Kathmandu and the challenge of Asian cities

                                                       

(Note: A powerful new earthquake shook Nepal May 12, killing at least 36 people and sending thousands rushing to the streets as more buildings collapsed. The 7.3-magnitude earthquake came 17 days after the 7.8-magnitude quake that struck April 25, killing more than 8,000 people and destroying hundreds of thousands of homes. The new quake will add to the dismal statistics as rescue workers, including Southern Baptist relief teams, once again begin digging out.)

Nepalis have begun the long struggle to dig out of the rubble left by the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that killed more than 8,000 people and destroyed parts of Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital city.

It’s becoming clear that the quake did even greater damage in rural areas, where Southern Baptist disaster relief workers and their Nepali Christian partners are focusing aid efforts.

But the death and destruction in Kathmandu highlight the enormous physical challenges confronting many Asian cities.

“With an annual population growth rate of 6.5 percent and one of the highest urban densities in the world, the 1.5 million people living in the Kathmandu Valley [another estimate puts the population at 2.5 million] were clearly facing a serious and growing earthquake risk,” said a report issued by a group of seismologists who visited Kathmandu a week before the April 25 temblor. “It was also clear that the next large earthquake to strike near the Valley would cause significantly greater loss of life, structural damage, and economic hardship than past earthquakes had inflicted.”

Why? Too many people crowded into too little space — in this case, a quake-prone urban area — living in old, crumbling buildings or in flimsy structures thrown together to house people arriving daily in search of jobs and a better life.

“Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings kill people” is a common saying among seismologists. The more people living in inadequate housing, the more potential casualties. “You’re up against a Himalayan-scale problem with Third-World resources,” geologist Susan Hough told the Washington Post.

But the rapidly expanding megacities of South Asia face even greater challenges than earthquakes. The region already counts 12 of the world’s 50 largest urban centers. They need more food, water, jobs, housing and infrastructure for the millions streaming in from rural areas. Most of all, they need the hope found only in Jesus Christ.

“By 2020, India alone will have a shortage of 30 million housing units in big cities,” says Daren Cantwell,* IMB strategy leader for South Asian Peoples. “By 2030 they’re expecting 350 million more Indians to move to cities. By 2050, they expect 700 million to move to cities. The challenge for these cities to provide water, food and sanitation is huge. With this many people coming in, a city can’t assimilate fast enough. So you have these huge slums grow up — like in Mumbai, where you have 10 million people living in slums.”

Yet Mumbai, with a metro population of more than 20 million, also boasts legions of middle-class workers and the most billionaires in India. It’s the pulsating heart of India’s financial, cultural and entertainment worlds.   

“Our focus on cities will be at multiple levels of society, from the slum dwellers to the people living in high-rises to doctors, lawyers, Bollywood [India’s film industry], the whole gamut,” Cantwell says. “Finding the best places to work, the best ways to work and to multiply yourself through your national partners across a city are all things we’re dealing with as we seek strategies to reach these places.”

They’re looking for U.S. partners, too, as IMB focuses more intensively on extending the gospel in and through the world’s cities. On a global scale, urban dwellers will double to 6.4 billion by the middle of this century — 70 percent of the projected human population — according to a United Nations forecast.

“There are massive needs in cities around the world,” says IMB President David Platt. “How do we take this God-ordained movement of people toward cities, leverage what God is doing and intentionally go to cities, so we’ve got relationships when people get there? They’ve come in search of economic help or prosperity. We hope they’ll find what they need for daily life, but find in a greater way what they need for eternal life. We want to be there, ready with the gospel.”

*Name changed.

Immigration reshaping U.S. cities

Immigrants flowing into urban America live mostly in the inner cities of huge metro areas, form tight ethnic enclaves and stick together, right?

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Yesterday, cities were in the nations. Today, the nations are in the cities, urban ministry pioneer Ray Bakke has observed. But to reach those nations, or peoples, for Christ, we need to understand who they are, where they are and how they are moving and changing.

“The epicenter of the urban wave in North America is ethnic minorities,” Troy Bush told pastors, lay church leaders and others during a session of “ethnéCITY: Reaching the Unreached in the Urban Center,” held Oct. 20-22 at Park Slope Community Church in Brooklyn, N.Y. “How are we going to tap into this, not only to reach them with the Gospel, but to mobilize them so that they will be the ones reaching people groups? … We must recognize what God is doing in our cities and seize the day.”

Bush, a former missionary to Moscow, leads the Dehoney Center for Urban Ministry Training at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He also directs The Rebuild Initiative, a national urban leadership and church-planting network based in Atlanta, one of the most ethnically diverse communities in America. While working with the North American Mission Board, he directed church planting in Baltimore, another city undergoing major ethnic change.

Using new data about urban immigrants in America from the Brookings Institution, Bush examined some key changes in the decade between 2000 and 2010. The number of foreign-born people in the United States reached 40 million in 2010, a 28 percent increase since 2000 — and about 13 percent of the nation’s total population. More than a third of new immigrants during the decade came from Asia, while the fastest-growing group came from Africa.

Immigrants living in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas increased 27 percent during the period. The five cities with the largest foreign-born populations: New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and Houston. But the top five’s share of the total immigrant population dipped from 43 percent to 38 percent during the decade. The fastest growth came in smaller and mid-sized cities.

The Brookings study reports: “A swath of metro areas from Scranton (Pa.) stretching southwest to Indianapolis and Little Rock and sweeping east to encompass most of the Southeast and lower mid-Atlantic — including states and localities that have been flashpoints in the immigration debate — saw growth rates on the order of three times that of the 100-largest-metro-areas rate. These include Charlotte, Raleigh, Nashville and Indianapolis, all of which passed the 100,000 mark for total foreign-born population by 2010.”

“These aren’t your Chicagos, L.A.’s, New Yorks, your normal gateway cities for immigrants,” Bush said. “These are medium-size cities. … Many [immigrants and refugees] coming from places like Somalia are only passing through LaGuardia or JFK [airports in New York] as they go straight to Louisville, straight to Kansas City, straight to Memphis. They’re bypassing these large cities right from the start.”

Similarly, the state with the fastest-growing immigrant population isn’t California or New York, but North Carolina. Number two: Georgia — followed by Arkansas, Nevada and Tennessee.

“So when we think strategically about where we’re going to engage unreached people groups, it’s OK to think about coming to Atlanta,” Bush said. “It really is. Why? Because they’re coming there! The largest Hindu temple in the entire U.S. is in Atlanta, in Gwinnett County.”

Another key trend: New immigrants are increasingly settling in the suburbs of metro areas rather than traditional inner-city ethnic enclaves as they seek better neighborhoods, jobs and schools. By 2010, slightly more than half of all immigrants could be found in suburbs.

“The younger generations that are moving in today, almost regardless of where they are coming from, are skipping completely over the center city. They’re actually starting in the suburbs,” said Bush. “They’re not going into ethnic enclaves that once made up the cores of those cities.”

Perhaps even more significant is the increase of second-generation immigrants in the cities and the nation at large. More than half of the children in Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco are second-generation — i.e., U.S.-born but with at least one foreign-born parent. They now account for more than 11 percent of the national population.

“This is a wave that we’ve really, really got to get on the radar,” Bush urged. “But here’s the thing to watch: Second-generation immigrant children represent 25 percent of all of the children under 18 in the United States. It is an enormous wave that is beginning to crash down on us.”

Second-gens often leave their parents’ homes, neighborhoods and ethnic communities. They move around (a trait that also typifies many new immigrants). They change. Their worldviews change. They create new patterns and cultures. In some cases, they actually form new people groups. “New American ethnic groups are forming more quickly than ever before [and they are] the children and grandchildren of today’s immigrants,” write Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, authors of Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation.

Bottom line: There’s no simple formula for reaching the “nations in the cities.” But any number of creative ministries can meet specific needs. Bush cited 11 different church-planting models that work effectively in different contexts. There surely are more.

“No one church can get its arms completely around any metro, especially a larger metro,” Bush said. “So what I encourage churches to do is begin in their own neighborhoods, geographically and relationally. Because in many cases, through their work and their play, they’re encountering many of the different ethnic groups that are coming into their communities. The census is certainly a good starting point, but relief agencies and especially immigration agencies are actively looking for church partners who will come alongside as they’re bringing in peoples — many of whom are coming from closed countries and unreached people groups.”

What ultimately works, regardless of location or context, is Jesus Christ’s model of disciple-making.

“There are no two cities that are exactly the same, but when it comes down to it, the heart of everything we need to do comes back to proclaiming the Gospel, displaying the Gospel and making disciples that congregate into reproducing, multiplying churches. That core is central whether we’re in Moscow or we’re in Mumbai,” Bush said.

“We need to model how to live as believers with immigrants. We need to share meals with them. We need to share life together. Our homes need to be places where we invite them not to come for a meal but to come for a month. … They see how you cling to Christ when there’s nothing else to cling to. It’s not just something you talk about in a Bible study. It’s who you are as a disciple.”

(ethnéCITY, co-sponsored by IMB and the North American Mission Board, reflects the reality that national borders no longer define the task of missions in a globalized world. Two more ethnéCITY conferences are set for Nov. 17-19 in Houston and May 3-5 in Vancouver. To find out more or register, visit www.ethnecity.com.)

Mumbai is the urban future

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/77/7739/7739-43113.mp3

Read my full coverage of Mumbai at http://www.imb.org/main/news/details.asp?StoryID=7858&LanguageID=1709

See a multimedia presentation about Mumbai at http://www.commissionstories.com/?p=141

Flying at night into Mumbai, India, you see millions of pretty lights glittering along the curving coast, like jewels on the neck of a queen.

At ground level, in the harsh light of day, illusion gives way to reality. The elegant monarch that once was Bombay is dead. Something altogether different — both exciting and terrifying — has replaced her.

Two-pack-a-day air pollution. Round-the-clock road wars between vast armies of cars, trucks and auto-rickshaws. Sleek skyscrapers, posh coffee shops and luxury high-rise apartments abound, taking their place alongside the grand Taj Hotel, the monumental Gateway of India arch and other reminders of the city’s former glory. But they’re surrounded by slums, filth, stench, violence and the crumbling remnants of old Bombay.

And everywhere, people.

Greater Mumbai’s population is approaching 20 million. That number is projected to rise to 26 million by 2025. India, the land of 600,000 villages, has joined the relentless human trek toward urban centers as the global economy moves in the same direction. Half of the nation’s more than 1 billion people will be living in cities by 2020, some estimates say.

“South Asia, set to overtake East Asia as the world’s most populous realm in 2010, will contain nearly one-quarter of all humanity by 2025,” reports geographer Harm de Blij. “Consider this: There are more people in Dhaka [Bangladesh] than in Greece. There are more people in Manila [Philippines] than in Belgium. There are more people in Delhi [India] than in Chile. Mumbai will soon overtake Australia.”

On a global scale, urban dwellers will double to 6.4 billion by the middle of this century — 70 percent of the projected human population, according to a United Nations forecast. By that time, predicts a BBC report, Mumbai “will have reached an almost unimaginable size.”

Mumbai, then, “is the future of urban civilization on the planet,” declares Suketu Mehta. “God help us.”

Mehta, author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found” (Vintage, 2004), left the city of his childhood in 1977. When he returned two decades later to live there, he barely recognized it. Somewhere toward the end of the 20th century, the bustling but livable Bombay he remembered had become — like Jekyll turning to Hyde — the dangerous, uncontrollable beast called Mumbai.

Mumbai has “hundreds of very different ethnic communities, most of whom heartily dislike one another,” Mehta notes. “They [tolerated] one another for centuries” — until the Hindu-Muslim riots of the 1990s, which left 1,000 dead and drove more than 100,000 from their homes. The riots tore apart the city’s delicate ethnic fabric and fueled extremist forces in politics and society that persist today. The citywide unity displayed after last November’s terrorist attacks encouraged many, but didn’t erase the memories of past bloodshed.

Bombay’s name change to Mumbai, part of a national initiative that renamed several major cities, symbolizes more fundamental shifts. The steady inflow of migrants and merchants seeking a job, a deal or a patch of ground to occupy has become a torrent. Organized crime bosses control major parts of the economy; their gangs attack each other and victimize the public. More than 100,000 women and children work as prostitutes in the city. The police have become notoriously violent and corrupt. The rule of law is nearly nonexistent. City government is dysfunctional. The courts have slowed to a crawl; justice interminably delayed is almost a guarantee.

On a more mundane level, accomplishing anything in Mumbai requires single-minded determination — and money.

“You’ve got to pay five bribes to get anything done,” complains Suman Nabar, an eye doctor who struggled for years to build a private medical practice. She treats her patients all day — and sometimes cleans the office toilets at night to make sure it’s done right.

“I just wish people would do their jobs,” she says with a tone of exasperated resignation.

Yet for all its staggering problems, Mumbai radiates addictive energy and excitement.

“The chaos is what I’m going to miss when I leave,” says Rose Wynn,* a Southern Baptist worker retiring after serving in the city for more than 10 years. “The chaos and the people. I love it.”

She marvels at how people still help one another, regardless of caste or class. If you fall on the street, someone appears from nowhere to offer assistance. If you’re lost, someone shows you where to go and personally takes you there, if necessary.

Somehow, the city keeps going — like its trains, the arteries that move 6 million people through Mumbai every day. And like Mumbai’s renowned dhabba wallahs.

Mostly nonliterate deliverymen, the dhabba wallahs carry some 200,000 hot lunches each work day by foot, bicycle and train from the suburban homes where they are made to the cross-town offices where they are consumed. That’s more than 60 million lunch tins a year. Of that total, they misplace perhaps 10 — an accuracy rate UPS and FedEx have enviously studied (see a multimedia presentation about Mumbai’s dhabba wallahs at http://www.commissionstories.com/?p=141 )

“It looks like chaos, but it works,” says an amazed observer.

Could the Gospel follow similar paths across Mumbai and other vast megacities, bringing living bread to millions of hungry souls? The time has come to find out.

“I wouldn’t say so much that we’re failing as that we’ve never tried,” says John Wynn,* a Southern Baptist worker in Mumbai, of the Christian movement’s response to the global urban explosion.

“We haven’t had the focus and the vision to reach the urban masses. The only answer is Jesus Christ. We can talk about the problems, the poverty and corruption and politicians. But it all goes back to the darkness they live in.

“They need Jesus Christ.”

*(Names changed)

Cities: quick facts

Consider these numbers and projections:

-- In China, 200 million people (the equivalent of two-thirds of the U.S. population) have migrated from the countryside to cities over the last 10 years.

-- Every second, two people move from rural areas to cities.

-- Half of all Asians and Africans will live in cities by 2030.

-- The number of squatters living in urban slums and "shadow cities" will double to 2 billion within a generation.

The movement of humanity into cities might never reverse. According to demographic forecasters, we face an "urban future," with all its challenges and opportunities.

"As recently as the early 20th century, the vast majority of the world's people lived in the countryside and practiced subsistence farming," writes Christopher Flavin, president of Worldwatch Institute. "By 2005, the world's urban population of 3.18 billion people constituted 49 percent of the total (global) population of 6.46 billion."

The 50-percent mark has now been passed, marking "a significant milestone on the long road of civilization."

How will cities – even in developed countries – find or produce sufficient food, water, housing, energy, jobs, healthcare, education and infrastructure for so many people? Government, business and community leaders are looking for answers to that question with increasing urgency. The increasingly urgent question for missions: How will so many city dwellers hear the Gospel?

Simply locating and identifying them – and their myriad communities and subcultures – is becoming a daunting challenge. Sometimes they maintain distinct, separate communities. Sometimes they mingle and form new groups. Either way, such groupings may multiply into millions of members, each subgroup struggling to gain and maintain its place in society.

"We look at the city and wonder what it will take to change its heartbeat – one that doesn't pulse for Jesus," says a Christian worker in urban India. "We know that God's desire is that all people bow at His feet in worship, but we see people daily bowing instead before almost anything else .... This city is our passion. Pray that God will change unbelieving hearts -– miraculously, contagiously."

A mission strategist adds:

"We need to receive this gift [migration to the cities] that God has set before us and use it to take the Gospel to the mass of people in the cities around the world," says a mission strategist. "For so long, life in the rural world has shaped our missions efforts. Now we live in an urban world and our methods to reach people must change. We must love the city as God does."

How, specifically, do we do that?

Cities: challenge of a new era

Yep, I finally started a blog. Welcome to the first post!

The topic: cities. Specifically, Buenos Aires, the second-largest "urban agglomeration" in South America.

It's the first of five global giants I'm profiling for an extended coverage project called "A Tale of Five Cities." Why? Because more of us live in urban than rural areas for the first time in history (we passed the mark sometime last year, according to demographers).

The implications of that reality for humanity, for the church and for the mission task are enormous -- as Buenos Aires illustrates.

(View a multimedia presentation about Buenos Aires — including video, sound, stories and photos at http://www.commissionstories.com/?p=38)

Is it possible to feel alone in a city of 13 million people? It is in Buenos Aires.

Glittering, sophisticated jewel of South American cities, Buenos Aires is Argentina’s capital, economic hub, cultural center and home to a third of the nation’s 40 million people. The city ranks as the second-largest metropolis on the continent (after São Paulo, Brazil) and the 10th-largest in the world, according to United Nations statistics.

But if you look beneath the surface of modern Buenos Aires’ frenetic pace, its wide avenues, its trendy bars and tango cafes, its cultural riches and European atmosphere, you find deep undercurrents of isolation, insecurity, hopelessness — and fear.

Why the pervasive sense of unease?

“In a big city, the spiritual strongholds are loneliness and fear,” says missionary Randy Whittall, the International Mission Board’s team leader and strategy coordinator for Buenos Aires. “It may seem crazy to think about being lonely when you’re surrounded by 13 million people, but they are.”

The metal bars guarding doors and windows represent something deeper than fear of crime, however. The waves of political violence, economic chaos and social turmoil experienced by Argentines since the 1970s have left a legacy of suspicion, disillusionment and cynicism — similar to the malaise that has plagued the United States in recent years.

“People just don’t trust anyone anymore,” explains Whittall. “It’s a huge barrier to the Gospel, because it makes it very difficult to approach people and share. You’ve got this priceless gift you’d like to give everybody, but fear keeps them from being open to even talking about it.”
Fear and distrust aren’t the only barriers to the Gospel in Buenos Aires. Nominal Catholicism (perhaps 5 percent of the population regularly attend Mass) has “inoculated” many people to faith. As in other major urban centers, materialism, secularism and postmodernism are more powerful draws than any organized religion — although a variety of cults attract the poor, the young and the gullible. As in Europe and North America, “tolerance” trumps tradition, opening the door to immorality, New Age beliefs and paganism.

Another major barrier: People are hard to reach — not just spiritually but physically. In the Federal Capital, three of every four people live in apartments — typically, high-rise condos with vigilant doormen or locked entrances. Whittall describes the daily schedule of many apartment-dwellers in the city:

“They get up. They take an elevator downstairs and get in their car. They drive to work. They come back and hit their garage door opener. They drive downstairs, get in an elevator and go up to their apartment. Their actual contact outside of their home and work is practically nonexistent.”
What do these realities mean for the Argentine church? After more than a century of work by missionaries and Argentine evangelicals, the spiritual lostness of contemporary Buenos Aires rivals that of cities in much less evangelized regions of the world. According to recent research, fewer than three in 100 Porteños (“People of the port”) claim evangelical faith in Jesus Christ.

There’s no single solution to the dilemma, but the time for some experimentation clearly has arrived. That’s exactly what Whittall and his missionary team are doing.

One key strategy they believe can work: small groups — many, many of them — that develop behind locked doors among families and other “relationship circles.” Whittall and his team are aiming for 2,500 home groups around the city one day — groups that guide lost people to faith, worship, make disciples and reproduce themselves. Many will gather in apartments and houses; others may meet in restaurants or businesses.

“Churches tend to grow along family lines; you invite someone you know,” he says. “Our goal is not to see big churches but small ones that grow and multiply.”

WHERE THE WORLD IS MOVING

Buenos Aires represents the direction where the world is rapidly moving: sprawling, crowded, ethnically and socially diverse, fast-paced, urban masses of people.

Emphasis on urban. A projected 88 percent of human population growth over the next generation will occur in cities in developing countries.

Buenos Aires is one of 20 global metro areas with populations above 10 million. Cities with populations exceeding 1 million people each total 380 worldwide. Much of future global urban growth will come in smaller cities (500,000 and under), but it will still be distinctively urban.

The urban trend certainly applies in South America, where nearly 80 percent of the region’s 380 million people live and work in cities, a percentage that will rise in the years to come. The continent counts 39 cities with populations topping 1 million.

Buenos Aires presents all the challenges of other urban giants, reports Whittall.

Besides sheer numbers and sprawl, Buenos Aires encompasses many distinct population segments — majority Argentines, numerous immigrant groups from near and far, students, professionals, the rich, the poor, the middle class, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, postmoderns.

In other words, cities within cities.

“Obviously we don’t have the personnel or the resources to wage a battle on every front,” Whittall admits. “You have to strategically pick certain areas that best fit your people, their gifts, their calling and abilities. We try to match those with the different strata and different groups represented here.”

In 2006, International Mission Board teams and their overseas partners applied church-planting strategies in 170 urban centers, most of which were unreached (less than 2 percent evangelical). Twenty-eight of those centers were engaged by mission workers for the first time.

There’s a long, long way to go — and a major change in mindset is required to get there.

“We still have the mindset of rural missions,” says Whittall, who changed his own mindset after growing up in rural Oklahoma. “But the mission of the 21st century, however much we don’t like it, is going to be in the Beijings, the New Delhis, the massive, polluted, crowded urban areas where billions of people live.”

Do you agree? How should the church respond?