Where does God want us to be, city or country?

The countryside – a safe haven for the soul? writes Michael Pfunder. After all, didn’t Babel rise against God, Lot flee Sodom and Jesus weep over Jerusalem?

Inevitably, there will be fallout from cramming crowds of flawed humans into urban jungles. On the other hand, cities are drivers of change. Historically, they enabled the leaven of the gospel to work its way through the cultural dough.

Jesus left sleepy Nazareth for the densely-populated Galilean seashore: a strategic move from his village, to a region where he could reach far more people than before. The very first church emerged in the Jewish capital, Jerusalem. The Apostle Paul founded Christian congregations in Greco-Roman culture hotspots – Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth.

Urban regions are not just strategically significant for mission, because that is where most people live, and where most of the movers and shakers go about their business. God himself has a soft spot for them. ‘Work for the good of the cities’ he told his people in the days of the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 29.7, GNB). Not Jerusalem, which lay in ruins at the time, but foreign cities. Enemy cities even.

These days, urban Britain looms like a bulwark of secularism. Yet, were Jeremiah alive today, would he not be urging God’s people to stand their ground, emerge from their holy huddle and work for the good of the community?

There’s a fine balance, obviously, between sticking to your moral guns as a Christian and engaging with a not-so-Christian city, as you explore how its inhabitants tick and try to meet them where they’re at. Immersion without assimilation is no mean feat. But if they want to be heard rather than ignored, Christ’s ambassadors have no choice but to tune into the cultural language of their community. Among other things, this should make them less prone to answering questions no one is asking.

Once the process of careful listening is done, how are Christians to proclaim the old rugged cross amidst a modern city’s aspirations, values and struggles? Preach the gospel? Help those in need? Two vital ingredients, for sure. Many local congregations are already pretty good at doing both – offering the bread of life to folk who originally turned up for a tin of tuna from the church pantry.

It’s all good stuff. But is it enough? Contemporary Britain tends to look benignly on Christians, so long as they keep their beliefs to themselves, refrain from meddling in social value debates and keep looking after those whom the system has failed. So, might the Church be most effective, not through public programmes or crusades, but through individuals consistently minding the gap between Sundays and weekdays, modelling the values of God’s kingdom in their everyday work and private spheres? Countless Christians acting as salt and light in their community, day by day? Might this be the key to moving the cultural dial closer towards a world where God’s will is done, foreshadowing ‘the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared and ready, like a bride dressed to meet her husband’? (Revelation 21.2, GNB).