very closely at the worldviews and the social maginaries that are reflected in the urban context.¹ Place is space with historical meanings, different identities, varied societal preoccupations.²

Over the past two years we have examined a variety of cities and ministries across the urban world. A common theme is God’s global urban mission. But we have also confronted a multitude of challenges for the Church in our cities. In this concluding article of the series we want to put this all together. The purpose is to explore the mission of God in our city/regions in an era of two realities: hyper-individuality and globalisation. There is not room here to go into great details, however, if you are interested in learning more about this topic, click here. Otherwise, below I will offer some practical notions that congregations can pursue as an “echo” of God’s global urban mission.

Glenn Smith is senior associate for urban mission for the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization and is executive director of Christian Direction in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is a professor of urban theology and missiology at the Institut de theologie pour la Francophonie at the Université de Montréal and at the Université chrétienne du Nord d’Haïti. He is also professor of urban missiology at Bakke Graduate University in Seattle, Washington, USA. Smith is editor of the Urban Communitees section.