Introduction to the Urban Desert
Desert places are lifeless places. Whether they are an arid desert, dry, dusty, and lifeless through lack of water. Or a cold desert, where conditions for life are just so hard. Despite being on a planet that is full of life, these places exist, and climate change will make them get bigger and more extreme. In many parts of our nation we have lifeless places, urban deserts, but the issue is not physical life but spiritual life.
There are increasingly large spiritual deserts in our inner cities. Where churches cease to exist, church communities are small and ineffective, and Christians no longer inhabit the places they live in. They are the spiritual deserts, where Christianity is ignored or simply irrelevant to people’s day to day lives.
In the earliest years of the church, just after the Roman Empire adopted a form of Christianity which came to be known a Christendom, many Christians, seeking true expressions of faith, went out to the Desert. They became known as Desert Fathers and Mothers. Know for their aesthetic and humble lives, they inspired the Celtic Christianity of the post-Roman early middle ages who sought out rugged Islands like Iona and Lindisfarne. These Celts inspired the Franciscans, who brought an early form of inner reformation to the wider Catholic Church.
Many Christians are finding more and more inspiration from these forms of Christianity, as Evangelicalism slowly self-destructs. But far from being insular or self-centred, these early movements of the church were blessed with missionary zeal. Far from being austere, they were Charismatic. The Celtic church was responsible for the re-evangelisation of Britain after the Romans left and took Christianity with them. They worked from the margins of society into the centre of society by incarnating the Gospel.
We need a new reformation of our church, so that rather than ignoring spiritual deserts, we start re-engaging with them instead. Inspired by Jesus’ own incarnation, where he gives up divine privileges and become not just a human, but a slave (Philippians 2). We need Christians to move into Urban Deserts, marginal places, deprived communities, sink estates and new estates, to start incarnating the Gospel. To see these places turned from lifeless deserts into renewed life-affirming centres of the Gospel.
This is what this site is about, we are an Oasis in the desert, seeking to encourage people to live deeply, move intentionally, and to worship authentically in marginal places. This may mean living in some form of new monastic community, with a rule of life, it may mean student living outside the student bubble, but it will mean commitment to the marginal places in our nation!
But like real deserts, and islands, while these places are hard, they are full of natural beauty. While they are spiritually dead, the Spirit of God is already at work, often in unexpected ways. In this sense we are not pioneers but responders to the call of God to follow him into these places.
“But he also turns deserts into pools of water,
the dry land into springs of water.” Psalm 107:35
Urban Spirituality 