I love Stockholm, I think it’s a great city and I’m glad this is my home. Much as I love our new city though, it’s not in the same rank as say London, Shanghai or New York. Or is it? How do you rank cities?

Foreign Policy has an extended theme on cities and asks the question, ‘which cities will be the most dynamic in 2025?‘ and compiled a list of 75 cities. There’s a lot to pay attention to, not least the obvious shift of gravity to China. However the ranking is only based on contribution to the global economy and there is more to life than money. There are lots of questions to consider when thinking about what makes a global city?

What about political power or cultural influence? What about quality of life? Where are trends made that others follow and which are the trends that matter? Cities are complex webs of life often encompassing the best and worst of a society and compressing it into one sprawling, heaving mass of humanity.

I’ve talked before about how we can overplay the theme of cities within scripture it is hard to overplay the increasing importance of cities in a globalized world. Even then not all cities are created equal.

As a church planter called to a city I can often fall into the same mistake in comparing apples with oranges. First of all we sell our city as dynamic, vibrant, influential. ‘We have more students/global companies/people/artists and musos than any other…’ and we’ll cite our cities ranking. Then of course we’ll flip it around because basically we all know that moving to a city to have a good time isn’t good enough for a church plant. So next we’ll say ‘we have more pimps/poverty/pagans than anywhere else and THIS church will change all that.’ We all know that moving overseas to church plant is hardcore in the kingdom so the more hardcore the better.

It is of course a motivational strategy that really only city planters can use – it’s not very impressive to anyone if my friend from a small town in Leicestershire stands up and says, ‘Not very much happens here, no one very important lives here, nothing of any significance is decided here and most people are around average, please come and move here to be a part of the great calling we have as a church.’

So significant as cities are in this world it’s a trap if we end up connecting the significance of my ministry to the significance of my city. In my mind the men and women who are called to years of service reaching small towns and villages, where no one will ever hear of them, no one will ever invite them to speak on a platform, and where nothing much happens except sharing the gospel, loving people faithfully and seeing the kingdom come – those people are hardcore heroes of the kingdom because they’ve chosen a path that our celebrity seeking, fame obsessed world cannot fathom – anonymity, to be unknown.

I feel fairly confident in predicting that London (ranked 21) will remain a more significant city than Foshan (#13) and that what happens in Berlin and Brussels (neither of which made the top 75) will be more important than Seattle (#74). Who knows, what happens in Tehran could be decisive in shaping the next ten years of world history. But how would you answer that question in terms of the kingdom of God? Perhaps a small island of the north coast of Scotland, or a village in the valleys of Wales or a town like Nazareth will be the among the places that God picks out.

The scale of your calling is not the same as the significance of your calling ; one is determined as much by your location as anything else while the other is determined by the one doing the calling.

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