The City and Unreached Peoples (Urbana 87)

part 1 of 2
by Harvie M. Conn

This article is a transcript from an address originally given by Harvie Conn at Urbana 87

What is a city? For a North American white, a city is a melting pot. For a suburbanite it's a ghetto. For my next-door neighbor in inner-city Philadelphia, a city is "One large collection of nothings."

Now all these definitions are wrong, and they're all wrong for the same reason. Yuppie, suburbanite or black, most people can't see anything in the city except mathematical urban units of one. They're like the pastor I met once in our ministry in Korea. At a moment of truth he confided in me, "I have a very hard time telling all Americans apart. You look so alike." I think that's how we all see cities. They all look so alike - sort of an urbanized Charles Bronson death wish.

A rose is a rose is a rose. And a city is a city is a city - a monoclass stereotype where everything becomes the least pleasant denominator. And when you see nothing else, you resort again to that Norman Rockwell worldview, the melting-pot myth where everything looks so nice and everyone is equal - of course some are more equal than others. In this scheme we're all in this together, and there's plenty of room for those that must sit in the back of the bus. We're all one big happy family. Tell that to the single parent on welfare in Newark, New Jersey. Ethnic differences, poor and rich neighborhoods, Yuppies, blue collar workers, physicians, roofers - they all slowly evaporate into this new homogeneity that is usually identified only as urban.

Now, what does all this have to do with world missions? You can't reach what you can't see.

Take a look, for example, at Lima, Peru. If you took your first look in 1984, you would find a city somewhere between four and a half and six million people, which, by the way, account for one-third of the total population of Peru. In 1982 people were moving into the capital city of Lima at a rate of 230 people per day. Today it is several times that figure, but if that is all you notice about Lima, your picture is still too general. You still haven't seen what you need to see to minister effectively there.

Lima is full of migrants, migrants from the provinces and the remotest Andean villages. And as you look closely, you will notice that they don't lose their identity as soon as they get off the bus. You won't see them with their knees shaking, looking around ready to have a mental breakdown because suddenly they've made it to the big city. Instead they come to the city and form social clubs, organized around their home locality. These regional clubs give them a place to gather, to feel at home in their new surroundings, a buffer zone that cushions the impact of the new urban world that they are part of. In 1957 there were 200 such associations in Lima. By 1984 there were more than 6,000. Now don't tell these people that Lima is a melting pot. Lima is a salad bowl. In fact, it may be 6,000 salad bowls awaiting the gospel's salad dressing.

Look again. Here's another Lima - the Lima you see on the street, an army of street venders, 200,000 to 300,000 strong. Up to 70% of the urban labor force in Lima make up this nonformal business world.

Look again and see Lima's 10,000 abandoned children. They shine shoes, wash cars, change tires and go begging during the day. At night they sleep in parks or on the sidewalk They are a part of the fifty percent of Lima's population that is under 22 years of age.

When you look at Lima like this, what do you see? You see magnetic centers that are sucking or pulling people into their fields. These magnetic fields are people groups. And they pull in different ways. Sometimes the pull is language or ethnicity. For example, 30% of the 18,000,000 Peruvians speak only Quechua. Yet there are only two Quechua-language evangelical congregations in all of Lima.

Sometimes the bonding that holds people together is geography, social space, a commonly shared residential territory. Migrants, for example, in Lima pour into something called the pueblos jóvenes, a euphemism meaning "young towns" to the government, but "slums" to the city. Three of every ten Limeños live in one of these young towns. The children who fill them live on a cup of tea and a couple of bread rolls a day. And an inflation rate of 125% keeps them there.

Sometimes the bonding that brings people together into a group is nongeographic social space. The street vendors and abandoned children represent such groups. Sometimes vocations bring non-neighbors together. Sometimes its common interests.

For seven years in Korea I did evangelistic work in brothels, sharing Christ with the country's prostitute population of over 50,000. They too represent a people group. A new and massive people group has emerged in just the last decade. It crosses ethnic, linguistic and even social barriers. I speak of those suffering from AIDS.

Some months ago I was visiting the midwest, and a friend invited me to go to a midnight prayer meeting. We went into this row house and up a set of rickety stairs and opened the door. There was this long table and about twelve people sitting around it, all with Bibles in front of them with beer cans strewn all over the smoke-filled room.

The Bible study leader was at the end, smoking this long, black cigar - and she really enjoyed it. At the other end of the table was this guy, built like Sylvester Stallone, wearing a black T-shirt with a white skull on it. On one arm was a big tattoo, a heart with the word mother on it and a big dagger through it.

So we sat down for a two-hour Bible study. Having been teaching at a typical white suburban theological seminary where everything's safe, I had my doubts when things started, but when we were done, I had no doubts about what was going on. These were people who really loved the Lord, most of them brand new believers. The gentleman at the end of the table with the tattoo had been responsible for leading almost everyone there to Christ.

These were bikers. They wouldn't feel much at home in our community or in most of our churches. Two or three of the members of the Bible study were former members of Hell's Angels. A member of the Christian Biker's Association, the fellow who started the Bible study spends six months of the year with his wife on the road, and his whole ministry is spent trying to reach bikers for Jesus. "Most outsiders," he told me, "are turned off by the beer and cigars. You ought to have seen what they were smoking and drinking a few months ago. Some Christians start at 1; other, at -3." I had found another unreached people group, one I didn't have to travel overseas to find. And I had also been reminded that sanctification follows justification, not vice versa.

What does this all mean for world evangelization? It means we need to realize that cities are not single, homogeneous little packages - Limas, Lisbons and Los Angeles'. They are conglomerates of thousands of different people groups. There are TV-movie entertainers in Seoul, soccer teams playing in São Paulo, Brazil; there are truck drivers spending 12-15 hours on the road between Osaka and Toyko. There are the cosmopolitans of Singapore, who communicate only in English, their class-consciousness high, their ethnic-consciousness low.

Last summer, as a classroom experiment, I sent three teams of missionaries to Times Square in New York. Their assignment: to survey the same area of about six city blocks in the course of an evening and to come back the next day with a list of fifteen unreached peoples.

The next morning we all gathered to present our lists. They included over fifty people groups with an overlap of only three or four. In the same area we came across only three Christian groups and churches, and only one of those, we found out, was working with the people in that area. We also found that the bars in the area were much more aware of people groups than the church, There were gay bars, singles bars, bars for the theater crowd and bars for newspaper people. Remember the opening line of the Cheers theme song, " . . . where everybody knows your name"?

We had begun to see the unreached people of the city, visible to God, but too often invisible to us. On our list we put prostitutes, sidewalk vendors, tourists, police, gays, theater people, teenage runaways, bag ladies, the homeless, store owners. We found all sorts of gospel targets and no sharpshooters. And we were also discovering that if you aim at everything, you will hit nothing.

Urban People Groups from the New Testament
Look with me at still another city with its people groups. We'll pick one with heavy population density, perhaps 200 people per acre, the equivalent of the industrial slums of Chicago or Philadelphia. This city has been devastated by war, and it has been rebuilt and gentrified by its Yuppie population.

It has become a thriving commercial center and capital of its province. Its reputation is built on a combination of religion and sex - all without beneflt of television or industrial-strength mascara. It's name has become a proverb for the good life, for a free-wheeling lifestyle. We're talking, of course, about the city of Corinth in the days of the apostle Paul.

The Lord had told the apostle Paul on his first visit to Corinth not to be afraid. "You don't have to hide in the suburbs, man. Don't forget what I did for Moses in Egypt. There are a lot of good folks in the city." That's my rough paraphrase of Acts 18:10.

Now when you read Romans, probably written from Corinth, and Paul's two letters written to the Christians in Corinth, you can see how God kept his promise. High and low, rich and poor, Jew and Greek - all the social, political and ethnic networks are there, and the gospel is touching them all.

Erastus - you find his name in the last chapter of Romans - either the director of the public works department (NIV) or the city treasurer (RSV) is there in Corinth. The aristocracy is being touched as well as the influential and the wealthy. First Corinthians 1 mentions Crispus. He came to Christ during Paul's first visit. Acts 18:18 calls him a ruler of the synagogue. That was a leader of the Jewish worship service, someone who assumed responsibility for the synagogue building. it also meant a man with money, social influence, far beyond the boundaries of the Jewish community itself.(1) I wonder if that isn't why in Acts 18:8 we read of the great impact of Crispus's conversion on the city. "Many of the Corinthians who heard him believed and were baptized."

He had a baptismal partner named Gaius. Romans 16:23 informs us that he was "host of the whole church" at Corinth, and that certainly means that he had a house big enough to put up Paul and to accommodate all the various Christian groups in Corinth that met together. He too was a fellow with some wealth and property.

At the other end of the social scale were the slaves, and the Corinthian Christian community included them as well. In fact, the numerical strength of the Corinthian church probably heavily leaned toward the have-nots of society. That's how God builds his church. With the wise and the powerful and the have-nots, all together doing the work of Jesus Christ.

In I Corinthians 1:26-28 Paul draws some gospel lessons against the background of these social realities. He paints a sociological picture of the church. There are "the wise," the educated classes; there are "the influential"; there are those of "noble birth." But there are "not many" of these in the church, though there are some.

By contrast, there are "the lower born," "the despised," "the things that are not." Primarily, among these people groups, "the refuse of the world, the offiscouring of all things" (I Cor 4:10-13 RSV), the church grows. And, says Paul in his best theological voice, that is the usual way God does things.

Is it easy to build an urban church out of such diverse groups? Not if Paul's experience is typical. First Corinthians 1 gives you a good sample of the problems.

Ethnic differences pick away at the gospel. Greeks look for wisdom; Jews look for power. What is needed is a new vision of Christ crucified, "the power of God and the wisdom of God" (I Cor 1:24). Social differences create conceit. Wealthy and influential Christians presumably were looking down their "noble born" noses at the "have not" Christians. The answer, says Paul, is God's weird peculiarities of grace in election, the foolish things of this world chosen to shame the wise (I Cor 1:27-28).

Read part 2 of 2 of The City and Unreached Peoples

NOTES

Harvie M. Conn, former missionary in Korea, is professor of missions and director of the urban missions program at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

1. Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), pp. 74-75.

Comments

Be the first one to add a comment.

To post a comment, please login or register

The City and Unreached Peoples (Urbana 87)

God's Word

Urbana Stories

35 days until

December 27-31, 2009