THE CHRISTIAN religion was born in the city of David and grow to manhood in the great cities of Caesar. Unlike Islam, which became powerful in the small towns and oases of the Arabian hinterland, the expansion of Christianity is inextricably associated with centers of power in the ancient world: Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Alexandria, Carthage, and Rome. St. Paul, evangelizing a receptive population- the synagogue communities, which lived by commerce in the cities traveled from urban center to urban center. Eight of his epistles are titled by the names of the urban centers to which they were directed. Cities and larger towns had great meaning for the Early Church and have even more significance for Christian missions in the next half century.
The Growing cities
The importance of cities for church growth increases when we see that larger and larger proportions of earth's population are living in them.
The rush to the cities is on, and within the next few decades perhaps three-fourths of the human race will be born, live, and die in urban rather than rural areas.
In making this statement, I classify as rural all those who earn their living from the soil, dwell in villages, and eat largely what they raise. All those who live in market centers and live by trade or manufacture, I classify
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as urban. Some will live in towns of less than ten thousand, others in towns of ten to ninety thousand, and still others in great manufacturing cities of a hundred thousand and up. The huge metropolises-Tokyo, To-ronto, Calcutta, Atlanta, Kinshasa, Berlin, Sao Paulo, and others- present special problems, but for the time being we shall consider them also simply as urban populations.
Good reasons exist for men to flock to the cities. Cultivating two acres by hand wastes manpower. With machines, fewer and fewer men can farm more and more land and raise more and more food. Farms are becoming huge food factories. Even a 160-acre farm is not economical to run. Machines can handle hundreds of acres and cost more to buy and replace than a man who owns only 160 acres can afford to pay. Cotton, which used to be picked by hand, requiring thousands of laborers, is now picked by machines requiring only a few. Even vegetables and fruit are being harvested with machines.
Huge populations in Afericasia will be thrown out of work when men there are replaced by machines. Fear of this dislocation restrains Third World mechanization of farms and temporarily holds enormous numbers on the soil, tilling two or three acres per family; but the mere fact that hand labor is the most expensive way to grow food will eventually force adjustment in these overpopulated lands, too. Their cities are growing apace and will grow more and more in the future.
City living has great benefits. Backbreaking toil in hot sun and deep mud is replaced by work in which machines provide the muscle. In cities men can be organized for much greater production. Arrangements for sanitation, clean water, and education are more readily made. City dwellers earn more money and buy more things. More amusements and excitements are available. Paved streets banish mud and dust. Medical services are more readily at hand.
For the time being, large numbers of city dwellers in Afericasia are at heart villagers. They keep one foot in their ancestral homes, and marry in the correct community. During periods of unemployment, they return to their own people. In Liberia they are called target workers--when they have made their target, they return to their forest hamlets to spend it. Such city dwellers dream of earning enough to go back and be "big shots" in the little village. But this come-and-go business is a transitional phenom-enon. Larger and larger numbers are becoming permanent residents of the city as in the West, they never return to the rural solitudes.
Dispersion of industries will not reverse the rush to the cities. On the contrary, since it will scatter cities throughout a nation, exodus from the
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villages will become easier and easier. Planned cities, created from scratch, being better places in which to live than those which have grown up by themselves, will accelerate the irreversible trend toward urbanization.
The Church faces huge city populations growing still more enormous.
Her task is to disciple, baptize, and teach these urban multitudes. It was urban multitudes that the Lord would have gathered as a hen gathers her brood under her wings; and His Church, indwelt by Him, longs to do the same. Yet the Church is not growing in most cities in both Eurica and Afericasia.
After a hundred and fifty years of modern missions, the plain fact is that Churches have not done well in most cities of Afericasia. The great movements to Christ have taken place among country people. In the South Pacific, for example, where four of the five million island inhabitants have become Christians, practically all were converted in their ancestral village homes. The 800,000 Baptists in Burma (total community) were not baptized in Rangoon and Mandalay; they became Christian in ten thousand little communities scattered through the rice paddies and forests of Burma.
The towns and cities of India have not been the scene of the great turnings to Christ by which about 16,000,000 Indians were Christians in 1980. The turnings took place in castewise movements to Christ in India's myriad villages. In African countries, even greater movements to Christian faith, which by 1980 had brought at least 100,000,000 into the Christian fold, were almost without exception rural movements. Much of the significant growth in Latin America has taken place in rural areas. For example, the growth of the Presbyterian Church in the provinces of Tabasco and Chia-pas, Mexico, took place among the peasants of that land. Most towns have been shut tight against the Evangelical Church. However, in Brazil, Chile, and a few other lands we find notable exceptions to this rule. After 1970 urban proletariats have been increasingly responsive to surging national evangelistic movements. Roger Greenway, in Apostles to the City (1978), calls attention to the striking growth of the Luz del Mundo Movement in the great city of Guadalajara, Mexico. So emphatic is this Church about the importance of learning to read the Bible and practicing the Christian life that
theirs is the only municipal district in the state of Jalisco that has no illiterates.
.. There are no taverns, saloons or houses of prostitution in the area.
Brawling, fighting between families, and drunkenness are virtually unknown .. streets are safe and clean… Women dress modestly and children are well behaved. Men are known for industriousness and honesty in their work (52-53).
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Un Afericasian cities and towns, congregation have, to be sure, been established, but for the most part these have grown up around mission stations and their related institutions and have formed introverted, static, "gathered-colony" congregations. Their members were heavily dependent on the missions for employment and have shown inability to multiply themselves across the urban scene. Were it not for the great country nove-ments, church growth in the cities would by this time have created Christian communities of less than one tenth of 1 per cent of the total population.
Multiplying congregations in countrysides and static congregations in cities have characterized Christianity in Afericasia for the last 150 years.
The general statement should, however, be qualified in several ways.
Some city congregations have grown greatly but by transfer growth.
Christians whose ancestors were converted in the country have moved to town and now make up 50, 60, or even 95 per cent of the church members there. In some cities, huge churches are found. In Kinshasa in 1977 I saw several of two or three thousand members; but these had become Christian in the tribal areas and had moved to the city looking for work. In Kinshasa in 1977 about 600,000 of the city's population of two and a half million claimed to be Protestants, but less than 100,000 were members of any Protestant congregation. Even in a hugely receptive population like that the Churches and missions had failed to do significant discipling (McGavran-Riddle, 1979:145). As Barrett says of the African situation in general, the "ponderous machinery of initiation cannot let in fast enough those who ask for instruction and baptism" (1973:175).
In a few countries, growth has been largely urban. In Japan, for example, the Church has grown scarcely at all in the villages. What growth has occurred has come from converted city dwellers. Nevertheless, Japan has seen no great urban movements to Christ. Making the statement for total community, less than 1 per cent of the population of Japan is Chris-tian, despite much missionary work and two periods of extraordinary openness to the Christian faith.
In 1965 in the towns and cities of Indonesia, 7 per cent of the Chinese were Christian (Haines, 1966:35). In Hong Kong in 1968 10 per cent were (Coxill, 1968:150, 222). However, the ways in which these congregations have been established have yet to be described, and with the influx from the mainland, the percentages have declined.
Of all the countries of Afericasia, in Brazil and Chile alone the general picture of much growth in the countrysides and little growth in the cities has been reversed. The great growth of Evangelical Churches in Chile and Brazil--particularly the Pentecostal Churches -has been in the cities. A
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map of Evangelical congregations shows them thickly clustered in the great urban complexes. In Chile, churches have multiplied among the urban proletariat. In Brazil great migrations from the drought-plagued northeast to the cites of the south have been rich sources of church growth. Some of the migrants were already believers (crentes) when they came south; hundreds of thousands more joined them in the factory communities. The significant Latin American Church Growth Research of 1965-68 has light for Christian mission at this point. Its chapters on urbanization and church growth are essential reading for churchmen anywhere in the world concerned with the Christianization of tomorrow's cities (Read, Monterroso, Johnson, 1969).
Failure of the Church to grow in most cities is not due to lack of effort. Most missionaries live and work in cities. These centers of population and communication are well supplied with postal and telegraphic services and are natural sites for mission stations. Headquarters of almost all missions and Churches are located in cities, and the larger institutions are there also. Tremendous amounts of Christian treasure and life have been poured out in "city work in Afericasia."
But, whether in North America or elsewhere, city work is not the task. The assignment is not "to reach the cities. " The Church has already done that. Her task is to bring urban multitudes to faith and obedience.
The goal to be constantly held in mind is so to preach and live the Gospel that baptized believers in increasing numbers flow into existing congre gations, and form themselves into new congregations which ramify and branch out through the suburbs, new towns, wards, barrios, colonias, mohullas, and other sections of urbania, soon to be occupied by 2,500,000,000 human beings. Success in churching the cities, which is beginning to characterize urban mission here and there, points in the right direction. In Urban Strategy for Latin America Greenway writes,
If revitalized churches whose leaders have been trained in church growth. oriented schools can be turned loose in the burgeoning cities, then a multiplication of churches will occur such as the world has not seen since the first century (236).
URGENT NEED FOR RESEARCH
Many conditions conducive to church growth are found in cities in North America and other continents. Uprooted and transplanted immi-grants, starting life anew in strange surroundings and needing community and friendship, flood into cities. These newcomers are away from the close
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control of family and intimates. Their priests and religious leaders do not know where they are. The old gods of hearth, field, and forest and the evil spirits whom they feared have been left behind. American and European cities are full of lonely people looking for community. Like the city-dwellers in the ancient world, they should be receptive to the Gospel.
They are easily reached. They have come out of a thousand far-off valleys, mountain ridges, distant plains, or deep forests and now live within an hour's walk or drive from where able national ministers or missionaries live. They are also very open to the mass media.
True, many conditions in cities militate against church growth. The population is extremely mobile. It is here today and gone tomorrow-sometimes back to its ancestral villages, sometimes on to other wards of the same city or to other cities. People are tied by hours of work and close schedules. There are no seasons when, because of dryness or heat, field work is at a standstill. The 1905 Korean system of month-long Bible study for laymen would not work in most urban centers. City dwellers are apt to become sophisticated and indifferent to religion. They have movies, radio, and other entertainment. Preaching has to be very dramatic or insistent to catch their attention. After they have lived in a given city for a while, they have rebuilt their circle of friends and do not feel the need for community. They have fitted into the religious activities-secular, Hindu, Buddhist, Moslem, or other--which have grown up in the city. The oppressions of the village and its feudal lord do not touch them in the city, and they are not looking for a liberator.
The urban puzzle facing the Christian Church consists in just this open-shut nature of the cities. In urban areas, where some conditions favor church growth and others inhibit it, sometimes churches multiply but mostly they do not. One cannot help asking why. Indeed, Christians have the most weighty reasons to find out what makes churches grow or stop growing in cities. If all denominations witnessing in cities were in a state of non-growth, the Church could conclude that the city presents a climate so hostile to the Gospel that evangelism there is simply bearing witness to Christ, providing a genial Christian presence, and leaving the rest to God's inscrutable purposes. But in face of the fact that some denominations are growing well, the Church dare not come to any such cheap conclusion.
She should instead go through the difficult process of discovering under which conditions multitudes will believe and under which they will not; cells of Christians will proliferate and in wich they will not; and what modes of evangelism God is currently
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blessing to the increase of His congregations, and what He is not. Let us look at a few growing urban Churches.
In the United States and Canada, churches have multiplied in new suburbs among native-born white Protestant populations, but have declined in inner cities and in "changing neighborhoods." The notion that the Church cannot grow in these last two areas is erroneous. It can grow there, but new methods and strong biblical convictions will be required. Old strong congregations and denominations should set goals for multiplying new congregations in these precise areas. In 1979 in Southern California when Hispanic churches resolved to multiply new churches among their own people and to use all the insights of church growth theory and theology to assist such expansion, the rate of establishing new congregations shot up. American cities are full of winnable men and women.
In Mexico, a certain indigenous denomination, the Iglesia Apostolica de la Fe en Cristo Jesus, has without any missionary assistance grown well. In 1967 it numbered about 16,000 communicants, most of whom lived and worshiped in towns and cities. While this was happening in Mexico, this same communion was establishing over fifty congregations among the Latins living in the metropolitan area of Los Angeles. When large North American missionary societies plant few congregations among this piece of the Californian urban mosaic, how does the Iglesia Apostolica plant so many? What is she doing that effectively communicates the faith?
In Japan, the Spirit of Jesus Church has--again without any mission assistance- multiplied congregations in many urban areas. What is it doing that the traditional Churches could not do if they tried?
In Brazil, the six major Protestant denominations have thousands of city churches-some with memberships of several thousand each. In 1978, according to the estimate of Dale McAfee, Presbyterians had 252,516 members, Seventh-Day Adventists 263,533 baptized believers, Brasil Para Cristo 405,000, Baptists 441,062 baptized believers, Congregacao Cristan 717,873, and the Assemblies of God 3,200,000. Most members lived in the cities. What are the secrets of this tremendous increase? It would be revealing to contrast the methods which bring in these numbers with those which have resulted in the very small growth of the denominations planted by thirty or more small missions which went to Brazil after World War Il.
Large-scale research is needed in every major country- West as well as East--to reveal what activities, modes of life, and kinds of proclamation communicate the Christian faith in cities and which do not. Many illustrations of the latter and some of the former can be readily obtained; they
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would cast invaluable light on this urban field in which the Churches will spend many billion dollars in the next thirty years.
Wide surveys of whole countries are proving valuable at the present time and will probably continue to do so for several years. But together with these should go studies of limited but significant portions of the total problem of growth. The exploration of crucial problems should comprise a larger and larger proportion of all church growth research.
For instance, many American denominations are composed of middle-class citizens. Of these some are very largely of Dutch, German, Men-nonite, or Swedish background. They find it "almost impossible" to grow in other segments of the populations. They are sealed off to their own little fragment. How do such Churches break out of their ethnicIclass en-circlement? Fortunately some breakouts have occurred. Research in this field will cast significant light on church growth everywhere. What is learned in North America will help sealed off denominations in Asia, Europe, and other continents also.
Or again, is it true that in the cities of Brazil 70 per cent of Presbyterian increase comes from the Christians moving to town and 30 per cent from "conversions in the cities," while the corresponding figures for Baptists are 50-50 and for Pentecostals 30-70? This is the opinion of some perceptive churchmen in Brazil. If it be so, what can Baptists, Presbyter-ians, Methodists, Lutherans, and others do to find the lost as effectively as the Pentecostals? Information about this limited aspect of evangelism would be well worth securing. It is only one of dozens of facts the Church needs if she is to be faithful to God in her stewardship of the Gospel in the cities. She must avoid squandering a billion dollars in "urban work" which repeats the mistakes of the last fifteen decades and is granted only small church increase.
It would be very useful indeed to know what kinds of literature distribution and radio broadcasting are sowing seed on the path, to be devoured by birds, and which are sowing it on good soils, some of which may produce a hundred, some sixty, and some thirty congregations. Such matters can be discovered, to the great benefit of mankind.
The real tasks of research will not be done by some missionary or minister released from his regular duties for six months to make a quick swing around the cities, talk to a few people, and write up his impressions.
Denominations and boards should train able and devout men- -preferably those who have spent some years planting churches in cities-in the best techniques of social and religous research. The more than two hundred missionary societies of North America, either singly or together, could
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easily create a small, highly trained corps of missionaries and ministers (citizens of all six continents) who would make research in church growth their life work. A missionary society entirely devoted to studying church growth might be organized. Social scientists in the service of urban evangelism should have no difficulty in raising support.
Such church growth researches over the next fifteen years should cost many million dollars. Since they will illuminate, guide, and fructify evangelistic endeavor costing hundreds of millions, this should be considered a small and essential expense. The Church cannot afford to blunder ahead evangelizing the cities with her eyes closed. To throw as much light as possible on what evangelism is effective and what is not is good steward-hip. Failure to acquire light would in these days be called, in the business vorld, criminal negligence. Our Lord would regard it no less seriously.
Lesearch in urban church growth demands immediate development by all ho take evangelism seriously. It surely would be pleasing to God were lis servants to obtain the best guidance possible on the task He has given rem to do- reconciling men of all nations to Himself.
EIGHT KEYS TO CHURCH GROWTH IN CITIES
Since the meticulous research described in the previous paragraphs en done, no one yet knows what modes of mission promise most unicating the Christian faith to urban man. The eight keys I am nention, however, are not mere guesses. They describe principles it which church growth men are agreed. As stated here, they are much general to describe what needs to be done in specific cities, for which formula will vary from country to country and culture to culture. Yet miese "keys" are in the neighborhood of the truth. Anyone who would use them must modify them to fit specific homogeneous units and sponsoring Churches. They are offered in the hope that church growth thinkers in America and all over the globe will carry the process further, and describe more exactly the keys which will unlock specific conurbations in which the Church is commanded to bring many sons to glory.
1. Emphasize house churches. When the Church begins to grow in cities among new segments of the population, each congregation must soon find a place to assemble. The obvious way to do that is for the founding Church or mission to buy a small plot and put up a meeting house. In cities, the cost of land is usually quite beyond the purse of a new little cell of Christians. The obvious way may be the only way in areas of great hostility, but it is contraindicated in responsive areas.
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The congregations should meet in the most natural surroundings, to which unbelievers can come with the greatest ease and where the converts themselves carry on the services. Where non-Christian leaders are antag-onistic, the meeting place should neither attract attention nor throw out a challenge to them. Obtaining a place to assemble should not lay a financial burden on the little congregation. The house church meets all these requirements.
The Disciples of Christ in Puerto Rico enjoyed vigorous growth in a multitude of house churches. These began as Bible study groups, when one neighbor would call in others to share in his new-found light; as prayer meetings when several families of believers would gather together in a convenient house; as branch Sunday Schools to which laymen from the fathering churches devoted a night a week; or as branch congregations which met on Sunday. Many house churches carried on with no financial outlay at all. Those that prospered under the lay leaders (and an occasional visit by the pastor) built little shacks, entirely on their own initiative, ten by twenty feet in size perhaps, and began to hold preaching services there, first on Sunday evening and later on Sunday morning. Some of these prospered and grew into strong congregations.
The house church has drawbacks. If believers do not increase fast so that at least some house churches rent halls or build "meeting houses," worship year after year in someone's home gets wearisome. Only those friendly to the householder will go to church in his house. Chickens, dogs, and cows strolling among the worshipers distract their attention. Wear and tear on the house is considerable. Nevertheless, so much urban growth has begun in house churches that they should always be seriously considered, both for initial planting and for later extension. Eurican patterns of worship should be adjusted till ordinary Christians in ordinary homes can lead them. It should be remembered that the Early Church met almost entirely in houses for at least the first seventy years of her life.
2. Develop unpaid lay leaders. Laymen have played a great part in urban expansions of the Church. One secret of growth in the cities of Latin America has been that, from the beginning, unpaid common men led the congregations, which therefore appeared to the masses to be truly Chilean or Brazilian affairs.
In any land, when laborers, mechanics, clerks, or truck drivers teach the Bible, lead in prayer, tell what God has done for them, or exhort the brethren, the Christian religion looks and sounds natural to ordinary men.
mine their living as others do, subject to the same hazards and bound by the same work schedules-lack in correctness
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of Bible teaching or beauty of prayers, they more than make up for by their intimate contact with their own people. No paid worker from the outside can know as much about a neighborhood as someone who has dozens of relatives and intimates all about him. True, on new ground the outsider has to start new expansions- no one else can- but the sooner he turns the churches over to local men the better.
Some new converts have leadership ability. Discovering these, laying the responsibility of the prayer meeting, Bible class, branch congregation, or house church on them, and getting out of the way so that they can function without embarrassment is close to the essence of the matter. From then on, they lead the churchlet, win new men to Christ, and instruct them in the faith. Enough contact should be maintained and enough encouragement given to sustain them in crisis; but they should realize that the enterprise is theirs under the Holy Spirit.
Lay leaders need much training whether in town or village. Nevius trained his unpaid leaders for a whole month each year, bringing them from their villages to his station two hundred miles away. He fed them for the month and gave them financial help to get back home. During the month he instructed them intensively in the Bible in the mornings, sent them out two by two to witness and preach in the afternoons, and had a rousing revival service with them in the evenings.
The four-month sessions of the Assemblies Bible School in El Salvador train mostly unpaid lay leaders. Only a few, after coming back for training over a period of six or eight years, become paid preachers. Else-where, once churches get under way, an apprentice system trains men.
However it is done, motivating laymen to learn and providing ways to learn are essential. It is here that the battle is won or lost.
3. Recognize resistant homogeneous units. The city is not a homogeneous whole, but rather a mosaic made up of hundreds of segments of society, a few responsive, many indifferent, and a few highly resistant.
The obedient and intelligent steward of God's grace recognizes this and plans his work in the light of it.
Frend, in describing the growth of the Donatist Church of North Af-rica, says that, while all the country people (and responsive units among the city dwellers also) became Christians between A.D. 250-300, the government officials and large landowners in the cities of Libya remained pagan, worshiping the gods and goddesses of Rome for another seventy-five years (Frend, 1952:108). The officials and owners had a vested interest in paganism and were highly resistant. They instituted the great persecution of 305. Had Christian missionaries to Libya between the years A.D. 100
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to 300 spent their presenting the Gospel to them and bypassing those who were responsive, very little church growth would have resulted.
Some new missionaries to Sao Paulo, Brazil, asked whether I would advise them to concentrate on neighborhood evangelism (by which they meant presenting the Gospel in a natural fasion to immediate neighbors in (heir section of the metropolis. In reply, I pointed out that since they were car owners and rented houses with garages, this guaranteed that their neighbors would be car owners-people of the classes, beneficiaries of the social order, and likely to be resistant. I counseled them to try neighborhood evangelism for a year, and if at the end of that time they had not assembled a church of at least five converted families, to seek a more receptive section of the city. I said "converted families" because it was quite possible to pick up a few second- or third-generation middle-class Protestants and form them into a new congregation.
Every minister hesitates to judge that "the people in this section cannot be won." All of us want to believe that those with whom we have estab. lished cordial relations are the people to whom God has sent us. Yet surely God expects us to use our common sense. Indeed, may we not be confident that the Holy Spirit Himself leads us away from gospel-rejectors to gospel-acceptors? This is the clear testimony of the New Testament.
In California an experienced pastor pointed out that fourth generation Hispanics were much more resistant to the Gospel than new immigrants.
He was correct, even though among the former are some highly responsive individuals. University chaplains know that some kinds of students are harder to reach than others. The wise pastor does not spend most of his time on the men and women least likely to join his church.
A Presbyterian layman of Recife, Brazil, observed that incoming migrants were receptive for a number of years; but when they had prospered and moved out of the favella, they became deaf to the Gospel. He felt that Christians should not walk past the responsive to those resistant on the dubious plea that the Holy Spirit was leading them precisely to those who had stopped their ears against the Gospel. Believing in the sovereignty of God, the Christian must grant that the Holy Spirit may on occasion lead a Christian to resistant populations. If He does, the Christian should certainly obey. Yet the Christian should beware lest his own class pride or love of ease rather than the Holy Spirit is what is leading him to neglect the receptive and spend himself on the resistant.
Resistance often arises because of land ownership. For example, a missionary in generally receptive Sao Paulo evangelized a certain section of the city fruitlessly for five years, only to discover that the houses in that
section were built on land belonging to the Roman Catholic Church! Becoming an Evangelical there entailed sharp economic loss. When he began evangelizing in another district his labors began to bear fruit. Congregations arose.
Resistance fluctuates, and sometimes units supposed to be responsive turn out resistant sometimes, for example, recent immigrants. They intend to return to their villages, and think to themselves, How will it go with us if we should go back Christians? J. C. Wold observes that in Liberia the young single men working on the Firestone rubber plantations are not as likely to become Christians as they are back in their forest villages with their families (Wold, 1968:45).
4. Focus on the responsive. The city mosaic has responsive units.
Which units are receptive will differ from city to city. The receptive units in Vancouver differ from those in Nashville. Responsive units in Bangkok will not be the same as those in Tokyo or Hong Kong--though all three are mainly Buddhist Asian cities. Both the degree of receptivity and the ability of the Churches and missions to harvest will fluctuate. There are thousands of responsive units, of which only a few can be mentioned.
One group which should normally prove receptive is that made up of recent rural immigrants who have come permanently to the city-espe-cially if they have come from overseas. For a generation or so these are villagers at heart. Unless they live in unusually tight ghettos, they are hungry for community and are forming all kinds of new associations. Their basic receptivity can be frustrated, however, if the first congregations receive extensive aid from outside churches. Then becoming Christian means being richly served by a wealthy foreign organization called *the Church," an understanding which is fatal to healthy growth. Furthermore, the foreign organization, though wealthy, never has unlimited funds, and if every new congregation means an additional five or ten thousand added to the budget, its interest in church growth diminishes rapidly.
City congregations that multiply establish a personal and corporate life that satisfies far better than the old cults and rituals did, and it can be carried on by the congregations themselves.
5. Mulriply tribe, caste, and language churches. In some circumstances building homogeneous unit congregations is a key to growth. Part of the feeling of lostness in responsive homogeneous units in cities comes from the fact that the immigrants are not at home in the standard language used in the city. Even when they learn to speak it after a fashion, it never sounds as sweet in their ears as their mother tongue. They like to get together with those who worship in their own language.
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At just this point, howevet, missions and Churches, under pressure to care for congregations in the most economical way, and antagonistic toward dialects and tribal languages, set up congregations where the praying, preaching, and singing are all done in the "national language”. Where the city is made up of many peoples and many languages, this is a dubious procedure. It means that many, if not most Christians have to worship God and hear His Word in a language which they imperfectly understand. Even worse, they have to try to bring their non-Christian friends to hear the Gospel proclaimed in a strange tongue.
In 1954, in Leopoldville, I witnessed a still more dubious procedure.
In one large building, services were held for two or three tribes in two or three languages simultaneously. The singing went well the tune drowned out the words. But the praying. Bible reading, and preaching (two leaders at once, each in a different language) were bedlam. This device, no doubt, served the more devout among the existing Christians, but non-Christians would scarcely be attracted to it. Such a device could never help the urban congregations to win every non-Christian of every tribe flooding into the city. In Calcutta, for example, Telegu, Ooriya, Uraon, Chhattisgarhi, Hindi, and Santal congregations are essential if congregations are to multiply in these linguistic units of the city.
When the Church forms a tiny minority in any city, its first business is not to assist assimilation or- in some countries- detribalization, but to disciple all who can be persuaded to believe on Jesus Christ. The first business of the Church is not to fuse the various populations of the metropolis into one people. The establishment, in each linguistic and ethnic group, of congregations whose members worship God with delight in their own mother tongue should be the aim. If any disagree with this principle, I suggest that he go and "worship" with a congregation of whose services he understands only one word in three! When city churches set themselves the task of discipling out to its fringes each ethnic unit in which there are already some Christians, and multiplying ethnic churches as the best means of accomplishing the task, discipling the cities will become much more possible than it is today.
When discipling of the responsive homogeneous units is advanced, shifting into the national language and broadening the base to appeal to
"the Gentiles also, " is desirable and, indeed, inevitable.
In a few cases, the melting-pot aspect of cities brings it about that large numbers in each ethnic or linguistic unit truly want to leave their past and join the dominant culture. Under such circumstances, multitudes will flock into congregations which worship in the standard language, encour-
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age intermarriage, and demonstrate the melting pot at its hottest. But in most cases the melting-pot aspect has been grossly overestimated.
How can the Church know when the melting pot is hot enough to make it advantageous to feature an "all-peoples church?" To worship in the standard language? To shift out of ethnic congregations? There is only one sure test: Do congregations which play up "one great brotherhood of all tribes and castes" multiply like yeast cells throughout the city? If they do, that is the time to shift out of ethnic churches.
6. Surmount the property barrier. Congregations must have places to meet, and house churches (as we have seen) furnish an excellent pattern to begin with. But house churches among common people under the very crowded conditions of modern cities have great handicaps. A whole family may be living in one or two rooms and sharing a tiny courtyard with two other families. In some high-rise apartment houses, such as have been built in Hong Kong, each family has only one room and no courtyard. In favellas in Brazil a half-dozen adults can with difficulty crowd into one dwelling. Inner cities are congested.
Unless some way is found for new congregations to get a place to worship, the multiplication of Christian cells becomes increasingly dif-ficult. Various means have been devised to meet the problem. The commonest among indigenous denominations is for the little congregation to obtain marginal land- an unused corner of a back lot, for example and build a shack on it. Such a shack, made of odds and ends of lumber and roofed over with flattened tin cans, is the first chapel. As the congregation grows, better and better shacks are built, until at last a permanent church building goes up.
Renting a hall, saloon, store, or storage shed is another expedient. In 1965, the 3,000-member Mother Church of the Brasil Para Cristo denomination met in a huge Quonset hut which was once a storage shed. Store front churches are common in New York.
A combination of many house churches, rented halls, and shack churches, with a "respectable"* mother-church building seems to work well for the Assemblies of God in Brazil. In El Salvador, however, where the average congregation of the Assemblies numbers twelve baptized be-lievers, about as many unbaptized believers, and their children, heavy dependence is placed on house churches.
One longs to discover a way in which the enormously wealthy world Church can help multiply congregations in Afericasian cities, eliminate the bottleneck of high-priced land, and get suitable meeting houses. It is easy enough to buy a suitable site and help the congregation erect a good
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building on it; but unless the world Church is prepared to continue such aid indefinitely, this only teaches young congregations that being Christian involves accepting a church building from overseas friends. The Southern Baptists, investing about $15,000 in each site plus building, have put a solid Baptist church in the capital city of every prefecture (province or state) in Japan. As long as the missionary society is willing to invest $100,000 a year in Japan, it can build six or seven new churches annually.
Till 1960, these new churches, using their own resources only, had not in turn planted other congregations (Wright, 1961).
All kinds of proposals to solve the property problem have been ad-vanced. Some suggest that the mission buy a suitable site, erect a basement on it, and give land and building to the Church when the congregation adds a top story. Others propose loans in which the congregations put up part, the mission gives part, and a part is loaned to the congregation to be repaid over twenty years. Others put a good roof on a building when the congregation buys the land and puts up the walls. Others have the mission buy a whole floor in an apartment house and use it as a pastor's home and congregational meeting place. Each scheme has its drawbacks and solves the property problem only under special circumstances.
The index of growth has a great deal to do with the matter. A Church which has found a way to communicate the Gospel, where the number of baptized believers is constantly increasing and the smell of victory is in the air, eliminates the building bottleneck in cities much better than a Church which is not growing. A Church which grows greatly often thereby solves its building problem.
The building bottleneck cannot be eliminated by concentrating on it alone. What must be found is a more effective way of winning men and women to Christ in the city. As soon as this is done, the building problem will he more than half-solved.
7. Communicate intense belief in Christ. The prime ingredient in the patristic capture of the great cities of the ancient world was an intense, fervent faith. This shines through the pages of the New Testament and was manifested by all the planters of the Early Church. The Jerusalem Church was born in persecution. The first great explosion of the faith was sparked by an oppression so great that it drove all but the apostles out of the city.
Paul and Barnabas were beaten again and again as they established congregations in synagogue communities. Reliable tradition has it that Paul was beheaded, Peter crucified, and every other apostle martyred-_Thomas dying in far-off India- in the cities of the ancient world.
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Unshakable faith in Christ, fervent enought to withstand flame and wild beasts, fanned the spread of the Early Church in the urban proletariat of those days. While of major eschatological importance, the Revelation of John is at the same time convincing evidence of the climate of faith in that city-conquering Church.
Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have tribulation. Be faithful to death and I will give you the crown of life.
He who conquers shall not be hurt by the second death. . . (Rev. 2:10, 11).
After this behold a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes, and peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb . . . and one of the elders said.
*These are those who have come out of the great tribulation" (Rev. 7:9).
The spread of Christianity throughout urban populations is due to no mere human appeal to dissatisfied groups of men. It is rather that believers submit themselves to God, believe His revelation, accept His Son as Savior, receive the Holy Spirit, and press forward as new creatures, earnests of the New Heaven and the New Earth in which shall be no more anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall worship Him, and the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.
8. Provide the theological base for an egalitarian society. Egalitarian society arises from a theological foundation and must have a theological framework to spread and endure. Men will live and die for what they know is the will of God- for what is eternal truth. Christianity provides the perfect base for the emerging masses of the world. Indeed, the only place where the common man has even dared hope for justice has been Chris-tendom. Marxism did not arise in animist, Hindu, Buddhist, or Moslem societies, despite all their excellences. It arose in Christian society, and would hardly have been thought of except for the soaring hopes for the common man which the Christian faith has engendered, even when the Church has failed to embody them in the social structures of mankind.
The Christian faith as it spreads in all six continents has not usually consciously provided a theological base for that new world of the common man whose dim outlines loom through the mist. Yet everywhere, though in varying degrees, it has done so unconsciously. The Afericasian revolutions of the twentieth century have many causes. One of the more influ-
venicacense of self- government and justice which arose in Eurica. After ten million Untouchables turned Christian, and many
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among them became teachers, preachers, and educated men and women, e ancient myth that they were inferior souls born in permanently inferior stes was badly shaken. Untouchables themselves began to disbelieve it.
Hindu scholar said to me, "This is indeed the Kaliyug (the last and orst age of man), because we see some untouchables becoming good id learned men while many Brahmans remain ignorant and wicked men." fter ten million had become Christian, and Hindu India feared lest they I might, thus changing the political weight of Hindus, Moslems, and hristians, major changes in basic Indian law concerning the masses be-ame possible.
K. M. Panikker (1963:50) has borne eloquent testimony to this point, hen he said,
where large numbers of the same community (caste) had been converted, the difference in social conditions was sufficiently glaring to create widespread discontent among the depressed classes who had remained within the Hindu fold. . . . (This) led to the upsurge of the depressed classes . . . one of the most significant movements of the two decades preceding the establishment of independence. . .. Gandhi's flaming zeal . . . contributed greatly to the success of the movement for the uplift of the untouchables. But its original source was the preaching of the Christian missionary.
The charter of rights which the United Nations has enacted and which is invoked by nation after nation bears a close relationship to what many Churches have fought for and many congregations have embodied in their day-by-day living.
Suppose now in North America and every other land, it became the conscious goal of the Church to combine redoubled proclamation on the one hand with the provision of a theological base for an egalitarian society on the other? Such a theological base is clearly biblical. It is congruous with the mind of Christ. It has already been put into practice by those bodies of Christians which have set out to live thoroughly Christian lives, whether these were the post-Pentecost Church in Jerusalem, the monastic orders before wealth corrupted them, or the gathered Churches in the first flush of their dedication.
Such a combination would undergird the social order-to-be with an unshakable belief that justice and mercy are incarnate in God Himself, and that God's good hand is upon all those who believe in His Son, guiding and directing them to just, peaceful, and merciful solutions to the complex problems of human life in this most changeable of all ages.
The Christian base for a just social order is enormously superior to all atheistic ideologies, which of necessity advocate justice on the shaky
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ground that--fortunately--it is not only a good but an eternally valid invention of man, and pays off in this life.
The Christian base is desperately needed by the proletariat in a secular age. The revolution to establish the rights of man will be lost in area after area simply because those into whose hands power falls will themselves be sinful men who have no belief in a righteous and almighty God, who has shown the way in which they and other men can become inwardly righteous.
Provision of a sound theological base for an egalitarian society should aid the multiplication of Christ's churches in towns and cities. Christianity would be recognized as the religion which provides bedrock for urban civilization.
Discipling urban populations is perhaps the most urgent task confronting the Church. Bright hope gleams that now is precisely the time to learn how it may be done and to surge forward actually doing it.
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McGavran. Understanding church growth 314- 332
