Northumbria Community Resources & Teaching

This is a downloadable pdf of the booklet "City without a Church" by Henry Drummond, which has been produced as one in a series of booklets exploring responses to one of the basic questions of the Northumbria Community: "How Then Shall We Live?" The city without a church The City Without a Church is a meditation by Henry Drummond on a selection of verses from Revelation chapters 21 (verses 2 and 22) and 22 (verses 2 and 3). Extracts from it feature in the Finan series of readings for July in Celtic Daily Prayer and it has become an important text for the Northumbria Community because it deals with ‘church without walls’ and ‘kingdom in the streets’. Although this meditation is framed in the muscular, self-confident language of the Victorian era, its underlying message to us is as fresh as if it was written yesterday. The message is this: the institutional churches have ‘stolen Christ from the people’. What struck Drummond about John’s vision of the New Jerusalem was not just that he saw a city (rather than some kind of pastoral idyll) but that he saw no temple (or church) there. Although Drummond has hard words for the institutional church, he is by no means anti-church: he just wants it to wake up to the realities of real faith and get its priorities right. For Drummond, this involves getting out of our church buildings and getting totally involved in the concrete realities of our streets − starting right where we are, with the mess of real life all around us. He says that ‘it is only because the secular is so intensely sacred that so many eyes are blind before it.’ When you complete your purchase, you will receive an email with a link to download your pdf.  The link will expire in 3 days, although we imagine you will have downloaded it long before then!