Submit a 500-750 word referenced reflection on what you feel were the key items covered during the week and how they might apply to your present or future education, life, or ministry. This is a very important part of the learning experience each week and should contain significant reflection on what you have learned.
Specifically, you should report on:
The above five (5) weekly reflection questions are independent of each other, meaning that your response to each question may or may not be a continued discussion of the previous question. It is possible to have five (5) entirely different responses to five (5) different aspects of what you learned this week.To score well, the reflection must make reference to the assigned reading (including parenthetical references), will include suggested real-world manifestations of the course material, and will include a plan for implementing the material in a personal and/or professional setting. Adhere to the following for this assignment:
177October 2009
We are living in a period of enormous global transfor-mation—that is no secret. One of the results is that
cities across the globe—all cities, the city in general—are rapidly
changing. A majority of the earth’s population now live in cities or
megacities.1 Over the past several decades, these cities throughout
the world have undergone a transformation that is closely con-
nected to the transformation in
economy, politics, and culture
associated with globalization.2
The city is no longer located
spatially at the center. It is be-
coming decentered and trans-
centered and—given the accel-
erating forces of virtual reality
and virtual living—virtually
immanent and transcendent
at the same time.3 Cities by
their very nature seek to make
connections with other cities,
seek to form networks, seek to
facilitate contacts beyond the
immediate terrain. Megacities
and global cities realize these
ends as never before.
Globalization has trans-
formed many of the most basic
conditions or understandings
of human existence upon
which notions of church and
mission have historically been
constructed in the modern era.
The idea of national and even geographic boundaries of identity,
for instance, that gave us the “here” and “there” of missionary
thinking that was famously criticized by Keith Bridston as offer-
ing a “salt-water” definition of mission—that is, that someone
becomes a missionary only when she or he crosses salt water—is
even more anachronistic in this day of global cities than it was
when his book was first published in 1965.4 Rather, cities around
the globe are becoming places of diaspora, places of passage
more than places of settlement, more like thoroughfares than
they are residences. City and world are converging formations.
The implications for mission and ministry are enormous.
Christianity has had a long and complex relationship with the
city. During its first centuries Christianity was primarily an urban
phenomenon. It spread from Palestine along urban commercial
trade routes to other regions of the world, going east into Asia
and south into Africa, as well as north and west into what later
The Church, the Urban, and the Global: Mission in an Age of
Global Cities
Dale T. Irvin
Dale T. Irvin, President and Professor of World Chris-
tianity, New York Theological Seminary, New York,
is the author (with Scott W. Sunquist) of History of
the World Christian Movement, vol. 1, 2001; vol.
2, forthcoming (Orbis Books). —dirvin@nyts.edu
To speak of globalization and urban culture today risks
making a double error—first, because the phrase sug-
gests that cities have never before experienced periods
of such intense global trade and migration, and, second,
because it implies that cities produce a singular urban
culture. Cities are always made by mobility—or, as in
current parlance, by flows—of people, money, goods
and signs. They combine, for this reason, paradoxical
extremes of wealth and poverty, familiarity and strange-
ness, home and abroad. Cities are where new things are
created and from which they spread across the world.
A city is both a territory and an attitude, and perhaps
this attitude is culture.
—United Nations Human Settlements Programme
The State of the World’s Cities, 2004/2005:
Globalization and Urban Culture
became Europe. In each place it went, it rapidly adapted to new
urban contexts, attracting members of the artisan and educated
(literate) classes who quickly assumed leadership of the move-
ment. Cities even then, though not of the size that we know them
today, were defining centers of religious, social, political, and
economic power. Cities were also, then as now, passageways,
nodes along commercial and
political nexuses of cultures
and civilizations. The city was
never just a particular physical
or geographic configuration; it
was and still is a way of being.
“A city isn’t just a place to live,
to shop, to go out and have kids
play,” says Richard Sennett.
“It’s a place that implicates
how one derives one’s ethics,
how one develops a sense of
justice, how one learns to talk
with and learn from people
who are unlike oneself, which
is how a human being becomes
human.”5 Perhaps the Christian
movement has always shown
a particular affinity for the city
precisely because the city is in
a certain sense part of what
ultimately makes us human.
But the city is a complex,
multifaceted reality, capable
of extremes and of forming, as
much as deforming, the human. It is a process that both reveals
and conceals, notes Henri Lefebvre: “Everything is legible. Urban
space is transparent. Everything signifies, even if signifiers float
freely, since everything is related to ‘pure’ form, is contained in
that form.” He goes on, “The city, the urban, is also mysterious,
occult. Alongside the strident signs of visible power such as wealth
and the police, plots are engineered and hidden powers conspire,
behind appearances and beneath transparency.”6 Theologically,
we might say that the city, not unlike the church, is a place for
sinners and saints alike, and a place where one can find signs
and countersigns alike of the coming reign of God.
The City in History
Lefebvre organizes the history of cities globally into several major
formations. The forms overlap, of course, and do not necessarily
progress in a linear, straightforward manner. Nevertheless as an
organizing schema with which to think about the urban, they can
be helpful. Lefebvre’s first type of city is what he calls the politi-
cal city, the polis, the capital, the place where kings and queens
lived and from which they ruled in the ancient world and around
the globe. The city was birthed as the semiotic world of royalty,
the ceremonial religious center where temple and palace were
located, the place where the divine and the human came together
to shape the world.7 The political city organized the countryside
178 International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 33, No. 4
outside itself and other cities of lesser power. In its most ex-
treme form these were imperial cities: Rome, Constantinople,
Ch’ang-an, Baghdad, or Tenochtitlán. In the ancient world they
were religious, ceremonial centers that brought the historical and
the transcendent together in one community.
The ancient political city could arise in part because of
surplus production. People could begin living together in spa-
tial arrangements whose density was greater than what their
immediate resources could meet. Cities did not grow their food
inside the gates but took it from the land that they organized
and controlled outside. Other items were also brought in to be
sold. The marketplace emerged alongside the temple and palace.
Even the most modest of kings and queens soon found that they
were not satisfied with the wealth that could be produced from
their immediate regions. The desire for goods that came from
beyond could be satisfied only by strangers who came from afar.
Cities became centers of commerce and trade, their marketplaces
filled with goods of merchants from other regions and cultures.
Eventually the merchants assumed control, giving rise to the
commercial city, which became the engine of the global network
called modern capitalism. Commercial cities were not unique to
Europe, but after the fifteenth century they came to dominate
European life and, through its modern colonial venture, the rest
of the world as well. The productive capacities of the modern
city accelerated with the industrial revolution. Meanwhile Euro-
pean colonialism and imperialism had reorganized the entire
globe. The result was to split the city into two: the modern, where
industrial goods were produced, and the colonial, where the raw
materials came from and the finished industrial goods of the
West were sold.8
Cities have always been places of differentiation, places where
strangers became neighbors, and neighbors became strangers.
One form of differentiation that they fostered and intensified was
what we call “class.” The extremes of rich and poor were—and
are—in fact a function of the city. Organizing these extremes
was always a major urban praxis. Cities also fostered the dif-
ferentiations that we call culture. They have always attracted
immigrants from their surrounding countryside, but also they
drew merchants who came from other cities and regions. The
merchants from afar contributed much to making the urban a
multicultural reality. The modern industrial city accelerated the
processes of cultural differentiation by attracting immigrants
from distances far away, not only to come and trade but also to
come and work.
The City and Mission
Christianity in the West, which after the tenth century had
become mostly organized into what we now call Christendom,
found a way to accommodate itself to the first waves of urban
transformation that took place under modern capitalism. The
English Puritan was an early capitalist but still a figure of Chris-
tendom. Even after the period of political revolutions that began
to disestablish the church politically in the West, Christendom
continued in its cultural form. The parish was still very much an
urban phenomenon. In the cities of Christendom in Europe and
in its settler colonies, which together constituted what we call
the West, a new social phenomenon called “the slums” began
in the eighteenth century, posing the first sustained challenge to
this organizing practice. Slums were among the first sectors of
Western society to slip beyond the reach of the traditional parish.
They emerged rapidly, far outstripping the ability of established
local urban parishes to minister to and within them effectively.9
For their part, churches in the West had long been aligned socially
and politically with the middle and upper classes, significantly
alienating them from the growing number of workers and oth-
ers from the lower social classes who populated the slums. The
culture of what eventually came to be called “the inner city”
posed a significant challenge to the traditional moral values and
teachings of the churches of Christendom.
This was the background of the vision of the city that inspired
urban missions and ministry through most of the twentieth
century. The city that was imagined was modern, industrial, and
becoming postindustrial. It was organized into rich and poor
districts that were clearly territorial and divided. It had factories,
slums, tenements, poor people (a disproportional number of
whom, in the United States after 1945, were African-American),
incoming immigrants (who were also disproportionately poor),
and an exiting middle class (read “white” or Euro-American in
the U.S. context). Urban ministry meant primarily ministry in
the slums and to the poor. It was ministry in the inner city, the
ghetto, and el barrio. Urban ministry did not mean ministry to the
businessmen and businesswomen who worked in the financial
district and commuted home to the suburbs. It did not mean min-
istry to the artists, to the city police officers and firefighters, to the
civil servants, to the restaurant owners, or to the urban university
professors. It did not mean engaging the corporate community, the
investment community, or the media or advertising industry. The
other, “regular,” form of ministry that was taught in theological
schools and practiced in “mainstream” churches was perceived to
be quite suitable for engaging these other sectors of urban reality.
One might do “mission work” in the city, but one never went
on a “mission” to the suburbs or in one’s “home church.” In the
United States urban ministry became a code word for ministry
to poor, especially to Blacks and Latino/as.10
We could stop to debate the merits and pitfalls of the
twentieth-century missiological project called “urban ministry.”
To do so, however, might allow us to miss the fact that the city
that was the basis for such ministry has changed. With the end
of the modern era and the onset of the postmodern/postcolonial
age, a new form of globalization is upon us. The modern/colonial
city has largely been displaced by another, a postmodern/post-
colonial city, or what some are calling the “global city” and the
“globalizing city.”11 The phenomenon is not confined to a few
urban locations. All cities of the world are being pulled into the
processes of globalization, while some have achieved the status
of being what sociologists are calling “global cities.” Production
in these places is no longer based in neighborhoods but can span
entire regions of the globe. Consumption is likewise becoming
globalized. One can find goods from virtually every region of
the world in the marketplaces and malls of even modest-sized
cities all around the world.
The Changing Nature of the City
The spatial structure of cities is changing. Transnational urban
networks are replacing older spatial linkages. Images and atti-
tudes that can be communicated globally through the media in
real time are taking the place of city walls, natural bodies of water,
interstate belt highway systems, dotted lines on a map, and other
such means that have traditionally been used to define urban
places. “Instead of being based on territory, communities are
more often spatially extensive networks, consisting of channels
through which resources flow—information, money, and social
capital.”12 New processes of metropolitanization are underway,
drawing urban inhabitants, commuters, and users together from
179October 2009
around the world in new combinations of material and virtual
realities. The processes of class and cultural differentiation that
historically marked the urban have accelerated in the globalizing
city, intensifying the polymorphous while expanding the distance
between rich and poor to astronomical proportions.13
As noted above, it is now clear that urbanization and global-
ization are converging historical forces, two sides of the same coin,
two sides of the same cutting edge of human historical existence.
Cities around the world, as noted above, have historically, even
from ancient days, been populated by strangers, many of them
merchants, who came from distant places to exchange goods
and sometimes services.14 The city was never only a center. It
was always also a thoroughfare, a node on a nexus, one link
in an urbanizing network. Today this is becoming clearer than
ever. Those who have dwelt in cities and those who have ruled
them have always had
more in view than the
city they inhabited. They
have also had their eyes
on the ends of the earth
that they sought to draw
goods from, or to reach out
to rule over, even if only in
their imagination. Global-
ization has brought that
imagining practice to new
levels, joining together in
endlessly flowing new
combinations the practical
and the only imaginable,
the local and the global, the
real and the virtual.
Implications
What are the implications
of globalization and urban-
ization for world Christi-
anity, and for churches that
are mission minded (and
for missions that are church minded) throughout the world at
the beginning of the twenty-first century? What issues call out
for attention? First, world Christianity since at least the fourth
century has been burdened with various forms of association with
particular territories and cultures. This was preeminently expressed
in the identification of Christianity with the Roman imperial order
and the territories that were governed by Rome or Constantinople.
There were other, lesser territorial expressions of Christianity
in late antiquity, such as those of the Armenian and Ethiopian
traditions, but these others did not rise to the level of imperial
identification and dominance attained by Rome and Constanti-
nople, or the Latin and Greek traditions of Christendom.15
The modern missionary movement in both its Catholic and
Protestant expressions was particularly plagued by territorial
notions of identity and culture that were fundamentally tied
to a particular place. The modern ecumenical movement did
little to challenge the social reconstruction that bifurcated the
world into “Christian lands” and “mission lands,” with its First
World and Third World theologies and its critical discourses
setting in place the West and the Rest. World Christianity as a
discipline is today in danger of being reduced to what happens
in the territories of the global South and East, leaving the ter-
ritorial definitions of Christianity in the North and West, both
evangelical and ecumenical, free to exercise dominance by being
unqualifiedly “Christian.”
Globalization has now made all such territorial construc-
tions obsolete. Spatial configurations of the personal body, the
congregation, the denomination, the city, the culture, and the
nation are all being increasingly deterritorialized and reterritori-
alized, resulting in new spatiotemporal configurations and
combinations. Korean Christianity is now a global Christian
reality, with 6 million Koreans living in a global diaspora. Pros-
perity doctrines and “G12” (“Government of 12,” pioneered by
César Castellanos Domínguez of Bogotá, Colombia16) are picked
up from their places of origin north or south and circulated
rapidly in and through global Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal
networks. African Christianity is a growing phenomenon in
western Europe and North America. A majority of persons in
the United States now
identify themselves with
more than one particular
denominational tradi-
tion over the course of
their lives. Our think-
ing about ministry and
mission must become
more conversant with
d e t e r r i t o r i a l i z e d a n d
reterritorialized forms
of Christian expression.
It must take seriously
the host of theological
practices and beliefs that
are circulating the globe,
landing in unexpected
places, and continuously
redefining each location.
It must do so, bringing
them into critical and
creative interaction at
b o t h c o n c e p t u a l a n d
practical levels in order
to be transformative.
A second issue needing attention, and a close corollary to
this first point regarding the deterritorialization of Christianity,
is the reification of culture. The various notions of culture that have
informed the study of missions and world Christianity in the
past have been particularly problematic. Culture as a concept
was often quite static and unchanging. The forms of culture that
have been particularly attractive to contextual forms of theol-
ogy in world Christianity have often been those of the rural,
the village, the countryside, or even the nation, where purity
and authenticity could be assured. Urban experience in general
has long challenged concepts of culture that hold cultures to be
stable or unchanging. Globalization is intensifying this realiza-
tion. The city, I noted earlier, has always been both a center and
a passageway, a node in a nexus, a place of destination and a
place for passing through. The street has long been a place where
one lives and a place where one travels, something that divides
and something that connects, both a boundary and a suture. As
more than half of the world’s population now lives in intensely
urban contexts, and 3 percent of the world’s peoples now live
as immigrants outside the lands of their birth, most of them
in cities, life on the street and the culture of the streets take on
intensely new configurations of inter- and cross-cultural experi-
ence and meaning.
Saint Peter’s Church located under the corner of Citigroup Center,
Lexington Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, New York City.
180 International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 33, No. 4
Training people for mission and ministry in this context
means attending to the traditional formations of church life
from a multitude of contexts and assisting churches to engage,
if not always embrace, what is different. It means attending to
the new formations of religion that are taking place as well, and
thinking through what preparation for ministry means in the
various contexts of hypercapitalism, the Internet, megachurches,
global immigration, and more.17 World Christianity as a whole
is far more inclusive than any particular local expression of it
can possibly be. Ministry that takes as its context both its own
location and the global reality will move in the direction of
inclusion while continuing to affirm distinct identities. The
church will once again be able to cross boundaries, including
those of “race,” ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation,
confession, and more. These identities can be played out and
factored in multiple ways that are both inclusive and exclusion-
ary. Regarding identities as such, however, we are finding more
and more the words of Edward Said to be true, “No one today is
purely one thing.”18 Our hybrids are proliferating and, contrary
to nature, are multiplying exponentially.19
The third implication of the convergence of globalization and
urbanization in world Christianity concerns the authority of biblical
texts. Not only the context but the very texts of our various theologi-
cal traditions become destabilized in the rapidly changing world
of globalized cities and cultures. New forms of reading biblical
texts and ecclesial traditions alike are proliferating. In the midst
of this proliferating difference, the Bible itself reemerges to play
a critical connective role in our experiences of world Christianity
in cities throughout the world. It is a common book, even when
read from different locations, perspectives, commitments, and
confessions and in different contexts and languages. It is a meeting
place of sorts, a movable site to which is ascribed authority and
from which is derived meaning. For some, biblical authority and
meaning are central. For others, they are peripheral. But whether
the Bible is read at the center or the margins of one’s religious
identity, and whether it is read from the center or the margins of
social life, it is still a common book, a site of intertextual engage-
ment, itself a context and a pretext.20 The Bible remains a place,
a site, a textual location marking various communities formed
by liturgy, devotion, and social praxis.
In such multiperspectival readings of the Bible the tempta-
tion lurks to ascribe to the text a degree of translocationality that
might give it the appearance of floating free from any particular
context and location, including that of the original world of its
production. This is one important reason why the hermeneutics
of social location must continue to play an important role in the
production and reproduction of biblical knowledge in world
Christian life, for such a hermeneutics helps reground biblical
readings in various Christian contexts and experiences. There is
always the danger that even this particular method will be seen
as an avenue toward a new universalizing discourse, brought
about at the cost of ignoring other authoritative sources for
faith.21 The danger can be avoided only by keeping the Bible in
community.
The fourth implication that I see for mission and ministry in
the context of global cities north and south concerns the levels of
engagement with other religions. Religious pluralism has long been a
dominant reality for churches in Asia and Africa, beginning with
the first centuries of the Christian movement. Christians who
lived under Muslim rulers in the political entity of the dar al-Islam
(“house of Islam”) have had centuries of experience with being
religious minorities. In the West Christianity was the dominant
religion, although it was never the only religion and there were
always forms of Christianity that were considered to be deviant
or “heretical” by the majority parties and traditions. Globalizing
and globalized cities in all parts of the world today are witness-
ing a degree of multifaith living that seems to be unprecedented
in its depth and dimensions. In Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo,
Baghdad, Jerusalem, Lagos, Dar es Salaam, São Paulo, Mexico
City, New York, Toronto, and more, churches of all confessional
persuasions are finding they have to learn new ways of living
with their non-Christian religious neighbor.
The “New Look” for the City in Mission
Within the ecology of the new urban formations arising within
the globalized city, we are finding renewed meaning in the
local church and its ministry when the context becomes world
Christianity. Churches from every part of the world, speaking
languages and nurturing cultures that were historically born in
places at a great distance from one another, are now flourishing
next to one another in cities all around the world. The traditional
model of parish ministry is not dead, but it is finding diverse
expression in the globalized city.22 Ministry has also moved
outside the church in new and interesting ways. The rise of the
entrepreneurial model of individuals heading ministries—with
their own Web pages, incorporation papers, TV programs, and
various pastoral conferences—leads the way in this effort. The
more traditional forms of urban and industrial ministry such as
ministry in the law office, in the university halls, in prisons, and
among firefighters continue.
Poverty is still a focal point in our theological reflections on
ministry in the city, but it comes in multiple constructions today.
We talk of anthropological poverty, political empowerment, and
the need for communities of faith and resistance to gain access
to information and knowledge of production. The commitment
to justice has a stronger transformational dimension as our
pedagogy is increasingly aware of the global cultural context in
which we are living.23
Global networks are becoming ever more important for
engaging in mission and ministry in the world Christian context
of the global city. Bilocationality and circulating patterns of migra-
tion and return are becoming more common in churches through-
out the world. Powerful charismatic clergy serve widely scat-
tered networks of congregations among the various diasporas
that wrap around the globe. All of us are busy finding our way—
“fumbling along,” some might say—in this new global urban
experience. Contextualization was the first step in the direction in
which we are heading. But it turns out to have been far too neat,
far too simple a model. The real and virtual worlds of this global
community of discourse decontextualize and recontextualize
us constantly, calling for a more active form of transpositional
theological reflection. Culture itself gets quickly transformed in
the accelerated flows of globalization that we are experiencing.
Even what counts as knowledge is brought into question.
The city has been on the agenda for mission studies for
more than a century. Unfortunately, the manner in which the
city too often has been imagined is as a place of need or despair.
In many instances the city was reduced conceptually to being a
function of poverty, lack, or neglect.24 The reduction of the city
to its poorest neighborhoods has always been problematic in the
theology of urban ministry. The city has always been more than
just a “slum” or a “ghetto,” even in its poorest neighborhoods.
Certainly preparation for ministry to, with, and of the poor ought
to occupy a prominent place in the mission agenda, but urban
ministry cannot be reduced to this one focus.
181October 2009
In all places our urban theologies are being challenged by
the very nature of the city itself. A more vital and engaging
form of mission and ministry in the postcolonial, postindustrial,
postmodern, and, in some instances, post-Christendom city is
needed. Global cities are the visible manifestations of a new global
reality that has become the context of world Christianity. Our
theologies unfortunately tend often to continue to conceptualize
the world in territorial terms that were part of the modern and
colonial frames of reference, placing various theologies in their
respective geographic locations and even trying to keep them
there. Korean theology is taken to refer to theology that is done
on the peninsula of Korea. Brazilian theology is taken to mean
theology that is done on location in Brazil and by people whose
ancestors lived in Brazil. The actual world that we are living in,
however, is one of transnational migrations, hyphenated and
hybrid identities, cultural conjunctions and disjunctions, and
global theological networks or flows. Korean-speaking Chris-
tian leaders from around the world gather outside of Korea
Notes
1. See Philip Berryman, Religion in the Megacity (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis
Books, 1992).
2. Peter Taylor, Ben Derudder, Pieter Saey, and Frank Witlox, eds., Cities in
Globalization: Practices, Policies, and Theories (London: Routledge, 2006),
look specifically at European and North American cities but uncover
the connections well. Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and
the City (London: Routledge, 1996), implicitly extends the discussion
of globalization in the direction of neo-imperialism by looking at
urban spaces through a postcolonial lens.
3. See Peter H. Sedgwick, ed., God in the City: Essays and Reflections from
the Archbishop’s Urban Theology Group (London: Mowbray, 1995).
4. Keith R. Bridston, Mission, Myth, and Reality (New York: Friendship
Press, 1965). On p. 33 Bridston writes: “It would be foolish to suggest
that the geographical frontier ever was, or will ever be, insignificant in
the missionary activity of the church. But if the religious significance
of salt water is seen in any other than a poetic and mythical way, the
whole meaning of the mission of the church is in danger of being
lost, or so perverted that it would be better lost. The geographical
frontier, symbolized by the seven seas, only represents what the
Christian mission is; it does not exhaust it. Ocean trips have never
made Christian missionaries, and, in itself, salt water never will.”
5. Richard Sennett, “The Civitas of Seeing,” Places 5, no. 4 (1989), quoted
in Bo Grönlund, “The Civitas of Seeing and the Design of Cities—on
the Urbanism of Richard Sennett,” Urban Winds, http://hjem.get2net
.dk/gronlund/Sennett_ny_tekst_ 97kort.html. It is interesting that the
Latin word urbs denoted an actual city, while the word civis referred
to the manner of life of those to whom belonged its privileges; only
later was it extended to be an alternative term for the city itself.
6. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003; French orig., 1970),
p. 120.
7. On the ceremonial origins of the city in world history and on
the relationship between human religiosity and urbanization
more generally, see Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters:
A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient
Chinese City (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1971); Davíd Carrasco,
City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1999); Nezar AlSayyad, Cities and Caliphs: On
the Genesis of Arab Muslim Urbanism (New York: Greenwood Press,
1991); and Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History (New York: Modern
Library, 2005).
8. On the relationship between colonial and modern cities, and the global
impact of postcolonial urbanization in particular, see Ryan Bishop,
John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo, eds., Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast
Asian Cities and Global Processes (New York: Routledge, 2003). For an
examination of the manner in which global charismatic Christianity
operates in and through the postcolonial city, in this case specifically
in congresses on the global mission of the Korean diaspora.
Portuguese-speaking congregations form among people who
have emigrated from Brazil and engage in theological reflection
in Tokyo, Newark, or Lisbon, while many who are doing theol-
ogy in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro are recent immigrants from
other continents to Brazil.
This new, complex global urban reality is posing a challenge
to the way mission is understood around the world today. In
each place this urban reality takes on distinctive features, even as
the overall process of global urbanization is tying these realities
together in new, complex, expanding, interlocking, differentiat-
ing networks of relations. Theology in general needs to grapple
with these new global configurations and the realities they are
generating, virtual and otherwise. The challenge for us is always
to reflect upon and engage theologically from our various loca-
tions and perspectives, a challenge present in each place, even as
we find ourselves increasingly relocated within this new global
urban context.
Singapore, see Robbie B. H. Goh, “Deus ex Machina: Evangelical Sites,
Urbanism, and the Construction of Social Identities,” in Postcolonial
Urbanism, ed. Bishop, Phillips, and Yeo, pp. 305–21.
9. One can argue that the intellectual challenges of the de-Christianization
of Europe that were posed by the middle class’s “cultured despisers
of religion” were addressed far more successfully by Schleiermacher
and others in the streams of liberal Protestant theology that followed
him through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than were the
challenges of the new urban working class who were gathering in
the slums. On the history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
“mission” work in slums in the United States, see Norris A. Magnuson,
Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Work, 1865–1920 (Metuchen,
N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977).
10. The tendency to focus or even reduce urban ministry to addressing
issues of urban poverty, and in the U.S. context to ministry in the
“inner city” (i.e., the slums, the ghetto, or el barrio), is apparent in
even such excellent recent work on urban ministry and theology
as Andrew Davey, Urban Christianity and Global Order: Theological
Resources for an Urban Future (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002),
and Mark R. Gornik, To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing
Inner City (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).
11. See Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Prince-
ton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991).
12. United Nations Human Settlements Programme, The State of the
World’s Cities, 2004/2005: Globalization and Urban Culture (London
and Sterling, Va.: Earthscan / UN-Habitat, 2004), p. 5.
13. According to the most recent U.N. figures, nearly 200 million persons,
or approximately 3 percent of the world’s population, are now
immigrants, living outside the territorial boundaries of their natal
cultural community, most of them living in cities. In New York City
alone, according to the mayor’s office, representatives from every
nation on earth are now living as immigrants in the city.
14. The tradition that St. Thomas traveled to India from Palestine in the
first century of the common era is quite telling for world Christian
identity, for Thomas is held by some strands of the tradition to have
gone to India not as a merchant but as a carpenter, recruited in a
Mediterranean seaport by agents of an Indian ruler seeking skilled
labor from the Roman Empire.
15. It should be noted that there were always Christians within the
imperial traditions who did not accept imperial domination, and
many who opposed it openly. There have also always been churches
of the world whose traditions lay outside the range of imperial reach,
especially the churches of Asia who lived as (often persecuted)
minority communities in multireligious societies. Although the
imperial forms of Christendom were not universal, their impact
touched in one way or another all churches and traditions. The legacy
of Christendom has been felt by all churches and traditions of the
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182 International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 33, No. 4
We acknowledge that industrialization, increased defor
world, even if its effects have been weighted differently among the
various churches.
16. For information on “Government of 12” program, see www.visiong12
.com.
17. Manuel A. Vásquez and Marie Friedmann Marquardt, Globalizing the
Sacred: Religion Across the Americas (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 54–55. The authors note on p. 55, “By changing
our sense of time, space and agency, globalization clearly affects
the viability of religious congregations. The latter, however, are
not mere passive subjects of more foundational economic forces.
Religious congregations are also active in transmitting and shaping
globalization.” They cite Pentecostalism as being particularly effective
in creating transnational networks, but include the Roman Catholic
Church and other global religious networks in their consideration
of globalizing religion.
18. Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf,
1994), p. 336, writes: “No one today is purely one thing. Labels
like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than
starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a
moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture
of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most
paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only,
mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. . . . No
one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained
habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there
seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their
separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was
about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in
Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the ‘other echoes [that]
inhabit the garden.’”
19. See Néstor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering
and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher Chiappari and Silvia L.
López (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990).
20. See Dale T. Irvin, “Contextualization and Catholicity: Looking Anew
for the Unity of the Faith,” Studia Theologica 48, no. 2 (1995): 8.
21. Francisco Lozado, Jr., “Reinventing the Biblical Tradition: An
Exploration of Social Location Hermeneutics,” in Futuring Our Past:
Explorations in the Theology of Tradition, ed. Orlando O. Espín and
Gary Macy (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2006), pp. 113–40.
22. On the various models of urban church experience, see Lowell W.
Livezey, ed., Public Religion and Urban Transformation: Faith in the City
(New York: New York Univ. Press, 2000).
23. On the problems and possibilities for transformative adult education
in the context of globalization, see Sharan B. Merriam, Bradley C.
Courtenay, and Ronald M. Cervero, eds., Global Issues and Adult
Education: Perspectives from Latin America, Southern Africa, and the
United States (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).
24. The classic formulation of this thesis in urban sociology remains that
of Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1974).
www.visiong12.com
www.visiong12.com
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