Digital Logos Edition
More than half the people in the world live in cities, including a growing number of megacities with populations exceeding ten million people. This trend means that an understanding of urbanization must be an urgent priority for Christian theology and mission across the globe. This updated edition of Seeking a City with Foundations, with an additional chapter, explores Christian responses to the city, ranging from rejecting the urban as evil, to embracing it as being central to God’s redemptive purposes.
Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, including history, social science, urban planning, and the history of art, readers are given a detailed text which confronts the challenges that contemporary urbanization presents to world Christianity. Looking at urbanism as a theme throughout Scripture, culminating with the great vision of the New Jerusalem, David Smith explains that God’s own future is revealed as urban, highlighting the need to identify modern-day idols as we share the gospel in cities and acknowledge the impact of global economic forces. The book also explores the causes of what has been called the divided city and traces the urban theme through the Bible to present an alternative vision of the urban future—a future in which the injustices in ever-growing slums and a crisis of meaning among the privileged might be overcome through the power of the reconciling message of the cross. This timely book proposes a way forward for urban mission, highlighting that transformation of our cities must be the focal point of Christian mission and hope.
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Recent years have witnessed an increasing focus on the growth of cities and megacities in the non-Western world. David Smith’s book provides foundations and perspectives on the city and what it means to engage with the urban contexts of today in missional and gospel centred ways.
—Peter Rowan, PhD, Co-National Director, OMF UK
This ground-breaking, beautifully written and lucidly organised text is thoroughly grounded in the literature of urbanism and urbanization, and also informed by the urgent theological problem posed by a radical change whereby more than half of humankind now lives in an urban environment.
—David Martin, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics
What David Smith is talking about in this book, that is urban pathologies, is a reality I see and experience in my own Asian context in the Philippines. What makes this book important for our context is not only that it shows us the reality but that it gives us a vision that empowers us.
—Federico G. Villanueva, PhD, Publications Secretary, Asia Theological Association
1 rating
Stephen Walton
5/30/2025
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