Ministry in the Megacity

The inner city and its ministries continue to be a prime conversation starter in today’s theological circles. It is still far from certain whether the megacity is to be a place of constructive “anonymity, freedom, and opportunity” in the future; perhaps it will prove to be the place “where the action is” in a radically demonic and negative manner. There is still some reasonable doubt whether Christianity must, if it is to survive, broadly affirm the emerging norms in our secular and urban world.

The recent trend toward world-acceptance clearly seems to be a reaction against the earlier (and gloomy) stress upon the “alienated man in the asphalt jungle.” It may also be a reaction against certain strains in dialectical theology, with its motif of the ultimate weakness of mere human endeavor and its distrust of any long-range solution to social problems through programs of Christian action. In any case, the newer emphasis is upon identification, participation, and acceptance.

Certain questions emerge from the newer discussions of the city in such works as Gibson Winter’s New Creation as Metropolis and Harvey Cox’s The Secular City. These writers, especially Cox, view the freedom, anonymity, and multiplied opportunities that urban life affords as high on the scale of tomorrow’s values. Now, it may be that the one who has the money, the background, and the sophistication to enjoy these will find them exhilarating; but to the one who is excluded from participating in them, they may prove terrifying. Anonymity, for example, may be of some value to a certain type of person, but if anonymity is imposed by poverty or loneliness, it may lead to the gravest sort of anxiety.

Underlying part of the current eulogizing of the megacity’s virtues is the assumption that there is a unified and identifiable urban community. But though certain characteristics may be common in urban living, the megacity is more accurately seen as a varied and complex collection of subcommunities linked together by a common water system. It is only those who are a part of a well-structured subcommunity who do not find the total city to be a threat. Those who lack a stable place in some subcommunity (and the number of these is increasing rapidly) seem to fall outside the pale of the urban blessed. To many of these, the city is a cage with invisible bars, a menacing and chaotic place.

The fragmentation of the urban community has deprived even the ghetto of its earlier meaning and role. To the immigrant of two generations ago, the ghetto was a defense against the confusions of the city as a whole, a retreat in which he could find a common set of symbols and a common mode of discourse. Today’s ghetto seems to possess most of the liabilities of the traditional ghetto but few or none of its assets, though these assets are still desperately needed. Those who are in a position to judge tell us that in many ghetto-situations the so-called storefront mission is the most effective agency for projecting the creative values of the ghetto, and especially for bridging the gulf between the environment its dwellers left behind and the mainstream of life in the culture they adopted.

In light of all this, one is inclined to ask: Are not many of the projections for the future of the city so problematical that one should view with reserve even the drawing of sociological inferences from urbanization? This does not mean that the Christian should not welcome any valid insights into urbanization that the social sciences may yield; he should prayerfully seek the implications of these for the projection of the Evangel into the emerging world of tomorrow. What seems open to legitimate question is the acceptance of the megacity as the interpretative norm for theology.

Submerged just below the surface of much of the discussion of the urban community as a controlling model for Christian thinking and action is the view that the new urban pattern confronts the Church with a cultural situation so radically different from that of the past that traditional patterns of ministry are now obsolete and historic understandings of the Christian Evangel in need of radical revision.

This is another way of saying that the urban man of today is a qualitatively different sort of being, that he faces social needs and conflicts radically different from those of his predecessors. Biblical faith is thus thought to need a profound reflective alteration, and biblical projection of the Good News is said to demand abandonment of older ministerial structures and techniques in favor of procedures dictated by the emerging situation, and especially by the “discoveries” of the social scientists. It may be that those who propose this radical reappraisal and restructuring of Christian theology and evangelical practice have performed an unwarranted extrapolation, in which there is a false appraisal of the parallelism involved.

In practical application, this assumption has led some to insist that the local church or “geographical parish” is an anachronism (resting, it is said, upon the dwindling prestige of bourgeois values) that will inevitably be supplanted by new structures. The parish ministry is alleged to be passé as a model for the propagation of Christianity. It will persist for a time as a phase of cultural lag, we are told, but is doomed to ultimate disappearance.

More significant still, the avant-garde urban religious planners say that preaching is a relic of a bygone age, partly at least because of its appeal to reason, which, like Piggy’s spectacles in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, is assumed to be badly fractured, and at best a pseudo-Promethean crutch to man. Perhaps the Apostle Paul foresaw some such development when he spoke of “the foolishness of preaching” and said that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men.”

All shades of the theological spectrum are represented in the inner-city ministries. But much of the theoretical work, as well as too much of the planning, is being done by those deflecting the tendencies just described. The evangelical may well be perplexed, perhaps frustrated, by what seems to him a sort of tyranny of the inner-city ministries.

The problem demands some sort of reasoned answer. May we propose the following: Let us as evangelicals welcome varied forms of urban ministries as pilot projects, with the distinct understanding that they are just that, and that their pronouncements are tentative. Let them teach whatever may be of value in the matter of approach, and whatever may be found to cast light upon the realities of man’s predicament. But let us make it plain that we do not take kindly to premature assertions of the obsolescence of the preaching and witnessing Church, or of the ministry by which lost and alienated persons are reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.

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