The Frontier has moved

Reference: Grigg, V. (2005). Cry of the Urban Poor. GA, USA: Authentic Media in partnership with World Vision.

Then the Lord said, “Broadcast this message in Jerusalem’s streets. Go from city to city throughout the land” (Jeremiah 11:6).

IT IS A MARXIST CITY OF ten million. Two-and-a-half million live in the bustees (slums). Most of the middle-class families are poorer than the street people of Los Angeles. Sixty-seven percent live one family per room.

And the church? There are only three churches and ten house churches in the bustees. Some of the middle-class and other individual families from the bustees are involved in the 154 middle-class churches.[1] But the poor of the slums and the 100,000 poor on the streets, while having seen some Christian missionaries, have never known a poor people’s movement nor churches of their own. No one proclaims Jesus to them. No holy person lives among them to show them Jesus in word and deed, in acts of mercy and deeds of power.
Once I had the joy of finding such a person. He had been imprisoned for working with the poor. He clearly couldn’t face talking of it. But he had gone back to the ragged wretched orphans, widows and beggars whom he loved and for whom he labored. He was a man who took Jesus’ pattern of ministry to the poor seriously.

This book is a report on two years of walking the slums of the great cities of Asia, looking for God among the poor, seeking to know how the great mission surge of the last decades had established the church among the urban poor.
The sad report is that after thorough research in ten Asian cities I found only two such embryo movements. The conclusion: The greatest mission surge in history, aimed at the last frontiers, has entirely missed the greatest migration in history, the migration of rural peasants in the Third World to the great mega-cities.

Two assumptions in mission seem self-evident. The first is that Jesus is our model for mission. Did he not say, “As the Father has sent me even so I send you” (John 20:21)? And did not his first declaration of his own great commission tell us:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18–19).

Surely with these words he modeled the gospel as primarily good news for the poor. And he defined ministry to the poor, declaring that the ministry to the poor is holistic, involving preaching, healing, deliverance, justice and doing good deeds, but is initiated by proclamation (and reception) of the kingdom.

2.The poor are the direction of responsiveness. This is true both in Jesus’ teaching and in missions history as well as sociological analysis.

3.The migrant poor are the greatest responsive group across the face of the earth today. I have found this responsiveness among Muslims in Karachi, Hindus in Calcutta, Buddhists in Thailand, and Catholics in Manila. All are in a state of rapid socio-economic and world view change and are hungry for the reality of a new relationship to a god.

Jesus commands a focus not so much on the last un-reached unresponsive people groups in the world, but on those major unreached or partially reached groups that are responsive. The period of time within five years of a person’s or family’s migration is one of those times of greatest responsiveness.

Dr. Roger Greenway, who has done a great deal to focus people’s attention on urban missions, speaks of his ministry to the urban poor with the phrase: “If the streets are paved, move on.”

The experience of walking through the slums and seeing hundreds of thousands of squatters in destitute poverty is devastating. As history moves towards its climax, the wound in God’s heart for this migration of people must make it difficult for him to hold back his judgment. To walk again and again into the destitution of these millions sears the soul with a darkness and grotesqueness that we could not cope with outside of the rest of Christ that comes from the refreshing balm of his Spirit and the hope of the returning King.
If the destitution of the urban poor is staggering in itself, their numerical growth is just as devastating. Since World War II, an endless convoy of smoke-belching, over laden, chicken-squawking bus after bus have careened down newly-constructed highways into the mega-city capitals of the Third World, disgorging crowds of wide-eyed impoverished farmers and teenagers looking for the next step towards affluence (or, more likely, poverty) in the squatter areas.
Wherever land can be found, huts and plywood shacks go up. Few governments have the capacity to prevent it or to provide services for the people arriving. The majority of new arrivals remain in squatter areas. Each capital city will continue to grow exponentially as it exploits the resources of its rural hinterland.

Hardly a church, rarely a pastor, seldom a missionary
    More nightmarish than the poverty and the staggering growth of that poverty is to find no more than a handful of God’s men, God’s women ministering among these poor in each city.
    I do not mean that there are no relief and development agencies. They are many, and most of them are doing good work in their roles as diaconal agencies of the church. But the church has given bread to the poor and has kept the bread of life for the middle class.
    My search has not been for aid programs but for people who are establishing the kingdom of God, for the men and women working and living among the poor to bring them the bread of life by both word and deed.
    I have found only a few. In the midst of the darkness, they are some of today’s heroes. In each city, a handful of people have followed Jesus fully in his calls to renunciation and involvement with the poor.
    There is a pastor in one west Asian city who wears the sandals and blanket of the poor, walking as holy men do. God has used him to mobilize and deploy 300 workers into the slums.
    There is a man of God, a doctor, on the streets of one city ministering to the sick. The government has tried to deport him for ministering to the poor. For four years he has remained, by bringing a court case against the government and quietly continuing to serve the poor.
    There is a pastor who for some years has chosen to live among the poor in a relocation area of Manila. He has worked to provide housing for the poorest in his community. The official housing manager and gang leaders were curious about this man and his concern for their people. They decided to help him build houses. Ultimately, they were converted because of his obedience in living out the love and justice of God among them.
    There is excitement in Bangkok, for a new generation of creative church leaders is seeing new breakthroughs for the gospel. In 1985 there were now 97 churches in this city of nearly six million. By 2004 there were 143 churches in a city of 7.5 million
    Hidden in these statistics is an old, highly successful Finnish Pentecostal church planter. At the age of 70, he daily spends long hours in a slum area, quietly establishing a church.
    Despite all of this, there are only three churches and six house groups in Bangkok’s 1024 slums. Only two percent of churches are among the migrant poor.
    Examples of men and women who are following Jesus in his ministry to the poor should not be the exception but the rule, if we as a church were truly following Jesus. We must refocus our energies and make the urban poor the primary thrust of missions.
    In an otherwise excellent article by Dr. DuBose on the urban poor, he makes an unusual series of conclusions:

Like the poor who have long gathered in their urban store fronts in America, the Christian communities are proliferating among the urban poor in the wake of an impressive advance of the gospel and are gathering in “shop churches” and in “house churches” in all major areas of the world.¹

This statement simply is not true. Perhaps it is a misunderstanding of the word “poor.” To the Americans, the entire world is poor, including the middle class of the Third World. Or perhaps he is inaccurate because he is using Latin American Catholic categories for the church among the poor. I have wondered whether his statement might be true of African Churches, but discussions with missionaries from those countries indicate that though there is more activity than in Asia, the percentage and focus of activity is about the same. My two years of research in Asia do not bear out his conclusions.

When faced with the sad failure of the great mission thrust to reach these poor one must ask “why?” and beyond the why, “What can be done to rectify this failure?” The following appear to be some factors:

1. As mission leaders we have failed to foresee both the immensity of urban growth and the fact that, most of the urban growth would be in squatter areas. The opportunity to save the cities from many traumas associated with this development, as well as the opportunity to establish a Church in every squatter area that has formed, have been lost almost entirely.

Perhaps it is because these poor are hidden. As we drive through third-world cities we see occasional glimpses of squatter and slum communities, but they are tucked behind houses and buildings and down in the hollows by the river, so that no one sees them. Those who emerge are dressed in their best clothes, soon to blend in with the middle-class people of the city. No one knows that they are poor. The poor do not advertise their misfortune.

People are being thrust out to the last frontier, but the last frontier has moved. Perhaps we could encourage missions researchers to revise their multicolored charts of unreached peoples. Instead of dividing them by religion alone, perhaps they should also be divided into urban-rural and rich-poor. We may find that the largest group of truly “unmissionaried” people would be the urban poor.

2. Some missions have made a deliberate attempt to reach the rich, believing in a sort of religious “trickle-down” theory. This strategic mistake lacks support both in biblical exegesis and in sociological analysis, and already has been competently refuted.²

The gospel “trickles up.” Any man or woman who would follow Jesus and walk among the poor will affect countless members of the middle and rich classes. People in these classes will come to the slums because they are curious. They hear of good deeds and like Nicodemus, they come seeking for truth and reality.

Despite the failure of affluent missionaries to preach the words of Scripture about unjust wealth and to live simply themselves, the converted rich come because these new believers can read the Bible. They come searching for the person who has chosen the poor, because they know that here is a true answer to the problems of wealth. They come because they are now concerned for the uplift of those they previously exploited. Jesus has an answer for the rich man. The rich middle-class missionary often has only words.

3. The same strategic reasons that led to defeat for an affluent power in the Vietnam war have led to failure in this spiritual war. Depending on affluent and high-powered programmatic approaches, the mission force has been out of touch with the realities of the third-world poor. A missionary living on $2800 per month in a western-style house and sending his children to a westerners’ school while trying to reach people who live on $200 per year is like a B-52 bomber attacking guerrillas.

4. This failure in the great Western mission thrust is, at its roots, ultimately not strategic but spiritual A church trapped by cultural perspectives on affluence rather than adopting the biblical stance of opposition to the “god of mammon’’ has exported this into missions. We must return to the pattern of Jesus, who chose non-destitute poverty as a way of life, took the time to learn language and culture, and refused to be a welfare agency king. We must return to the way of the apostles and of the wandering friars who have been the key to the conversion of the world in generations before us. Non-destitute poverty and simplicity must again become Focal in mission strategy.

5. Some perhaps have concluded that the poor are unreachable. This is a culturally logical conclusion for those of European descent growing up in the capitalist of the United States. Claerbaut ,in an excellent analysis on urban ministry, has some penetrating insights into American cultural attitudes to the poor:

The truths of stratification and self-perpetuation of the socioeconomic system are not widely known or accepted. As a result, negative attitudes towards the poor persist.

To argue that poverty is a self-perpetuating condition in a capitalistic society is to attack the nation’s sacred civil doctrine of the self-made person. To suggest that one is poor because of an unequal distribution of opportunities is to suggest that riches are as much a matter of good fortune as of virtue.³

The poverty of the third-world urban poor, however, is a direct result of social forces and oppression, not of personal sin. The oppressed poor in the Scriptures are considered to be rich in faith and the ones for whom the kingdom is particularly to be preached.

6. The propensity for the Western church to accept the agenda of aid organizations as focal to the Great Commission has seriously skewed mission. Mission to the middle class is seen as proclamation. To the poor it has become giving handouts or assisting in development as defined by Christianized humanitarian perspectives. It is far easier for churches to give thousands of dollars than to find one of their members who will walk into the slums for a decade.

Vows of poverty
My convictions have deepened and been modified during these months of wandering, preaching to the poor and research.

The central one remains: we must thrust out groups similar to the devotional communities of 12th century preaching friars, or the wandering Irish monks that converted Northern Europe between the fifth and ninth centuries, before the Catholic hierarchy gained control there. In our case we must send communities of men and women, married couples and singles, with commitments to live as the poor among the poor in order to preach the kingdom and establish the church in these great slum areas.

Westerners and upper-class nationals who choose such lives of non-destitute poverty may be catalysts for movements of lay leaders from among the poor in each city. The spearhead of such a thrust will be those who accept the gift of singleness for some years. We must set up new mission structures for this to happen. The key is young couples who will choose to give leadership to these communities of pioneers.

We need men and women who will commit themselves to lives of simplicity, poverty, devotion, community, and sacrifice in areas of marriage and family.

Most missionary teams are not communities, but teams. The focus of most teams is to work. On the other hand, traditional communities in the church are by definition primarily committed to relational caring, worship and a devotional pattern. These emphases are essential if workers are to survive in the slums. Working and living two by two in various slum areas, they need to come together every two weeks for a day of ministry to each other, of worship and relaxation.

The commitments to non-destitute poverty may be similar to those of the older Catholic orders, without the legalism.

So too is a commitment to singleness—taken not as a vow of celibacy, but for a period of time. We Protestants have lost the concept of the gift of singleness. Marriage has been seen as the only ideal. The biblical blessing on chosen or given singleness has to be recovered. Part of the blessing of that gift is freedom to pioneer in difficult and dangerous places

Obedience for Protestants is democratized by the emphasis on the priesthood of all believers. We obey God within the defined decision-making processes of our organization.

Historically, movements among the poor have consistently been thrown out of the middle-class churches. It is traumatic for one missionary living on $2800 per month to have to be in the same mission team with someone willing to receive only $500 needed for living expenses and all ministry and travel costs.

To avoid such trauma, it would be wise for mission directors to create new orders of men and women called to the poor. These could be within or without their old mission boards. Ultimately this will both create effectiveness and prevent disharmony.

Such orders should only be guided by persons in authority who have lived, for long periods, this kind of sacrificial and incarnational lifestyle. Authority should never be given to administrators who have not lived out this lifestyle. Incarnational workers do not want protection. They want pastoral care from leaders who have been on the front line, who will keep them at the front line, and who will take the “bullets” out when the workers are wounded.

God is offering Western missions the chance to return to a biblical commitment to the poor and to incarnation as the primary missionary role model. The need is urgent: several thousand catalysts in the slums of scores of third-world cities who can generate movements in each city. Two billion people cry out.

If Western mission leaders, boards and pastors do not heed this call, God will sidestep us and rely only on emerging Latin American and Third-World missions to meet this focus of mission in the next decades.
How sad to miss the focal call of the Scriptures to preach the gospel to the poor! For the God who sent his Son to a manger will find a way to send other sons and daughters to those poor for whom particularly he came. He will not leave their cries unheard.

1. [VG1]DuBose, Francis M., “Urban Poverty as a World Challenge,” An Urban World, Larry L. Rose and C. Kirk Hadaway, eds. pp 51–74, Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press, 1984.

2. See for example McGavran, Donald A., Understanding Church Growth, pp 269–294, Eerdmans, 1980.

[1] In 1985 there were only 2 house churches and one Pentecostal church, of the 143 churches in the city. Though a number of poor attended three larger churches.

[VG1]See extra reference inserted earlier in the chapter about number of churches

© Viv Grigg & Urban Leadership Foundationand other materials © by various contributors & Urban Leadership Foundation, for The Encarnacao Training Commission. Last modified: July 2010