To be clear, Robinson’s point is not that early Christians prioritized rural over urban. Rather his point is that the rural dimension of early Christianity has been routinely overlooked due to a reigning paradigm that has insisted Christians were predominantly urban.
In reality, early Christians were both.
Robinson’s study thus has an obvious implication for modern church planting. We should be careful not to insist that we must focus on the urban because early Christians focused on the urban. It turns out, according to Robinson, that this is not what the earliest Christians did. Of course, we may decide to focus on urban locations for other reasons, and that is perfectly fine. But, we can’t insist that it has always been this way.
Michael J. Kruger, “Remembering the Rural: Do Modern Church Plants Focus too Much on the City?“
R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
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