Book Review - Positive Urban Theology

Positive Urban Theology: Finding God in the Grit and Glory of the City

 By Cris Rogers  

Published by   the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication

June 2026

Available  for £9.99  in paperback or £5.99 ebook

from this web page https://ccx.org.uk/resource/positive-urban-theology/

Author’s blog summary about it is at https://ccx.org.uk/resource/positive-estate-theology/

Book Review  By Greg Smith   July 2026

This book is to be welcomed as a new contribution to urban theology and missiology. It marks a renewed interest within the Church of England in church planting and revitalisation on social housing estates. It would be especially useful for beginners in this type of ministry, for example, planting curates in the HTB 

network, members of Eden Network and Urban Expression teams, and to some recognised lay ministers with existing roots in such communities.

The author remains enthusiastic and positive about this sort of ministry, despite over fifteen years of service in a tough urban estate in East London. He reflects on practice in his own parish as well as some wider research (the report is here)  he carried out with the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication. He built in Bow a team of local and incoming people, and a renewed and growing church congregation, with active involvement in the local community. He describes the familiar mixture of disappointment, disaster, success, and incremental signs of hope. He is a voice that should be listened to by the wider church.

The ideas expressed in this book are far from new. Forty years on from the Faith in the City report, as someone who contributed to the work of that commission, I felt that much of the learning and recommendations were being resurrected. For example, the concern to establish appropriate Ministry training for local christian leaders on the apprenticeship model and using stories and concrete examples rather than abstract ideas was there in FITC 1985 (6.5 p 106).

Reading the book reminded me that when I first moved to East London fifty one years ago, I was clutching a copy of David Sheppard's “Built as a City”. Much of Positive Urban Theology might have been written by the early pioneers  / founding fathers of urban mission, such as John Vincent, Colin Marchant, John Pearce,  and Neville Black. Cris Rogers offers a fresh enthusiasm to the field, in a contemporary idiom, but to me it feels well rehearsed. At times I became a bit irritated by the structure and editing of the manuscript which at certain points repeated things that had already been said.

In particular I think he makes some unfair criticisms of John Vincent, without understanding from personal experience , what was happening in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. Vincent certainly had some difficult and provocative tendencies , and was by no means an evangelical, yet he inspired many of us in my generation to discipleship and theological reflection in urban settings. See the recent book of essays in his honour , Radical Disciple.

A strength of the book that needs to be noticed is that it debunks the naive idea that Christians can move into an area to bring God to the local community, and to introduce light into darkness. There are huge dangers in the saviour complex, often leading to disappointment and a rapid departure from the scene. Rightly Rogers uses the missio dei approach, whereby we search out the signs of the kingdom, and the evidence that God is already at work. He is suggesting that long-term commitment and collaboration with other christians, statutory and voluntary organisations, and people of good will, is a vital component of effective ministry.

My biggest criticism of the book is that it tends to treat residents of urban estates as a single undifferentiated category of the working class. The founding fathers of English urban mission tended to focus on the working man, as a manual labourer or factory worker, rooted in Trade Unions and localised extended families. Meanwhile the demographic, economic and cultural trends of the past 50 years have transformed urban life beyond recognition. The book pays little attention to this diversity and intersectionality, and there is not much about women. As far as I could see, there is not a single mention of racism, ethnicity or multi faith communities, or recognition of the author's positionality as an ordained white man in a superdiverse local context. There is about one page covering the possibility of intercultural churches, and no mention of relationships with Christians who worship in independent and Pentecostal churches, serving the global diaspora. This is particularly surprising from someone who has worked for so long in the borough of Tower Hamlets. Not that East London is the only place today where diversity is found ; even small towns and rural areas can no longer say “we have none round here”.

More significantly this seems to highlight the silo thinking of the mission strategy of the Church of England as I perceive it. On the one hand there is an estate strategy that concentrates on left behind areas, assumed to be largely white British in background, and poor working class in economic circumstances and culture. In another camp is the intercultural church movement which may mention social justice, but rarely talks about issues of social class, and is dominated by highly educated people from around the world. The third party is that which concentrates on racial and gender issues at the level of institutions and ideologies. Alongside these there is what remains of the interfaith movement, and the halting attempts of enthusiastic Cross-cultural evangelists to introduce people of other faiths to Jesus. In local parish life, in most urban settings these strands need to be integrated if we are to build healthy churches which help local communities to flourish.