By John Cole

"We are all city dwellers now". The comment was made by an expert on rural life in a publication about the future of the countryside.

He is right. of course. Across the world urban life is becoming the norm. In this country even the tiniest village cannot claim that ‘urbanising’ influences have passed it by.

In an urban society, almost by definition, people tend to live their lives within a whole variety of intersecting circles of relationships. Where they feel most ‘at home’ will vary (golf club? works canteen?) but it is less and less likely to be among the neighbours down the street. This is the ‘tribalism’ described in Chapter One.

People no longer feel ‘rooted’ to the place where they have their home. The house itself is still important to them, but all that matters about the neighbourhood is that it should be ‘quiet’.

The evidence that we are an urban society, whether or not we live in a town, can be put together merely by listing all those aspects of life which no longer take place within walking distance of a person’s house.

The list would include at least the following:

* Education * Industry * Employment * Medical Care * Recreation * Shopping * Social contacts * Relatives * Social Services * The law * Local government * Control of housing

In residential areas, home is now reduced to the admittedly not unimportant matters of eating, sleeping, baby-care, hospitality and loneliness. Above all it is also the place where people guard their privacy.

Most of human life, its broken relationships, ethical dilemmas, hopes and fears for the future, now takes place among the first group of activities, for the most part outside the residential area. When problems do arise within the home, people tend to keep them a closely guarded secret.

Clergy and ministers in residential areas will still find plenty to occupy their time, but almost inevitably their work will be biased towards the very old and the very young, because these are the ‘captive’ groups, the dependent half of the population, the only ones to whom the minister can still gain ready access. Echoes here of the imbalance to be found in the life of many supposedly ‘successful’ churches!

Occasionally the local church or its clergy may be able to bandage the wounds of someone spiritually injured in the melée outside the home, but only the lay people with their contacts and circles of relationships away from the immediate locality will be able to do anything to redeem the way life is lived in the melée itself.

Yet churches should have a greater priority to exercise a prophetic role among the former group of activities away from the home - for this is where people live the bulk of their waking lives - rather than a pastoral role within the residential area.

This urban society has been evolving for generations in parallel with a tide of thinking which has led in the latter part of the twentieth century to the dominant notion of a ‘secular’ society.

Old traditions of community based on where we live, or based on our shared origins, were like crutches that have supported half-committed Christians for generations; for where local community life was strong, so were the churches.

To refuse to accept the change as God-given is to pretend to live in an age now past. Accepting it enables us to explore how God is already working in this new and more complicated world, and to discover how to receive his grace to establish his Kingdom within it.

For what is emerging is either a jungle of competing self-interest or else the City of God; either a place where the disadvantaged will suffer or where God will enable us to experience himself in true community.

Remarkably there is very little new in this situation. The early church was to be found in just such a multi-cultural, fluid, urban society in the great Roman towns. And just the same problems were to be found there: overcrowding, unemployment, broken relationships, sexual licence, racial tension, violence and insecurity.

In that situation, where was the church? Not among the socially secure, helping them to escape to their villas, but in among the insulae, the ‘tower blocks’ of 1800 years ago, where it took courage to live out a transforming faith in alien surroundings.

Here was the ‘alternative society’ living out its experience of new life and proclaiming the Gospel of reconciliation among all the existing problems, working intimately and flexibly in small groups, evolving a style of being ‘church’ which was shaped by its context, not hiving off into a corner for security.

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