Urban Evangelization (Urbana 87)

Message from Urbana 87
by Ray Bakke

"For two thousand years we have had the Great Commission to go into all the world to preach the gospel to all peoples and make disciples of the nations. Now we know where they are - in my neighborhood, in the cities, in Los Angeles, in Miami and the teeming cities around the world."

Billy Graham rightly reminds us that the call to missions is a personal call. But God does not give us mere advice, which we paternalistically deliver to the city, but news, news that liberates and sets people free from bondage. The fundamental difference between the messages of Jesus Christ and Ann Landers is precisely this. Advice requires you to do something to make things work. News declares what God has already done for you in Jesus Christ. We go forth as persons called by a risen Christ to announce good news.

We have just been reminded by our lucid Sri Lankan expositor Ajith Fernando that God himself is a missionary. God is striving to enlarge our message and get his messengers to enlarge their maps. The mission of Jonah was to go to a city that was filled with hatred and war. The message of Jonah confronts the narcissism of America, and confronts the ethnocentric gospels which we wrap in flags and deliver to nations around the world.

World-Class Barriers to Urban Mission

My task is to enlarge your map. I want to draw your attention to the shifting frontiers of mission today. I want to talk about a world that has gone from a world of nations to a world of interconnected multinational cities. It is a world of some 223 nations that is in reality a world of 300 world-class cities, a world growing so fast that by the year 2000 there will be nearly 500 cities of more than 1 million people. The barriers to mission and evangelism today are real and complex.

One of the barriers is simply the demographics. The United Nations has a department of 40 people that focuses on the demographics of cities. And the numbers are staggering. In the next few moments a hundred babies will be born in the world. Forty-nine will be yellow. Thirteen will be white like me. The rest will be black and brown. Most of them will live in the cities of the world.

In order to get to Urbana, most of you passed through metropolitan Chicago, a six-county area with 7.1 million people. I am here to tell you that the monthly net growth of the world is more than the population of metropolitan Chicago. We are talking about a world of rapidly increasing numbers. There have not been a billion minutes since Jesus walked on this earth over nineteen hundred years ago, but we are going to produce a billion-and-a-half new babies in the next thirteen or fourteen years. And without a doubt most of them will live in the cities.

For two thousand years we have had the Great Commission to go into all the world to preach the gospel to all peoples and make disciples of the nations. Now we know where they are - in my neighborhood, in the cities, in Los Angeles, in Miami and the teeming cities around the world. The numbers are staggering - but so is the kaleidoscopic complexity of the cities. The city is like an escalator moving in the wrong direction - like a gigantic magnet sucking people from the jungles, from islands, from tribal groups.

For centuries western Europe could organize its life, its ideology, its world view around the Mediterranean. If you read Henri Pirenne's classic Medieval Cities, you will discover that Europe swung for 800 years like a slowly swinging door. She was pushed by Islam and pulled by the northern cities of Germany. Europe was forced to be a nation looking north and west. We have been in an Atlantic-perimeter world for the last 500 to 600 years. But now within this century, your lifetime and mine, the world is swinging again. The door is opening, only this time much faster, and we're shifting from an Atlantic to a Pacific-perimeter world. This new world is beckoning us with explosive and complex cities.

The fastest growing cities in the world are in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and they are changing the way we think, live and construct our economics. Sadly, the fastest growing cities are often in areas where the church is the weakest - in the Asian perimeter. So the scale of urban mission is measured not only by the size and number of the cities, but also by the changing configuration and complexity of the cities.

For example, Mexico City is the oldest city in this hemisphere, but it is also the youngest. Twenty million people live in that city - try to imagine it - twenty million people. But while the median age in Chicago is 31, the median age in Mexico City is 14. That means there are some ten million people in Mexico City under 14 years of age. It is an old city and a young city.

A few weeks ago I was walking the streets of Toronto with a former student of mine, now a missionary to the streets of that city. We were looking at some of the 20,000 teenagers on the streets of Toronto. And as we looked we wanted to weep. Two weeks ago I was in Hollywood, observing some of the 5,000 teenagers on the streets of that city, selling their bodies. They have come from all over, drawn by a dream, but living on the streets.

A few weeks ago I heard the Ecumenical Night Ministry in Chicago tell the story of 10,000 teenagers on the streets of Chicago. They are a city within a city. Thirty per cent of them are psychiatric mental cases, patients who were released from mental institutions and psychiatric hospitals when they lost funding.

The complexity of the city is that it isn't one city. It's a commercial city. It's an industrial city. It's a nocturnal city. It's a daytime city. It's an ethnic city. It's an international city. It's a migrant city. It's a student city. It's a five-star hotel city. It's a derelict city, a deviant city, an institutionalized city. People are being packaged in cities. To reach them is to deal with numbers, growth and complexity

But many of these cities are not easily accessible to us. Thirty of the cities with populations of more than one million are in China. At least twenty of them are in the Soviet Union. Many of the fastest-growing cities in the world are in the Islamic world. Some are like Beirut, which may be a parable of the city. Today we know it as a violent city. But it is not well known that a decade ago, when the civil war began in Beirut, the population was one million. Today, after years of war and many, many deaths, the population of Beirut is about 1.8 million. In other words, the city has served as a magnet to draw people out of south Lebanon into that city - and it's almost impossible for us to go in and do anything about that.

Personal Barriers to Urban Mission

So when we talk about urban mission today, we are talking about some barriers that are very real. But I want to talk about three barriers that I believe confront you personally. And it seems to me that these are the real barriers.

In 1980 the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization held a conference in Thailand. My assignment was to help organize the urban part of that consultation. In the preparation we carried on correspondence with people in over a hundred cities. So I carried with me about 5,000 pages of primary research to that conference. We sat down with 110 people who were from six continents and began to look at what God was doing in the cities. We were amazed to find how little was being done by evangelicals and how few mission agencies seemed concerned about preparing missionaries for urban mission. We were also stunned by how God was using new means, new forms and new wineskins.

After that conference I was assigned to travel to about a hundred cities, holding consultations with people, taking a fresh look at their city and ministries on the one hand, and then asking, What are the new models of ministry that are needed to reach this city - whether it be Cairo, Copenhagen, Zagreb or Mexico City?

I had been taught in seminary by the late Paul Little that if people don't come to Christ or won't witness for Christ, it is because they lack two things - either information or motivation. But I'm here to say, there is a third factor in urban mission: intimidation, the we-never-did-it-that-way-before syndrome. Those are the seven last words of the church.

The Theological Barrier

One of the barriers is not external in the big, bad city, but internal. It is a theological barrier. Most of us have a personal theology, a personal conversion. I would call it a Philippian theology - a theology of Christ who left the heavens and came down to live within us. A "my God and I" relationship - and it's wonderful. It's pietism. Most of us lack however, a Colossian theology of a transcendent Christ, who is Lord of the systems and structures of the world, including those gigantic macrostructures of the metroplace, the city. And without that Colossian perspective, we have relief theology, but no theology of reform.

We deal with victims, but we can't deal with the issues of justice. A thief-on-the-cross theology - just enough to make it to heaven - is a place to start. But if we are to engage in urban mission, we are going to have to keep studying. In the words of Walter Scott, "For a Christian one book is enough, but a thousand aren't too many." It is a fact that with the Bible School training which I have, I could be the most educated person in many a village, but in many cases the city will not yield to minimalist education. Some of you will need to go on and study hard to apply that Colossian theology. To personal theology you need to add a public theology of mission. We need not only a missiology of the city, but a biblical theology of the city.

To think biblically means to understand how God has moved in creation and redemption throughout biblical history. To think historically is to understand that the same Spirit of God that moves us today has also led God's people across cultures for the past two thousand years. We need these lessons from history because the city is a museum of art and architecture, a museum of cultures and peoples who come from the far comers of the globe and are being reshaped by the forces of the city.

The voice you hear is in Chicago, but the culture is from some place else. The agendas people carry are from other places. So we need to develop a world view that helps us see that the world now lives in my neighborhood. There are sixty nations represented in my neighborhood in Chicago, sixty nations in the public school where my kids went, and the school teaches in eleven languages. Thirty-five percent of the neighborhood is Black, but many Black cultures are represented - tobacco culture, cotton culture, coal culture, Caribbean culture. These are all Black cultures, but they are all different. Twenty-eight percent are Asians, but they are all different. There are north, south and east Asians - some of them are refugees and poor, but many are wealthy and elite.

One of the real barriers to urban missions is the way we have read the Bible as a rural book. We sing "Work for the Night Is Coming" and "I Come to the Garden Alone" - hymns imbued with pastoral and rural imagery. But, as Bill Pannell says, it is very difficult for the urbanite in downtown Cleveland to think in terms of herding sheep. We need to expand our theology until it encompasses Gods vision for the city.

The Ecclesiastical Barrier

Another major barrier is ecclesiastical. For many of us the church has been a club - my white, middle-class church could not survive when the neighborhood changed. Many of us are the product of the white-flight, white-flight syndrome. We fled the city just when God brought the whole world there.

Some of us feel guilty about that. But let me tell you, when you left the city, the Spirit didn't leave. He just jumped into other wineskins. Today the fastest growing churches are often Black, Hispanic or Korean - and many of them worship in languages other than English. The Lord doesn't need you to come back to Chicago as a Messiah sent to save the city. If you come, you must join him in the work he is already doing there.

Today denominations and mission boards are struggling to understand how they should divide the turf. Whereas in the past they could distinguish between home mission and foreign mission, today those distinctions don't make much sense - what is home and what is foreign cannot be so easily distinguished. The Southern Baptist Home Mission ministers in twenty-six languages in Los Angeles alone. The archdiocese of Chicago must deal with twenty-two languages. The foreign field has come home.

Today we need to think in terms of mission to the geographically distant - that mission to reach a billion or more people living far from any existing church - and the new frontier of mission to the culturally distant - that two-and-a-half billion people that live within the shadows of existing churches. We will still need missionaries to cross oceans, mountains and deserts to reach unreached peoples. But the new frontier is in the cities constructed from the mass migrations and exploding birth rates of our day. This is the new reality of world mission.

One of the assignments I enjoy giving to classes on urban mission is to take them into a supermarket and give them thirty minutes to observe what is happening in the neighborhood. They come out and tell me how the food business has changed in the last thirty, even fifteen years. Stores are open twenty-four hours. Everything has been computerized. Prices have gone up. While stores used to carry eight thousand products, they now stock twenty-four thousand products. They have an Asian section, a Spanish section, a Geritol section, a salt-free section. Other sections cater to microwave people. They have foreign-language checkers, and their check-cashing service is more convenient than my bank. Gone are days when the meat-cutters union could say "We will not sell meat after six o'clock."

But then I take my students over to a nearby church, and we look at the sign. And what do we see? Morning worship: 11:00 A.M. - as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.

And I ask, How can a supermarket without the Spirit of God do what the church doesn't seem to be able to do with the Spirit? How can we liberate the church to reach the city? How can we persuade the foreign board to team up with the home board in teaching the cross-cultural skills we now need at home? How can we do that? For most of us this is a greater barrier than Islam - and I say that from my own experience of trying to overcome the barrier.

The Fear Barrier

The third barrier is intensely personal - it has to do with our fear of the city. My cousin Gordon went to Zambia. We entered Moody Bible Institute together thirty-one years ago, and he went to Zambia. He is a hero. He is a missionary, and he's got pythons and cobras in his garden. I've got news for him: I've got Pythons and Cobras and Latin Kings in my yard.

But many people who admire my cousin Gordon think I'm stupid to raise my family in the city. There is a dichotomy in the minds of many of us as we think about the city. Many of the great missionary heroes buried their children in foreign lands. But if you take your children to the city today, someone is going to tell you that you are abusing them. You are going to alienate them from the mainstream of our culture. I have heard this argument, and I reject it.

Jesus Christ is Lord of the city. We desperately need families in the city. We need children, for they quickly adapt to the culture and give us access to the culture of the city. They give us reasons to be involved in the schools. We need Christians back in public housing projects, back in the labor unions, back in the playgrounds and grammar schools. We can't afford to pull them out.

We cannot fight the battle for the cities the way we fought the war in Vietnam. We parked our planes on Guam, flew them at 37,000 feet, bombed people to hell, went back for a night's sleep and lost the war. You cannot blitz the cities and expect to win the battle. We have to incarnate the gospel, wrap it up and deliver it in person to the street. The personal challenge is a barrier for many of you. Jonah found it a barrier.

The theme this week is "Should I Not Be Concerned?" Are you concerned enough to overcome the barriers? The numbers are staggering. David Barrett, who knows the numbers better than anyone else, has been telling us that the figures are astounding. Humanly and mathematically speaking, we are losing the battle for the city. I say that apart from what the Spirit of God might do and how you might figure in those numbers. The complexity of the city is overwhelming, and the stunning reality is that the bigger a city gets, the less we can comprehend and communicate that complexity. Social psychologists speak of this as the psychology of overload.

The sheer complexity of the city is staggering, not to speak of the Beiruts, the Sowetos and Nicosias that are locked behind restrictive national borders. But I would remind you of the three barriers you need to confront this week. First, you need to overcome the theological barrier, that seven-foot hump between your personal faith and the faith that equips you for the full-orbed mission of the church in the world of today.

Second, you need to get over the ecclesiastical barrier that looks at the church as a little club and start asking hard questions about how we build churches within the complex structures and ethnicity of our cities. How can the church at home become the foreign church, and how can we speak with integrity about the global mission of the local church in a world in which the nations have come to live with us?

And finally you need to confront the personal issues. You will always be a minority in the city - racially, spiritually, ideologically, politically and almost every other way. Are you ready? Remember Romans 8:31: "If God is for us, who can be against us?" Go for it. Go for it, and God bless you.

Ray Bakke is a Speaker at Urbana 06.

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December 27-31, 2009