Bridging the Rural-Urban Divide: A Vision for Flourishing and Diversity within …

[Charles Cotherman]

Abstract:

It is impossible to deny the growing importance of urban centers. As cities boom the church must be prepared to meet the needs of an ever more diverse urban population with the Gospel in a way that emphasizes Kingdom flourishing attuned to the challenges and possibilities that accompany these demographic shifts. Fortunately, individuals like Timothy Keller have helped evangelical Christians adapt to these changes. Keller’s Center Church (Zondervan, 2012) represents one variation on this theme. As books like Mark Lau Branson and Nicholas Warnes’s Starting Missional Churches (IVP, 2014) highlight, church planting seems to have begun to make a similar shift away from the suburban emphasis of the past thirty or so years and toward urban centers. Furthermore, thanks in part to the work of scholars like James Davidson Hunter, more and more Christians are considering afresh the importance of being faithfully present in the elite communities (and the mostly urban centers) where culture is shaped.

This is all good and necessary, but an emphasis on meeting the needs of our nation’s urban centers should not—perhaps cannot rightly—be considered completely apart from the flourishing of other places, especially our forgotten rural wastelands. If the 2016 U.S. presidential election did nothing else, it reminded us that people do in fact still live in the vast areas of the map that lie between our nation’s cities. In my paper I hope to shed light on these forgotten places and point to ways in which the Vineyard (and the world) can be better if we consider how to bring about flourishing in “Jerusalem” as well as “Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth.”

The full paper is attached to this post.