From Village to City

For at least a month Len Hjalmarson has been posting quotations from Delbert Wiens; most notably from his very long 1973 article From the Village to the City.

I finally downloaded this article / short book and read it in full over the weekend. From the Village to the City is Wiens' attempt to develop a grammar for expressing the way their history as Mennonites in America has shaped who they have been and become as Mennonites. The movement from the village to the town to the city is both a literal historical movement, but also a metaphor for the way in which the changing cultural systems have shaped the language, habits, thought patterns and faith of his faith community.

I found huge amounts of his descriptions almost directly applicable to my own historical background. My ancestors were not Mennonite, but they were German speaking residents of eastern Europe (notably Russia and Poland) who lived in tightly integrated ethnic / church communities in the old country, and who moved as whole communities to the Alberta frontier — as much due to the pressures of ethnic / religious persecution as to economic opportunities.

Even though he was born in Alberta, the world my grandfather grew up in was not the same as the world my father grew up in, which in turn was not the same as that in which I grew up, and which again was not the same as the world my children have grown up in. In many ways, the shifts that Delbert Wiens describes, and which I recognize in my own family history, parallel in a much shorter time period the huge societal shifts from pre-modern to modern to post-modern.

I grew up in the town, but still with close enough ties to the "village" and the "farm" to be able to personally relate to that culture. But I have spent all my adult life in the city — with all its diversity and fragmentation. Church life, on the other hand has lagged behind in a sense, retaining a "town" character far longer. But even there, I have now tasted the riches of the diversity of ecclesiastical expression that Wiens' metaphor associates with "city" and found it to both fill something was notably missing in "town" church while also fueling a sense of discongruity — I have become at home in many very different church expressions while simultaneously being at home in none. This leaves a longing for more of a "village-like" community.

What Wiens has helped me see much more clearly, however, is that a return to the "village" would not really fill that longing. I have been changed by the city in ways that can never be undone — both for good and for ill — and there really is no way I could ever return. The deep community of the village was based on a narrow commonality of thought that I could now never fit into.

No, the only way forward is through the turmoil and disjointedness of the city, seeking developing forms of community that are indeed city forms.

The really good news, of course, is that for all its brokenness and for all its characteristic rebellion against God, the ultimate end of the city is not destruction and replacement by the village (or the garden), but the transformation of the city into the "true" city — the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. The ultimate destiny of the city is not the judgement of destruction upon Babylon, but the blessedness of the New Jerusalem, where God Himself dwells among His people — people of every nation, race and tongue — where all the diversity and individuality forms the basis for a new and deeper community.

That is certainly worth pressing on and through towards.