EMQ » October–December 2020 » Volume 56 Issue 4
By Alan McMahan
In 1955 Donald McGavran’s book, The Bridges of God, launched the field of modern missiology and it shook the evangelical world with its conclusions on the validity of people movements occurring in Northern India. Evangelistic fruit was showing up where many were not expecting it. The cognitive dissonance that book engendered led to a whole new way of thinking about the harvest, eventually giving rise to the church growth and the frontier missions movements with its emphasis on reaching unreached peoples. Today, a new set of factors converge to once again shake our understanding of how God is redeeming the lost peoples of the earth.
We live in unprecedented times. Never in the history of the world have we seen so much upheaval and opportunity among the world’s peoples that causes us to reconsider our missionary paradigms, definitions, and strategies. In the accounting of the advance of modern missions, we may be at the threshold of the fourth era.[1]
Three Major Trends
Three major sets of factors are manifesting themselves in ways we could have never imagined. They are converging to create a unique opportunity in all of human history that can influence the completion of the task of global evangelization. Those three sets of factors are urbanization, migration, and globalization.
Urbanization
In the 1930s, less than 30% of the world’s population lived in cities. By the year 2050, that number will hit 70% in the developing world and 90% in the developed world, doubling the global urban population to a total of 6.4 billion people.[2] That is equivalent to adding a city the size of Los Angeles each week to the world’s urban population.[3] In 1997, David Barrett reported that 127,000 non-Christian urban dwellers were being added daily, a number that is no doubt much higher now.[4] Most of these are represented by the urban poor located in the world’s mega-cities with minimal Christian impact.
Migration
The peoples of the earth are moving away from their homelands at rates higher than ever seen before. In 2019, more than 272 million people[5] crossed international boundaries in search of a better life.[6] When this number is added to the number of those migrating within their country of origin, the total is close to 1 billion people, or 1/7 of the world’s population.[7] They move for many reasons: economic or educational opportunities, war, natural catastrophes, family reunification, governmental initiatives, etc. But they move in hope of a better life. These conditions create new receptivity, and a mixing of the world’s peoples that realign traditional beliefs, patterns of living, and social norms.
Globalization
Thanks to dramatic improvements in transportation, communication, and technology, coupled with the exercise of free enterprise, ideas, products, and services are moving at lightning speed across international boundaries. The results are numerous, from a homogenization of ideas and trends, the emergence of never before seen affiliations and innovations, and the rise of a global youth culture in which a young person in Jakarta, Indonesia may have more in common with the youth of Los Angeles than they do with their own parents![8]
The convergence of these three sets of factors in the world’s urban contexts interact with and amplify each other to create an environment where the laws of strange physics dominate. Three metaphors of the city will serve to illustrate.
The city functions as a “black hole” in that the bigger a city is, the greater is its gravitational attraction as it sucks in everything around it to fuel its need for food, water, and natural resources. And as the pull of the city increases, the density of its population becomes ever greater driving up costs and the competition for scarce resources, distorting even the rules for social engagement and human interaction.
Secondly, the larger the city is, the more intense becomes its sub-cultures that may orbit around a culture of origin, or lifestyle preference, or hobby. Poisonous snake-lovers can form a club because in the city they can find enough others who will join them. People who were rejected by their small-town friends because of their sexual preferences can now align with like-minded others to carry out political or social action initiatives to force change on the larger society. At the same time, the city is characterized by enormous diversity and heterogeneity. Here, in this high-density environment, some find themselves pressed together where they can no longer avoid each other. Cultures that are dramatically different are placed in close proximity. In this way the city functions as a “super-collider” where particles of different types are smashed together at high speed and yield strange new elements to those observing it.
Thirdly, the city functions as a “culture-making engine” leading many to an exploration of new ideas, re-combinations, and new collaborations (even marriages!) that are not subject to censure by the elders and the former traditions. It is not surprising that most new ideas, trends, fashions, and music emanate from great urban centers which are then transmitted to the rest of the world.
General Implications
The results of these interacting forces generate some interesting findings for reaching UPG’s that demand a new toolkit be developed for missionaries today.
First … Our understanding of people groups must move beyond static, mono-cultural, geographically and linguistically-based definitions. In the hybridity characteristic of the city, hyphenated sub-cultures are rapidly emerging and the aspirational identity of many urban dwellers center around values and characteristics that differ from their identity of origin. The “glue” that binds urban dwellers together may relate more to age, education, socio-economic status, music, occupation, a hobby, or a common dream of the future than it does to language, religion, or a common homeland. Today, it is frequently true that young people may marry someone outside their cultural or religious group, move to a context foreign to both of them and build their lives together in that third culture environment. What culture will their kids form their identity around? What people group are they a part of now? These hybridized population segments become key bridge people to cross cultural divides and overcome traditional patterns of resistance.
Second … Urban environments function to break down societal control as traditionally practiced in the homeland of a people. In the city, one becomes anonymous within a block or two from where they live. Informal controls over deviant behavior, usually manifested in the form of gossip, become ineffective in a world of strangers. Urban migrants, then, find a new freedom to explore beyond the permitted constraints of their worldview. A new receptivity emerges that more freely experiments with new ideas, patterns of living, and affinity groups. This new freedom is simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating and it may lead to either good or bad choices but it is very different than the traditional life in the homeland.
Consider the young Muslim women in Jakarta who live in traditional families but work in the commercial or corporate centers of the city. They depart for work wearing the traditional Muslim clothing expected by the elders that covers them completely but on the bus that is removed to reveal smart, Western business attire underneath. At work they associate with their Chinese-Indonesian colleagues who invite them to a lunch-time worship service at a local Christian fellowship nearby where they hear the gospel and meet more Christian friends. At night they go back home on the bus, putting on the Muslim dress they removed earlier, return to their traditional families, and resume the identity they had before they left. At some point, if they do find Christ, they will be forced to make a choice about which faith they will follow. Perhaps this occurs when they get married or start to raise children, but never before did they have such a direct exposure to this life-changing message of salvation. Such scenarios are not at all uncommon in the city.
Third … Ministries that seek to penetrate a UPG by going to the homeland of the people and using highly contextualized forms valued mostly by the older generation are still important and should be continued, but they may face more resistance and see slower results than what might be possible in the city. I have ministry colleagues who have worked in highly contextualized ways for two or three decades in the homeland of a UPG and by God’s grace have raised up a few Christian fellowships of Jesus followers. Their commitment and persistence are commendable and inspiring!
But I have also visited mega-churches[9] in nearby urban centers where you would expect to find no such UPG people that, on the contrary, have in some cases hundreds, or even thousands, of converts from UPG’s from areas where my other colleagues worked. Even more shocking is that many of these mega-churches used worship forms that were obviously not contextualized as they sang Hillsong music in English accompanied by large jumbo-trons, laser lights, and smoke machines! And these contexts which looked like and sounded like what I would expect to see in Los Angeles or New York were actually effective in bringing a new, younger generation to Christ. In these uncontextualized, Western forms of ministry UPG folk were coming to Christ. As in 1955 when Donald McGavran wrote The Bridges of God, his observations indicated fruit was being produced in unexpected places. That’s what we are seeing now as well.
Furthermore, these same patterns that I observed in Indonesia were also apparent in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, Chennai, Hong Kong, Manila, London, New York, Los Angeles, and to a much lesser extent in Beijing, and Moscow where I conducted similar research. Indeed, it is predictable that among the urban migrants coming into cities, and the larger the city, the more pronounced are the patterns, we will see members of UPG’s from throughout the surrounding regions who are becoming more receptive and have hope for a new life. In some cases, it is possible to find Christian believers who are among members of multiple UPG’s living together in the same apartment complex. The population density and geographical proximity to one another increase the likelihood the gospel can “hop” across cultural boundaries that previously would have prevented communication and effective evangelization.
Implications for Missions
The implications for missions are numerous. First, we need to develop the ability of to see pockets of receptivity wherever they occur, even if they don’t show up in the expected places. Since urbanites may affiliate with others based on factors other than language, culture, and place of origin we need to become good at “glue-sniffing” to find what actually holds them together, then follow the trail to see where it leads. That may mean we need to develop more sophisticated tools to define and track UPG streams. Maybe the affiliations are forming through social media such as Facebook, Instagram, or other. Receptivity may occur in unpredicted spaces and times. Our definitions and anthropological/ministry tools may be good at examining “detailed complexity” (looking at all the cultural patterns and attributes of a people) but fail at understanding “dynamic complexity” to understand how peoples’ identities shift and receptivity rises and falls at different phases of migration and in the presence of certain stimuli.
Secondly, better communication and cooperation needs to occur between personnel deployed in the homeland of UPG’s and those engaged in ministry in pluralistic migrant destinations. Migration is seldom a one-way flow. More typically, people are engaged in a circular migration pattern as they visit their parents in the homeland bringing with them the rewards purchased by their “high-paying” jobs in the city, only to return to the city again and continue their status-building, wealth generating careers. With these visits, they also bring new ideas, new perspectives, new values, perhaps even their new faith.
To prepare UPG converts in the urban contexts to “take the gospel home” urban churches need to be equipped with the vision and the tools to identify, equip, mobilize, and problem-solve with new UPG-background believers so they can be effective upon their return home. How many times do the young people return home wearing the “skinny jeans” of the city only to face the scorn of the parents? Sensitivity-training is needed to help the new convert talk about their faith in ways that are loving, and winsome to the skeptics at home. Christian workers also need to be cooperating with each other in the homeland and the city as much as possible to conserve the fruit of these interactions.
Thirdly, it is important to plant multi-ethnic churches in the city where the dominance of the largest ethnic groups within the congregation is diminished and space is created for minority voices.[10] Research on multi-ethnic churches indicates that the hardest minority group to add to the congregation is the second one because it tends to stand in sharp contrast or in polarity to the largest ethnic group. If the “contract” can be negotiated between these two groups, then adding a second or third minority group is much less difficult.
As a church becomes more variegated and diverse adding other minority voices becomes even easier and space is created for even more people that don’t fit any of the identified groups to join. Such is the case with congregations in Indonesia that might be dominantly composed of Chinese-background Indonesians. The larger the church becomes and the more diverse it is, the easier it is for members of UPG’s to anonymously explore the claims of the faith without being “discovered.” Church planting efforts that are multi-ethnic match more accurately the diversity of the city and are therefore more contextualized to that pluralistic context.
Fourthly, we need to consider the possibility that contextualization may not match what we have been trained to see. Many would dismiss Western-style worship services and mega-church models as having anything of value for reaching the UPG’s. This doesn’t fit our paradigm of frontier missiology. Yet, if it is understood what the rising generations of urban nomads are looking for some of these forms might be worth considering as a first level of engagement. Perhaps, if new Western or K-Pop forms are first adopted by these young urban migrants, there will still need to be serious study on how this is eventually engrafted back to the identity of origin lest it be discarded for being foreign and alien. Perhaps this is a level of self-theologizing with which the indigenous church will need to grapple.
Finally, we need to refine the toolkit for equipping the next generation of missionaries and cross-cultural workers. Our methods of equipping too often assume our workers will work in mono-cultural environments focused on a single UPG. Instead we need to equip some of them to work in environments of high diversity, high density, and rapid change. We need to pay close attention to the people who are shifting between cultures and recognize that they may be able to operate in two environments. These migrants may be the honeybees that will pollenate the flowers of new advancement of the gospel.
Conclusion
Doing missions in the fourth era marked by urbanization, migration, and globalization will require that we recognize the forces that are quickly changing our context of ministry. These forces are re-defining the pathways people follow as they come to Christ, as well as the cultural frame they will prioritize in their choices and values. Will it be their culture of origin or their culture of aspiration that lead to greater receptivity? How will God use these changing conditions to take the gospel to the last UPG? What new toolkit does the next generation of missionaries need to be successful? What strategies will yield the most fruit? These are questions that urgently need to be addressed as we re-think our people group missiology.
Alan McMahan (Ph.D. Fuller Theological Seminary) is Professor in the Cook School of Intercultural Studies, Biola University. He has conducted extensive field research on patterns of urban church growth in Asia, Europe, and the US for an upcoming book on the subject. This article draws on that knowledge to contribute to the ongoing discussion of people groups.
Notes
[1] Winter, Ralph D. “Three Mission Eras: And the Loss and Recovery of Kingdom Mission – 1800 – 2000.”
[2] United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects, 2007 Revision, (Department of Economic and Social Affairs, March 10, 2010), 1
[3] Prince Charles in an address to the World Urban Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, February 13, 2018.
[4] David Barrett, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 21:1 (January 1997): 24–25.
[5] World Economic Forum, January 20, 2020. Accessed on August 1, 2020 (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/iom-global-migration-report-international-migrants-2020/).
[6] This is a number higher than the population of Indonesia, the fourth most populated nation on earth.
[7] UN DESA – Technical Paper No. 2013/1 – Cross-national comparisons of internal migration: An update on global patterns and trends. Accessed on August 1, 2020: (http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/technical/TP2013-1.pdf).
[8] At least this may be true in terms of aspirational identity as opposed to the identity of origin.
[9] Some of these mega-churches were running 5,000, or 10,000 or 40,000, or even over 120,000 attendees in weekend services. Though the core constituencies were often made of displaced Christian migrants from other areas or hyphenated peoples such as Chinese-Indonesians, there were, nevertheless many representatives from UPG’s in the area.
[10] For a more complete explanation of these concepts see the book, Being the Church in a Multi-ethnic Community, by Gary L. McIntosh and Alan McMahan, 2012, Wesleyan Publishers.
EMQ, Volume 56, Issue 4. Copyright © 2020 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
