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    Why Cities Matter: To God, the Culture, and the Church
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    Why Cities Matter: To God, the Culture, and the Church
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    Why Cities Matter: To God, the Culture, and the Church
    Ebook212 pages4 hours

    Why Cities Matter: To God, the Culture, and the Church

    By Stephen T. Um, Justin Buzzard and Timothy Keller

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    About this ebook

    We live in a unique moment in history.

    Right now, more people live in urban centers than ever before. This means that we have an unprecedented opportunity to influence the majority of the world through the church in the city.

    Helping us to make the most of this moment, urban pastors Justin Buzzard and Stephen Um lay out a compelling vision for cultural engagement and church planting in our world’s cities.

    If you’re looking for motivation to maintain a commitment to the city or for guidance as you consider going all in, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of urban life that informs, instructs, inspires, and answers questions including:

    • Why cities are so important
    • What the Bible says about cities
    • How to overcome common issues and develop a plan for living missionally in the city

    Instead of retreating from or taking from our cities, here is a call to make the cities our home, to take good care of them, and to participate in God’s kingdom-building work in the urban centers of our world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCrossway Books
    Release dateMar 31, 2013
    ISBN9781433532924
    Author

    Stephen T. Um

    Stephen Um (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is the author of Micah for You and 1 Corinthians in the Preaching the Word series. Stephen and his wife, Kathleen, live in Boston, Massachusetts, with their three daughters.

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    • 2/5
      Stephen Um and Justin Buzzard, in Why Cities Matter, help those with faith or fledgling churches to leverage an understanding of urban environments into a flourishing of religiosity, where the faithful listen actively to both their city’s and their neighbor’s narrative in order to find a common connection from which to spread the message of Christianity.Um and Buzzard start with an analysis of how cities represent the future of humanity. Their argument is that the combination of a density of peoples and a diversity of interests are the driving forces behind the growth of cities. Without either one, you either have a low population village or a monolithic mass of citizens. Both are necessary. When a city is indeed propelled into fruition, the next step that Um and Buzzard deem necessary is the mass-multiplication of Christian faith in order to encourage the city to attain its full potential. While a decade ago I would have been visibly angry at such a text, now I’m rather Zen about the whole thing. Those who seek to convert will hardly be talked out of it and those that convert need to do so, so who am I to argue with the arrangement?There’s a great deal of sociological references in the book, and those may be fodder for future reading. They balance this with a deep reading of the Bible, showing how the figures of Jesus and God both understand that people are at their most prolific when in an urban environment. Truthfully, I hadn’t really paid that much attention, but the Bible does have quite a few passage about cities and how population centers figure in the growth of the Christian church. Granted, this book will absolutely not be for everybody, but it was an interesting convergence of social science and religion.