Megacities: Ready or Not

by Karen Klein

Increasingly, the great cities of the world "are megacities infected by a social cancer, magnets pulling people to them, whirlpools sucking people into a bottomless vortex of misery. They are a blend of slum pollution, poverty, crime, corruption."

- R. Franklin Cook, editor of World Mission

Over the past 100 years, on every populated continent of the world, people have been leaving rural areas in record numbers and seeking refuge in the city. For the first time in history, more than half of the world's population now lives in cities. Instead of finding refuge, however, many of these people find misery. More than 30 percent of the people living in the world's 50 largest cities are poor, powerless, and dying in urban slums - and the numbers are increasing.

Dr. Ray Bakke and Dr. Robert Linthicum are leading experts on Christian ministry in the inner cities. Bakke is the executive director of International Urban Associates, a nonprofit consulting group for church and mission agencies worldwide. Linthicum is the founder of World Vision International's Office of Urban Advance and has led urban ministry and community organizing training events in 53 cities throughout the world. He currently works as a consultant and operates an urban-ministry training organization, Partners in Urban Transformation, in Los Angeles, Calif.

World Vision: Both of you have focused your life's work on cities. How do your approaches differ?

LINTHICUM: I tend to stress what I call the work of the church with the city instead of to the city. The church tends to do good things for the city - that is, to discern what the issues are and then develop solutions for those issues. If you're talking about empowerment, however, you have to come alongside the poor, identify with them, cast your lot with them, and then work with them in addressing the issues.

BAKKE: My call is the bigger picture and Bob is putting it together. I'm challenging the church to face the city. To some extent, I'm calling for a worldview shift, a bias toward the city. The Bible contains 1,250 texts that mention the word "city." The city is an important theme, because the world is urbanizing at an enormous rate and we're just not ready.

In light of this global urbanization, what are you telling churches and church leaders?

BAKKE: We're seeing the greatest migration of people in human history, a migration of hemispheric proportion. More than 30 million people are wandering around the world without a home - and over half of them are Africans migrating in search of bread. The cities are the catch basins of these folks. The frontier of world mission is no longer geographically distant. It's culturally distant and geographically right next door. It reminds me of Psalm 107, which is filled with images of people looking for a city to dwell in. In the Bible the city was a place of hope. If we really start reading Psalm 107 and other scriptures again, we'll gain a whole new perspective on what our cities need to look like as the catch basins of hope.

Is your work producing real changes for urban poor people?

LINTHICUM: God is making significant political, social, economic, and spiritual changes in regard to the poor. In Madras, India, for example - a city with over 8 million people and something like 1,000 slums -- World Vision is working in five slums, organizing churches and missions agencies and nongovernmental organizations to work together with the people. In five years, World Vision invested $34,000 in bringing these groups together. The result was, we got the government to build 2,000 homes, to deed land to 2,000 poor families, to build and open three schools and a library, to install adequate public toilets, to asphalt roads, and to put in street lighting, house wiring, and sewer lines -- which cost the government $1.5 million. So $34,000 was leveraged into $1.5 million.

BAKKE: The point is not to focus on the needs of poor communities, but to see their capacities and begin to work from strength.

LINTHICUM: Right - to call that strength forth! The $1.5 million and the government's capacity to use it was there all the time. All we did - through community organization - was get everybody together and get them mobilized. The result is five reborn communities and a growing indigenous church.

What problems do you see in the major cities of the United States?

BAKKE: Four new trends in the past decade or so have really increased the problems for urban people: first, a massive growth in the HIV epidemic; second, a massive shift in the drug and alcohol problem to crack cocaine, which is instantly addictive, immediately available, and cheap; third, a massive increase in assault weapons; and fourth, the change in the homeless population from mostly single males to mostly women and children.

In addition, the cities have large black populations that originally migrated to the north and to urban areas earlier this century, when cotton farming was mechanizing in the south. Just when they got to the cities, however, the jobs fled, leaving massive numbers of disaffected people living in cities around this country who have no opportunity other than entry-level service jobs.

To make matters worse, in the 1960s - when Congress changed the civil rights act, passed the voting rights act, and changed the immigration laws - Asians Latinos, and Africans started coming in large numbers to the United States. These immigrants came with nothing but an enormous sense of destiny - like Americans had 100 years ago. So the cities have populations that are growing in color, half of which are spiraling downward and half of which are spiraling upward. That has complicated urban ministry dramatically.

A black woman friend of mine said the other day, with tears in her eyes, that on the right we seem to have a white male population in the United States that is angry because of the loss of entitlements and privileges of being white and male. On the left, she said, is the rising frustration of black males at the loss of hope. She was talking about how Christians should take a stand of reconciliation, in the middle, between the hatred on the right and hatred on the left. I agree with that.

LINTHICUM: It's always easy to find scapegoats for our cities' problems. Currently, the country's political agenda concerning our cities involves attempting to scapegoat, and it's picking the most vulnerable and powerless and marginalized people in society to do that scapegoating on.

Take the welfare debate, for example. If you ask typical Americans what percentage of the federal budget is spent on welfare, they'd probably say about 20 percent. They think we can save money in the budget by cutting back on welfare. Further, one of the basic principles in welfare reform is that you have to stop giving away so much money to people who are on welfare because they don't deserve it. The argument goes that we middle-class people have to go out and work hard for our money. Then we just give it away to poor people through programs like Aid to Dependent Children. So, the argument says, all these programs ought to be abolished.

But if welfare is eliminated, who will this affect? It's going to affect the most vulnerable people in our society. The typical person on welfare is a woman with two children who has no means of support, no capacity for income, little education, and can't get work. There are no jobs out there for a person like that. And if a job was available, it would take her away from raising her children. So she's extremely vulnerable and totally dependent on that aid.

The truth is, we won't save significant amounts of money by cutting back on welfare. In reality, less than one percent of the national budget goes for welfare. The amount of money actually spent on welfare is so minimal that it is impossible to reform it significantly without actually eliminating it as an effective tool. A 1 percent change in the federal budget is not going to profoundly affect the budget.

Problems in U.S. inner cities still seem to be largely ignored by people living outside those areas. What do you think would be a good first step in helping us bring reconciliation and healing in our inner cities?

BAKKE: We have to start bringing ourselves together again by drawing more parallels. I am a former rural person, and I always try to show people that we've got common issues here. We have to show that poor people in the cities are not the only ones benefiting from federal aid. Electrical power is cheaper in my home state of Washington because the federal government controls the Bonneville Power Co., which controls 30 dams, and is really a subsidized electrical base that allows cheaper farming and dairy operations. But we don't call it Aid to Dependent Farmers.

LINTHICUM: We must begin to understand that their problem is my problem. That the issue I wrestle with as a white, upper middle-class, suburban American is the same issue an African-American, working-class person wrestles with in the inner city. In essence, we are victims of the same global forces that are simply manifesting themselves in different ways in our respective situations.

The thing we have in common is powerlessness. We are not in control of our own lives. A black poor person, marginalized from the main thrust of American society, knows that he or she is powerless and has learned to cope with that. As a white middle-class person working for some giant industry, my standard of living is due to the fact that I have sold, and keep on selling, my skills and abilities to the company for financial security. As the song puts it, "I've sold my soul to the company store."

I am in a very vulnerable and powerless position, because only so long as the company needs my skills are they going to employ me. When they decide I no longer make that contribution, I become what organizations euphemistically call "redundant." Then I'm laid off, and I'm as powerless as those poor people in the inner city who don't have a job.

Yet when I begin to realize that my problem is their problem, and their problem is my problem, and that my future depends upon their future, and their future depends upon my future, then we can begin to work together. But as long as we see the suburbs and inner city areas as separate from each other, and against each other, we are playing into the hands of a system that wants to maintain and control all the power.

When I begin to realize that we cannot talk about the inner city and the suburbs, but that we're talking about one massive economically linked metropolitan area, that our problems are essentially the same, and that every one of us has to be concerned with the good of the entire metropolitan area, then there's a future for us and for our city.

Karen Klein is a free-lance journalist in Monrovia, Calif.

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Megacities: Ready or Not

God's Word

Urbana Stories

36 days until

December 27-31, 2009