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 Drummond’s time, 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.’ And how should we go about this? Drummond points out that ‘by far the greatest thing a man can do for his City is to be a good man’; and (lest anybody forgets this is a Victorian text where ‘man’ means women as much as men) he goes on to say that ‘most of the stones for the building of the City of God, and all the best of them, are made by mothers.’

‘To move among the people on the common street; to meet them in the market-place on equal terms; to live among them not as saint or monk, but as brother-man with brother-man; to serve God not with form or ritual, but in the free impulse of a soul; to bear the burdens of society and relieve its needs; to carry on the multitudinous activities of the City – social, commercial, political, philanthropic – in Christ’s spirit and for His ends: this is the religion of the Son of Man, and the only meetness for Heaven which has much reality in it.’
HENRY DRUMMOND (1851 – 1897)

Henry Drummond, was a remarkable man, by any standards. His writings were so widely influential in his lifetime that it was said of him: ‘It may be doubted whether any living novelist has had so many readers’.

He was an original thinker (were he alive today, it is tempting to think that he would feel very at home with the Community’s concept of the ‘heretical imperative’!) who combined scholarship, in both science and theology, with a very winsome personality that enabled him to be at ease in any company in any culture. He moved amongst statesmen, explorers, sportsmen and church leaders; but also endured great privations travelling in Africa.

He studied science at Edinburgh University and then went on to study for the ministry in the Free Church of Scotland. During this period, when Drummond was in his early twenties, the American evangelist Moody came to campaign in Edinburgh; Moody immediately saw Drummond’s potential and made him one of his principal assistants. Drummond was a powerful preacher and a discipler of young men, to whom he was an inspiration and role model. He found his professional niche as a lecturer in Natural Science at the Free Church College in Glasgow, a position which allowed him great latitude to speak, write and travel widely – to America, Asia and Africa.