Urban Ministry: An Introduction - Softcover

Peters, Ronald E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0687642256 ISBN 13: 9780687642250

Verlag: Abingdon Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

A comprehensive introduction to the particular challenges and opportunities of congregational ministry in urban settings. Urban ministry has long been a part of seminary curricula, but a basic and definitive understanding of what students should know as they prepare for congregational ministry in the city has remained elusive. Too often it is assumed that the theological resources developed for ministry in other settings are adequate for urban ministry, but these resources fail to account for the unique challenges and opportunities of the urban setting. Ronald Peters clarifies the nature of urban ministry as a theological discipline by showing how its core values of love, justice, community, and reconciliation (among others) engage the issues of economics, education, family life, public health, ethnic relations, and religious life in the urban environment. Arguing that the city has always served as an arena of God's activity, Peters articulates a theological rationale for urban ministry that is both hopeful and yet realistic, affirming that God loves the city and its people and encouraging practitioners to do the same.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ronald E. Peters is Henry L. Hillman Associate Professor of Urban Ministry and Director of the Metro-Urban Institute at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Urban Ministry

An Introduction

By Ronald E. Peters

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2007 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-687-64225-0

Contents

List of Charts and Diagrams, 
Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
PART 1: CHALLENGES, 
1. An Introduction: The Information Gap and Discerning the Right Questions, 
2. Pitfalls and Potentials: The City as a Paradigm of Human Relationships, 
3. Bridging the Chasms in Urban Ministry, 
PART 2: ORIGINS, 
4. Looking Back: Ancient and Modern Urban Ministry, 
5. Urban Theology: A Bottom-Up Perspective, 
6. Antecedents of a Top-Down Theological Perspective, 
7. Antecedents of a Bottom-Up Theological Perspective, 
PART 3: PERSPECTIVES, 
8. Core Values in Urban Ministry, 
9. Two Spheres of Urban Ministry: Parish and Public, 
10. Seeing with a Divine Lens: Issues and Networks in the City, 
11. The Egalitarian Metropolis, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

AN INTRODUCTION: THE INFORMATION GAP AND DISCERNING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

If you don't know what it looks like, you won't recognize it when you see it.

—West African Proverb

In trying to define the term urbanization ... we are confronted with the fact that social scientists themselves are not entirely agreed about what it means. It is clear, however, that urbanization is not just a quantitative term. It does not refer to population size or density, to geographic extent or to a particular form of government. Admittedly some of the character of modern urban life would not be possible without giant populations concentrated on enormous contiguous land masses. But urbanization is not something that refers only to the city.

—Harvey Cox

When someone can get you to ask the wrong question, the answer you receive won't really matter because it will be irrelevant.

—Charles L. Peters, Sr.

Having met for the first time as we found our seats around the banquet table, we introduced ourselves and began making polite conversation while waiting for the meal to be served. When the young woman sitting next to me learned that I was a seminary professor who taught urban ministry, she asked me the usual questions: What is urban ministry? How does it differ from rural or suburban ministry? Her innocent queries concerning the nature of my discipline were not unlike those of students or faculty colleagues who do not live in the city, but are clear about their perceptions of urban society and, yet, are relatively vague about what it means to engage in effective and life-enhancing ministry in this arena. In an era that places so much stress on information, this lack of understanding about urban ministry represents a deep division, a chasm, in the life of the church and society that is much bigger than just an information gap. The question posed at the banquet table revealed more than an information gap about urban realities and Christian ministry; it also exposed a need to discern how this gap can be overcome and eliminated. Her questions made me wonder why there exists so little understanding about urban ministry.

Unlike urban churches, seminary education is largely oblivious to urban ministry in spite of the fact that 79 percent of the U.S. population reside in its metropolitan centers. Nearly two-thirds of all seminaries accredited by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada offer no courses related to urban ministry. This situation helps explain the resilience of the vast gaps of information about urban ministry outside urban communities in general and within seminaries in particular, the longevity and vitality of its practice notwithstanding.

Conversations in Seminary and on City Streets: An Insight

Biblical scholars have debated whether Isaiah's mention of King Uzziah's death (Isaiah 6:1) was, in fact, a historical point of reference or perhaps something more, such as the catalytic event that clarified Isaiah's understanding of his prophetic vocation. The death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 prompted me to view this passage as a thorough mixture of both. During that year, Dr. King was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, on Thursday, April 4, by an assassin. The entire decade of the 1960s was punctuated by the assassinations of famous people in the United States: first, the nation's president; then, a radical Muslim preacher from New York; Dr. King was the third; and, fourth, a presidential candidate (the late president's brother). At the time of Dr. King's death, his leadership of the civil rights movement was virtually uncontested. The difference between the response to this event on my seminary campus and on the streets of cities across the United States was startling.

The nation was in a state of turmoil. A man whose ministry was largely defined by his activities on behalf of the oppressed, Martin King had gone to Memphis in support of striking garbage workers who had taken their struggle for better wages and working conditions to the streets with public protests. Upon news of his death, urban areas large and small were engulfed in riots almost immediately. National Guard units and other military personnel and armaments of war became part of the urban landscape from Boston to Los Angeles and just about every city in between. Across the nation, religious, civic, and community groups organized impromptu memorial services and called for peace. By contrast, so far as I could see on my seminary campus, there was no mention of the incident either formally or informally. I was not a seminary student when the first two assassinations of that decade took place, so the stark contrast between the serenity of my seminary's campus with its apparent aloofness to what was happening in city streets nationwide in the wake of Dr. King's death was a surprise to me. For this reason, 1968 (the year Dr. King died) became not only a historical point of reference for me, but also a key factor that inspired within me a fresh theological insight: I saw a gaping chasm between God-talk in the seminary and God-talk in city streets.

More than thirty-five years since that theological insight, I now teach in a seminary surrounded by city streets. The city is not Memphis, but Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and there have been no mass riots in some time. No president, presidential contender, famous cleric, or other dignitaries have been killed by assassins in Pittsburgh. Indeed, unlike that transformational year in my life, the killings on this city's streets nowadays are caused not by the notoriety of the victims, but by their lack thereof. These are ordinary people: a teenage girl walking home with her friends after school, a father and his eight-year-old daughter sharing a meal while sitting in a fast-food restaurant, a postal worker delivering mail, a woman riding in the car with her sister, a man in front of his home. The deaths of people like these on city streets in Pittsburgh and thousands of others like them in cities across America are overshadowed by cataclysmic events such as the notorious September 11 attacks on New York City's World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the spiral of national and international events that have followed. And, for the most part, the chasm between the nature of the God-talk in seminary and that of its surrounding city streets has remained remarkably similar to my experience back in 1968. Generally, on campus, little attention is given to these deaths. The young lady's banquet-table question, therefore, did not surprise me, but...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Abingdon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0687642256
• ISBN 13: 9780687642250
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 207
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland